Morgan, who has been beekeeping for about four years, received an emergency call from a stranger on Sunday: an Alaskan beekeeper said 200 packages of bees were missing.
“It was shocking,” Morgan told CNN. “My lady called suddenly and said, ‘I don’t know you, you don’t know me, but I need your help.'”
She said the packages were to be sent directly to her 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 – ended up on the runway at Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport in Atlanta, more than 3,000 miles from where they were supposed to be.
The Alaskan beekeeper told Morgan she had been informed that the bees could not fly Delta Air Lines because some of them had come out of their packages.
While waiting in the heat of Atlanta on Sunday, the “vast majority” of bees died, according to the association’s Facebook post. Atlanta subway weather reached 80 degrees Fahrenheit on Sunday.
A spokesman for Delta Air Lines told CNN that the company had taken “immediate action to implement new measures” to ensure that nothing like this happened again. “We contacted the client directly to apologize for this unfortunate situation,” the spokesman added.
As soon as he received a call from a fellow beekeeper, Morgan loaded his truck and headed for the scene. “I didn’t know what to expect,” he said.
Morgan found many bees dead and others hungry. And he learned that the flight for which the other bees were scheduled would leave on Monday afternoon.
“There was no way they could succeed 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 bees in the Atlanta area. The association sent mass emails to local beekeepers, and people began to show up at the airport to take the surviving bees home and plant them.
That was the best solution to help the bees stay alive, Morgan said.
Back in Alaska, some of the people waiting for the bees to arrive were mad 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.
“Bees are kind of like pets to us, part of our family,” Estes said.
CNN’s Christina Maxuris contributed to this report.
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