From The New York Times:
In the northwest corner of Washington State on Friday morning, the authorities issued a most unusual all-points bulletin, rather, an A.P.Bee.
“250 million bees are now loose,” the Whatcom County Sheriff’s Department wrote on social media. (Actually, the number was closer to 14 million, the department said on Saturday, saying the first estimate was inaccurate.)
Because they are highly social by nature and drawn to their hives, the bees were likely to settle down and stay close to the truck, said Gene E. Robinson, a professor of entomology at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and an expert on insect social behavior and genomics.
“That’s where their queen and the next generation of bees (the ‘brood’) are located,” Professor Robinson said in an email on Friday.