Millions of bees bound for Alaska died on a Delta Air Lines flight after the plane was left on the asphalt in Atlanta, Georgia, after being diverted. Alaska public media (APM) reported Wednesday that a Delta plane carrying a cargo of about 5 million bees bound for Anchorage, Alaska, was forced to change course to Atlanta. Most of the bees died in the city of Georgia. The 200-box shipment, ordered by Sarah McElrea of ​​Sarah’s Alaska Honey on behalf of 300 Alaskan beekeepers, carried 800 pounds of bees and was worth about $ 48,000. The boxes were to travel from Sacramento, California to Anchorage Airport via Seattle, Washington. But the bees did not fit on the flight to Seattle and were instead rerouted via the Delta junction in Atlanta. Delta told McElrea that the bees should have waited in a refrigerator last Saturday, but were taken to the tarmac the next day for fear that the bees would escape. McElrea told the APM that the temperature in Atlanta was 80 degrees Fahrenheit the day they stayed there. “I was really panicked when they found out they had moved them out, because the pheromones that these bees emit are attractive to other bees that are native to the area,” he told APM. Because the bees were outside, it was more difficult to save those in the boxes. MacElrea told the APM that it had linked to Facebook with “a page based in Georgia”. He reached out to Edward Morgan, a beekeeper in Atlanta, Georgia, who told Atlanta WABE radio station that he and more than 20 others from the Metro Atlanta Beekeepers Association rushed to the airport to try to save the bees. “It is devastating to see so many dead,” Julia Mahood, a beekeeper in Georgia, told WABE. “Just clusters of dead bees that had no chance because they were left without food and basically got lost in Delta machines.” In an e-mailed statement, a Delta spokesman told Insider: “Delta was briefed on the status of the DL2390 shipment from Sacramento to Atlanta and quickly recruited appropriate internal teams to assess the situation. “We have taken immediate steps to implement new measures to ensure that such incidents do not occur in the future. We have been in direct contact with the customer to apologize for the unfortunate situation.” McElrea did not immediately respond to Insider requests for comment outside of regular hours. McElrea told the New York Times in an interview that Alaskans are increasingly relying on imports for bees to pollinate crops for spring and fall.
“People do not realize how dependent we as a species are on pollinating bees,” MacElrea told the New York Times. “And this is just a waste, an absolute tragedy.”