Wallace Leatherwood , a beekeeper from North Carolina, went through what most people would consider a living nightmare and came out unscathed. He drove 40 miles with thousands of bees loose in the cabin of his truck, and didn’t get a single sting.
Last Tuesday, Leatherwood bought about 18,000 bees from Wild Mountain Bees in Weaverville, and put them in the back of his truck. But before driving back home to Waynesville, he went to look at a job and then stopped at a local diner to get some lunch. Because he didn’t have anywhere shady to put the bees, he grabbed three of the boxes from the bed of his truck and moved them into the cabin. Only Wallace didn’t notice that one of them wasn’t as securely closed as he had thought, so when he came back from the restaurant, he found the cabin crawling with around 3,000 bees.
Photo: video screengrab
“I didn’t have any shady place to sit them,” Leatherwood told local news station WLOS-13. “When I came out, [one of the boxes] was black with bees, and there were bees everywhere. I thought, ‘well, I don’t know what to do.'”
“I didn’t want to lose my bees. They were $165 (£122) per box,” the beekeeper added, so instead of just abandoning the truck and running for the hills, as any rational person would have done, he just got in the cabin with the bees and drove 40 miles back to Waynesville.
Crazier still is the fact that Leatherwood managed to keep his sense of humour, whipping out his smartphone and filming himself in the bee-infested truck, as a prank for his son.
“The girls are out, we’ve got a problem. Houston, we have a problem!” the man can be heard saying in the video, which has since gone viral on social media.
The incredible scene of a man driving in a truck full of bees didn’t go unnoticed, and there’s another video captured by onlooker Brandon Singleton, in Canton, North Carolina, doing the rounds online. In it, Singleton can be heard saying “This fool has got bees in his damned truck turned loose”.
Incredibly, Wallace Leatherwood managed to drive all the way home without getting stung once. He did admit that he did suffer a few stings while removing the bees from the truck, though.
So yeah, when you’re thinking of places to transport your bee hive boxes in, maybe don’t go for inside the cabin of your vehicle.
