“It was shocking,” Morgan told CNN. “The lady calls me unusually and says, ‘I do not know you, you do not know me, but I need your help.’ She said the packages should have been sent directly from California to Anchorage, according to a Facebook post by the Atlanta Metro Beekeepers Association. (Morgan is a member of the union’s board.) Instead, the packages – which Morgan estimated contained nearly 10,000 bees each – ended up on asphalt at Atlanta Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport, more than 3,000 miles from where they were supposed to be. The Alaskan beekeeper told Morgan that he had been informed that the bees could not fly the Delta Air Lines because some of them had left their packages. While waiting in the heat of Atlanta on Sunday, the “vast majority” of bees died, according to the union’s Facebook post. The weather in the Atlanta subway reached a higher temperature of 80 degrees Fahrenheit on Sunday. A Delta Air Lines spokesman told CNN that the company had taken “immediate steps to implement new measures” to ensure that nothing like this would happen again. “We have been in direct contact with the client to apologize for this unfortunate situation,” the spokesman added. As soon as he received the call from the beekeeper’s colleague, Morgan loaded his truck and headed for the spot. “I did not know what to expect,” he said. Morgan found many bees dead and others hungry. And he learned that the flight for the other bees would depart on Monday afternoon. “There was no way they could do it because it was still hot in Atlanta and then you had to spend another day,” 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 club sent a massive email to local beekeepers and people started showing up at the airport to pick up the surviving bees at home and put them in a hive. It was the best decision I could make to help keep the bees alive, Morgan said. Back in Alaska, some of the people waiting for the bees to arrive were upset to find out what had happened. Steve Estes and his wife had to receive two of the bee packs. They said they had already prepared their barn for the bees to arrive. “Bees are a bit like pets to us, part of our family,” Estes said. CNN’s Christina Maxouri contributed to this report.
