More than five million honey bees died in the hot sun after a Delta Airlines shipment was diverted to Alaska and left on hot tarmac in Atlanta.
The 200 boxes of honey bees, weighing about 800 pounds, were the first of two shipments shipped from Sacramento, California to Anchorage, Alaska.
There, more than 300 beekeepers waited in apple orchards for their pollination services.
Previous shipments had made it to Alaska on Delta Airlines flights that went from Sacramento to Seattle and then on to Anchorage, but that trip was diverted.
Atlanta beekeeper Edward Morgan works to open a box of bees while Ellen Ausley shines a flashlight into one of two cargo boxes full of bees
Edward Morgan was one of the Atlanta beekeepers who rushed to save millions of dying bees at the Atlanta Georgia airport
A beekeeper examines a package of mostly dead bees at Atlanta’s Hartsfield-Jackson Airport Sunday night
The flight to Seattle ran out of space, according to a New York Times report, so it was diverted last Friday through the Delta hub in Atlanta, where the bees would then proceed to Anchorage the next day.
While the bees were initially placed in a cooler, they were later removed and left on the tarmac at 83 degrees Fahrenheit as some of them escaped the box.
After a local expert was sent to examine the bees, it was found that they had been turned upside down with no access to food and millions had died. The rest were given away, meaning none could be shipped to Alaska.
The bees were the first of two shipments that Alaskan beekeeper Sarah McElrea ordered from a distributor in California.
Millions of bees were left on a pavement in the Georgia sun after a shipment from California to Alaska was diverted to Georgia
Crate of bees that starved to death after a cargo crate was left out in the hot sun at Atlanta’s Hartsfield-Jackson Airport
Beekeepers check whether a queen survived in one of the bee packages
McElrea said she was concerned when the £800 delivery didn’t arrive in Atlanta in time to make the connecting flight. The next day, she said, Delta informed her that some bees had escaped, so airline employees placed the boxes of bees outside of a Delta cargo hold.
Panicked, McElrea reached an Atlanta beekeeper, who rushed to the airport and found that many of the bees had died from the heat and starvation.
Delta called it an “unfortunate situation.”
In an emailed statement, Delta spokeswoman Catherine Morrow said the airline “was made aware of the shipping situation … and quickly engaged the appropriate internal teams to assess the situation. We have taken immediate action to take new measures to ensure that events of this nature do not occur again in the future.’
Many of the bees were saved thanks to the quick response of the bee community. Pictured above, a beekeeper from Atlanta
Edward Morgan from the Metro Atlanta Beekeepers Association speaks about the state of the bees
A group of beekeepers conduct a survey of bees left on the runway at Atlanta Airport
Morrow said Delta apologized to McElrea. The airline declined to provide anyone for an interview.
McElrea said she would use a fleet of vehicles in the future to bring the bees directly from Sacramento to Seattle, where they could fly to Alaska.
The bees were to be used to pollinate apple orchards and nurseries in Alaska, where they are not native.
A beekeeper in Atlanta, Edward Morgan, called more than a dozen people to go to the airport and try to save any bees that were still alive.
“It’s devastating to see so many deaths,” Georgia beekeeper Julia Mahood told Atlanta-based broadcaster WABE. ‘Just clumps of dead bees that didn’t stand a chance because they were left out without food and basically got lost in Delta’s machines.’
McElrea, who runs a business called Sarah’s Alaska Honey, said she has had previous shipments of honey bees on Delta from Sacramento, Calif., to Anchorage via Seattle many times.
The airline told her last weekend’s shipment didn’t fit on the plane, so it was diverted via Atlanta.
McElrea said her supplier in California will replace the shipment, worth about $48,000.
She said she hopes Delta will provide some help, although she acknowledged there are risks in shipping live animals.
A beekeeper unloads a cargo box of bees at Atlanta’s Hartsfield-Jackson Airport
A flashlight is lit as a beekeeper examines the condition of the stranded bees. The vast majority of bees died in the heat, but several thousand were saved