Morgan, who has been in the beekeeping practice for about four years, received an urgent call Sunday from a stranger: an Alaskan beekeeper said her 200 bee packages were missing.
“It was shocking,” Morgan told CNN. “The lady calls me out of the blue and says, ‘I don’t know you, you don’t know me, but I need your help.'”
She said the packages should be shipped to her directly from California to Anchorage, according to a Facebook post by the Metro Atlanta Beekeepers Association. (Morgan is a board member of the association.)
Instead, the packages — which Morgan estimated contained nearly 10,000 bees each — landed on a runway at Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport, more than 3,000 miles from their intended location.
The Alaskan beekeeper told Morgan she was informed the bees couldn’t make the Delta Air Lines flight because some of them got out of their packages.
While they waited in the Atlanta heat on Sunday, the “vast majority” of the bees died, according to the association’s Facebook post. Weather in Metro Atlanta peaked at 80 degrees Fahrenheit on Sunday.
A spokesman for Delta Air Lines told CNN the company took “immediate action to implement new measures” to ensure nothing similar happens again. “We have contacted the customer directly to apologize for this unfortunate situation,” the spokesman added.
As soon as he got the call from his beekeeper friend, Morgan loaded his truck and drove to the scene. “I didn’t know what to expect,” he said.
Morgan found many bees dead and others starved. And he learned that the flight the remaining bees were scheduled to take would depart on Monday afternoon.
“There was no way they were going to make it because it was still hot in Atlanta and then you have to go through another day of it,” Morgan said.
So he and the Alaskan beekeeper agreed that flying was no longer a viable option and began selling the bees in the Atlanta area. The association sent out a mass email to local beekeepers, and people started showing up at the airport to bring the surviving bees home and populate them.
It was the best decision to keep the bees alive, Morgan said.
Back in Alaska, some of the people waiting for the bees to arrive were distraught to find out what had happened. Steve Estes and his wife were to receive two of the bee packages.
They said they had already prepared their hive for the arrival of the bees.
“The bees are like pets to us, part of our family,” Estes said.
CNN’s Christina Maxouris contributed to this report.