The accident scene you really don't want to be sent to

[dianeduane]

After 16-year-old Jacqueline Cossairt of Markle lost control of a sport utility vehicle on gravel-covered Wells County Road 1050 North about 4:30 p.m., it struck an old hollow tree, rousting 80,000 to 100,000 honeybees inside.

By the time Ossian Volunteer Fire Chief Kent Gilbert arrived he found a black cloud of the insects swarming around the GMC Envoy.

“Those bees were mad,” he said. “I’ve never seen bees, especially honeybees, attack like that.”

And those angry bees turned what Gilbert said should have been a 10-minute extrication of the teen who was pinned inside her truck into 45 agonizing minutes as firefighters tried to figure out a way to safely work among the bees.

Cripes, what a nightmare.

Comments

[starcat-jewel.livejournal.com]

Yeek! Reminds me of an old Arthur C. Clarke story...

[siliconshaman.livejournal.com]

45 minutes?!

Geeze, doesn't take that long to get a good smokey fire going a safe distance upwind does it?!

[bellinghman.livejournal.com]

I love it - firefighters setting fires. So Farenheit 451.

I'd have been tempted to try large amounts of foam.

[siliconshaman.livejournal.com]

not sure that foam would hit airborne bees enough...
but you'd think they'd try something wouldn't you. Rather than just try to tough it out...

[korenwolf.livejournal.com]

Assuming the car was secure (ie not letting bees in) then the best thing to do would have been to tow it far enough away (anything up to a mile or so) and then start pumping out the foam to deter the remaining bees from landing.

Pissed honeybees are not nice little creatures, trust me on this.

[keristor.livejournal.com]

They did. They used foam, which apperently helped but not enough. When bees get really riled they don't care about smoke, foam will physically incapacitate them but only when it actually strikes. The article doesn't say whether the truck was towable, presumably not.

[siliconshaman.livejournal.com]

I don't think they'd tow, too much risk of jolting the driver who could have a possible neck/spinal injury. They'd want to get her stabilised and out first... something that wouldn't be helped by either foam or bees.

[bellinghman.livejournal.com]

Remind me next time to read the article.

I was thinking more of the difficulty bees would have in getting through a thick blanket of foam, to be honest, rather than as a knock down weapon. It seems that that worked, to a certain extent, but not enough.

[robotech-master.livejournal.com]

It is weird that they didn't think of using smudge pots or something. That's what beekeepers have used since time immemorial to calm bees down. (My Dad's an ex-beekeeper, so I should know.)

[siliconshaman.livejournal.com]

It is kinda odd, I mean at a pinch they could have used road flares. They produce quite a bit of smoke [delibratly so]. and it's non-toxic.

Bunch of city-boys who didn't know smoke calms bees down maybe?

[megabitch.livejournal.com]

Once you have seriously pissed off bees buzzing around you (more pissed off than normal - and we have extremely aggressive hives anyway) smoke isn't a lot of help. One of our hives was knocked over during the night recently and there was absolutely no point in trying to use smoke - korenwolf just put double layers on with his veil-hood etc and put the thing back together again.

[korenwolf.livejournal.com]

Don't forget the baseball cap under the veil just as yet another layer to prevent them from stinging my scalp.

The "smoke calms bees" thing isn't a 100% dead cert, if the bees are already in attack mode it'll do very little and even on a relaxed hive it won't necessarily slow them down (I present hive#1 in the back garden as a prime example).

What the smoke is doing is triggering the "oh sh*t the wood is on fire start eating that honey right now just in case we need to leg it" response. Bees are generally a lot dopier when they're feeling fat (just think 3pm on xmas day after the full turkey fat bugger meal). This is why swarms which have left the main hive are terrifying to look at but quite safe to be near (a lot of keepers will take a swarm with no protective kit on other than a veil to keep bees out of their eyes and hair).

[siliconshaman.livejournal.com]

I did not know that... thanks.
*squirrels away nugget of information for possible later use*

Presumibly one would want to keep the amount of smoke use down to minimum since that would reduce the amount of honey...

Hmm, I wonder if cold air/gas would make them sluggish enough without harming them? Something like a modified CO₂ fire extinguser with a variable outlet valve so you could control the flow perhaps?

[korenwolf.livejournal.com]

Presumibly one would want to keep the amount of smoke use down to minimum since that would reduce the amount of honey...

General advice is to use as much as is required to quiten down the hive, which with my evil little darlings is a fair bit, the real trick is to get "cool" smoke, which normally involves stuffing freshly ripped up grass in the top of the smoker to cool it down.

Hmm, I wonder if cold air/gas would make them sluggish enough without harming them? Something like a modified CO2 fire extinguser with a variable outlet valve so you could control the flow perhaps?

The problem with using something to cool down the bees / hive is that the brood will get chilled which will kill them knocking the hive right back over the next month or so. Rule of thumb for opening the hives is that it's got to be warm enough to work in in a t-shirt or similar any cooler.

However with the big swarm in the story it would probably work, another approach if they'd had some local keepers around is to find the queen and rehive her, the bees would then start sending out the "come home" signal which might have started to calm them down a bit as well.

[korenwolf.livejournal.com]

Speaking as someone who lifts the lid on hive which have been described by a local keeper of 20+ years experience as "very very nasty" I can sympathise massively. She's damm lucky the car remained secure, if they were that pissed off the firefighters would have been looking at a fatality.

In brighter news I should be pulling honey off the hives in the next week or so (some hopefully will be for sale at dwcon :)

[handworn.livejournal.com]

I'm amazed.

Though I'm also thinking, "Where does she come up with these stories or links?"

[xnamkrad.livejournal.com]

"Where does she come up with these stories or links?" - Thats what I want to know as well

[gramina.livejournal.com]

In the story I read about this, the closing comment was from a local biologist/bee expert:

"They don't like to be jostled."

(!!!)

[korenwolf.livejournal.com]

"They don't like to be jostled."

Given this (http://www.flickr.com/photos/flyinghamster/200855993/) is how I found one hive last saturday guess how impressed the bees were. Thankfully this is the weakest of the hives so I only had around 5-10,000 annoyed bees to deal with :)

[gramina.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I'd expect they'd be fairly unhappy about that...

(My dad's dad was a beekeeper, among many other things, but when I knew him he'd had to give it up, since moving the bees from Arkansas to Wisconsin was Not On. But I still remember the almost-black raw honey he brought with him -- it was **Wonderful.**)

[silversliver.livejournal.com]

Thankfully they hadn't flown into the vehicle's air handling system. One time, my dad had a car sitting idle for about 6 summer months, and as soon as it was turned on, wasps started pouring out the vents into the cab! They had nested in the engine compartment, and just like bees "didn't like to be jostled."