“The Hazards of Collecting Nectar” appears in the Fall 2011 issue of flyway: Journal of Writing and Environment. An excerpt…
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On May 24, 2010, a Reinhart Foodservice semi truck failed to slow down for a line of vehicles stopped for road construction. It plowed in from behind, crushing a Pontiac Bonneville and a Chevy Lumina between itself and another semi trailer. That second truck carried 17 million honeybees. Hives crashed down on top of the two cars, rendering them unrecognizable and indistinguishable. The bees panicked, fled from their hives, sought the cause of the disturbance, found motorists, truck drivers, and later, fire fighters, police officers, paramedics.
That same day I sat in the sweltering driver’s seat of my Volkswagen Jetta, four miles south of the crash site, completely stopped.
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