Close to one million honeybees are making a temporary pit stop in a tree at a Lebanon County rest area, according to My FOX Philly.
So far dozens of customers have been stung. "A local beekeeper came out in the morning and saw the size of the swarm and said I can't handle this. In my 26 years, I have never seen this many bees." Beekeeper Bill Fisher says."Orkin's policy is we are not killing honey bees; they are endangered and we need them."
Beekeepers showed up to remove the bees, but they were quickly overmatched by the enormous colony and had to leave. "They don't have their queen and they don't have their colony. They are getting trucks going by all the time, so they were really agitated," Fisher explains. "They all got [one beekeeper] at least 10 to 20 times. They got on the tight wherever your protective gear gets pulled. He got stung in the back of the legs." A local beekeeper and his helpers were stung in the process, but managed to scoop up as many bees as they could.
"I am adding these bees to those colonies with the new queen, hoping that they find that queen then they get her pheromones and scents. And then they'll start building up that colony and survive the winter," says Fisher. Representatives from the State Department of Agriculture will examine the sample to make sure there are no killer bees in the mix.
