Five million honeybees to be used for pollination die on tarmac at Atlanta airport

A large shipment of live honeybees bound for Alaska from California was bumped and rerouted via Atlanta, where Delta workers placed them on a hot tarmac for hours, causing most of the bees to die.

The shipment of 5 million bees that were being sent to Alaska beekeeper Sara McElrae from a California distributor was meant to help pollinate apple orchards in Alaska. The shipment was bumped from the flight on which the bees were originally booked and rerouted through Atlanta.

While there, some of the bees escaped, according to Delta workers. McElrae was contacted to let her know some of the bees had escaped, and she asked a local beekeeper to go to the airport and check on the shipment. The Atlanta beekeeper, Edward Morgan, said when he arrived the bees were mostly dead after being left on a tarmac outside in warm weather by Delta workers after the bees began to escape.

Morgan called about a dozen other local beekeepers, who came to the airport to see if they could help save the bees in the shipment.

“It’s devastating to see that many dead,” Georgia beekeeper Julia Mahood told WABE. “Just clumps of dead bees that had no chance because they were left outside with no food and basically got lost in Delta’s machinery.”

A Delta spokesperson, Catherine Morrow, told the Associated Press in a statement this week that Delta had apologized to McElrea and called the incident “unfortunate.”

Morrow said McElrae “was made aware of the shipment situation … and quickly engaged the appropriate internal teams to assess the situation. We have taken immediate action to implement new measures to ensure events of this nature do not occur in the future.”

McElrae says the shipment was worth $48,000 and that she hopes Delta will be assisting her with recovering the cost of replacing the shipment from the California supplier.