Honeybees don’t normally travel far from home, but that wasn’t the case one morning recently in El Cerrito, California.

“When four UC Davis employees approached their commuter van at 7 a.m. Friday, Aug. 1 in the BART parking lot in El Cerrito, some weren’t sure they wanted to board,” reported Kathy Keatley Garvey, of the University of California’s Department of Entomology. The passenger side of the van and part of the windshield were covered with a huge swarm of bees!

Undaunted, however — and knowing that swarming bees are very little threat to anyone — the commuters piled into the van through the driver’s door and set off on the trip to their workplace on campus.

In an un-bee-lievable sight, the white van, accompanied by the bees and their queen, buzzed to the UC campus on a 60-mile freeway ride.

When the vehicle pulled into the Shields parking lot shortly before 8 a.m., so did a long line of bees hanging around the door frame.

“We lost most of them along the way,” [Keir Reavie, head of the Biological and Agricultural Sciences Department at Shields Library] said.

How did the survivors survive?

“Some bees must have slipped inside the door frame and held on to the others by linking legs,” said Eric Mussen, UC Davis apiculturist. “The queen bee was probably inside the crack.”

Apparently, the surviving honeybees spent the day on campus, periodically leaving the van for food and water and sending out scouts to search the campus buildings for a suitable new home. More bees were lost on the return highway trip at the end of the work day, and the few remaining bees had dispersed from the van by the next afternoon — leaving the commuter van with a new nickname, The Bee-Mobile!

Photo: Kathy Keatley Garvey
See also:

• Bees Hitch Ride on UC Van
  University of California Davis Department of Entomology: News
  1 August 2008