Devotion knows no barriers when it comes to bees and their leader.
Carol Howarth had parked her Mitsubishi in the town of Haverfordwest, Wales, to do some shopping. However, little did she know the mayhem that would ensue.
When she attended to her errands, a swarm of about 20,000 bees was drawn to her car. A local man, Tom Moses, spotted the buzzing hubbub and worrying that the bees may be poorly handled, called in a team of beekeepers.
"It was spectacular. I was driving through when I spotted the big brown splodge,” Moses said. "A lot of people were really amazed by it, cars were slowing down and people were taking pictures of it."
With the beekeepers on the job, when Howarth returned, the situation appeared to have been resolved.
But, no. The swarm kept the car in their sights and managed to track it down.
"The next day I realized that some of the bees had followed me home,” Howarth said. She, therefore, summoned the beekeepers, that arrived ready for rescue.
“We think the queen bee had been attracted to something in the car, perhaps something sweet, and had got into a gap on the boot’s wiper blade or perhaps the hinge,” said Roger Burns of Pembrokeshire Beekeepers. “The swarm of around 20,000 had followed her and were sat around on the boot of the car.”
The adventurous queen and her subjects were finally reunited without harm.
Burns said that it was the strangest bee-thing he had seen in thirty years of beekeeping. “It is natural for them to follow the queen, but it is a strange thing to see and quite surprising to have a car followed for two days. It was quite amusing.”
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