- No, not the bees? Yes, the bees!
Bees are both valuable and terrifying. On one hand, they make honey and pollinate plants; on the other, they’ll sting you if you get too close to their hive.
And avoiding that hive isn’t always easy. Bees can nest in surprising places, like trees, holes in the ground, old couches, your bedroom walls…
Even if there’s no hive, massive numbers of bees can appear suddenly for unexpected reasons.
Here are 8 stories about when bees went nuts.
1. Stingy Cushions
In 2020, somebody dumped an old, worn-out couch at a park in Irving, Texas. When city workers went to take the thing away, they were in for a nasty surprise.
The interior of the couch was full of thousands of bees.
The workers called the fire department to come poison the insects. Lucky for the bees, one of the firefighters was an amateur beekeeper who suggested saving and relocating them instead. Together with another city employee who was into keeping bees, they took about 10,000 bees to a new home.
A couch might sound like a surprising place to find bees, but they’re actually one of the most common places bees nest inside a house. The dark, dry, and empty interior of a couch makes for an ideal hive location.
2. Sewage Bees
Residents of a certain Philadelphia neighborhood recently found themselves putting up with an unusual problem. Bees kept swarming cars in the neighborhood parking lot and stung several people.
The locals called professionals for help, and they soon located where the bees were coming from. Much to their surprise, they were buzzing out from under a manhole cover.
In the sewer, the experts found a roughly 10,000-bug-strong beehive. It wasn’t huge as far as beehives go, but removing it would still take several weeks due to its strange location.
“It is kinda weird,” Mark Berman, owner of Anna Bees Honey, told WPVI-TV.
3. Sweet Drippings
In 2020, Tropical Storm Faye hit Pennsylvania, showering the state with torrents of heavy rain. When Andrea and Justin Isabell noticed strange brown streaks running down the walls of their Perkasie home, they thought it was dirty rainwater.
Instead, it was honey.
Inside their attic, the couple discovered a beehive containing 30,000 bees. It was so rich with honey that the stuff was running down from the attic to the basement along the walls.
Yet, the weirdest part was that the Isabells had never once had an issue with bees appearing out of nowhere. What well-behaved squatters.
4. Volkswagen Bee(tle)
Carol Howarth of Haverfordwest, Wales, was having lunch in 2016. She glanced outside at her car and did a double-take.
More than 20,000 bees had suddenly swarmed her Volkswagen Beetle. The writhing, buzzing mass covered the car for two days before beekeepers could remove it.
They also discovered that the bees had been trying to get to their queen. She had gotten trapped inside the vehicle, and her subjects were desperately trying to save her.
“I have been beekeeping for 30 years, and I have never seen a swarm do that. It is natural for them to follow the queen, but it is a strange thing to see and quite surprising to have a car followed for two days,” beekeeper Roger Burns told Fox News.
5. Weaponized Bees
The year was 2022, and Rebecca Woods of Massachusetts was incensed. Sheriff’s deputies were attempting to serve eviction papers to her friend living in Longmeadow.
Woods had previous experience with eviction-happy landlords, so she had a bit of a bee in her bonnet about the whole thing. So, she decided to fight the law – with bees.
Being an amateur beekeeper, Woods had arrived at the scene with boxes of bees in her vehicle. She donned her beekeeping suit and unleashed a swarm of thousands upon thousands of bees on the sheriff’s deputies.
That, however, didn’t stop the eviction, and it earned Woods a prison sentence. If you want more details, read our story about the incident.
6. Bee Highway
Sometimes beekeepers have to transport lots of bees over long distances. A traffic accident can turn such a trip into a nightmare, as happened in Canada.
In 2023, a truck carrying an estimated five million bees tipped over near Burlington, Ontario. The incident released an enormous swarm of angry stingers that quickly took over the highway.
The cops had no option but to close the entire road while beekeepers did their best to rescue at least some of the bees. After some three hours, the highway opened again, but angry bees stuck around for days, prompting the authorities to warn motorists to keep their windows closed.
7. Little Girl and the Monster
In 2024, the young daughter of a North Carolina family started coming up with strange stories. She claimed a monster was living in her bedroom walls. The girl insisted she could hear it growling and scraping at night.
Just an overactive child’s imagination, right? Yet, it turned out the monster was real.
Or perhaps I should say “monsters,” as the growling turned out to be the buzzing of 60,000 bees living in a hive stretching from the girl’s bedroom floor to the ceiling. During the removal process, a beekeeper removed a 100-pound honeycomb from the walls.
This case was so weird that we wrote a whole article about it. Go check it out!
8. A Grave Situation
In 2022, a scientist from Cornell University noticed an unusually high number of bees buzzing about an old cemetery in Ithaca, New York. Specifically, the bees were mining bees, a species that builds its nests underground.
Curious, the researcher did what researchers do best and started researching. Slowly but surely, his work revealed one of, if not the largest, bee colony ever recorded.
Virtually the entire graveyard is one giant, expansive underground colony. Up to 6 million bees inhabit its tunnels that crisscross throughout the cemetery and its old graves.
Yet, this isn’t a single beehive. Mining bees are solitary, and each female digs her own small chamber in the ground where she lays her eggs.
There’s probably some profound message here about the intersection of death and new life.
Want more unusual animal tales? Read our list of 6 weird stories involving bears.