Milk River, Alberta. As Don Schollander, visiting paleontologist from USC, drove towards the famed Alberta Dinosaur diggings a bee blew into the window of his pickup. Schollander, who is allergic to bee stings, swerved into the oncoming lane and broadsided as semi-trailer loaded with 1500 bee hives destined for Horatios Honey in Sweetgrass, Montana.
The entire beehive convoy slid in slow motion as beehives bounced on the pavement and terrified bees escaped stinging truck drivers on their way to freedom. Schollander smashed the miscreant bee with the Billings Gazette as another semi crashed and scattered more hives across the tumbleweed countryside. And finally the Milk River volunteer Fire Department arrived and began to subdue the angry bees with fire hoses
Miraculously no one was hurt in the collisions, except the unlucky bee that flew into Schollander's vehicle. Biologist Donna DeVarona, from Horatios Honey, was on site for the cleanup and identified the smashed bee as a killer bee, which is distinctly different from the eight hundred million domestic bees scattered in the pileup. One lone killer bee in Alberta is mysterious as it is two thousand miles from the closest killer hive in New Mexico. DeVarona immediately blamed the whole mess on rival bee keeping company Hornblower's Hives, also of Sweetgrass.
The pacifist Horatio family and the red neck Hornblower family feud goes back over one hundred years when the families arrived in Sweetgrass planning to fill the same honey producers niche. Business success and near failure have vacillated between the warring factions, but the winning bid for of 1500 hives from Bob's Bees in Red Deer seemed to just about nail the coffin on Hornblower Hives.
Tricky old man Hornblower wasn't going down easily and DeVarona theorizes that he had converted hives to the more aggressive killer bee and hoped they would wreak havoc on the bee business in Sweetgrass. If Hornblower can't have it nobody can.
The United States Agriculture Department is conducting an investigation of the Sweetgrass bees but no further killer bees have been found.
