It could be the prelude to a horror movie: A truck carrying millions of bees crashes into a rural ditch, releasing a swarm of frantic insects and an intense, angry whirring.
But a spontaneous rescue effort over the weekend by a beekeeping community in southeastern Texas made that reality considerably less scary.
When Christie Ray heard from a firefighter that an 18-wheeler had overturned in Orange County, she skipped church and put on her bee suit instead. A dozen other local beekeepers soon joined in the effort to recover roughly 20 million honeybees, or about 400 colonies, that had spilled out onto the country road.
Some of the bees had escaped into the rural surroundings, but most were trapped in overturned boxes inside the trailer.
The crash led the local authorities to close roads and send an emergency text alert to residents within a mile-and-a-half radius about a “heavy presence of bees in the area,” encouraging them to stay inside on Sunday morning.
The beekeepers said the driver of the trailer had made an ill-advised turn onto Colony Drive, the flooded, curvy, aptly named road where his delicate passengers ended up in the ditch.
Ms. Ray said the swarm was so thick she couldn’t drive up to the trailer.
The noise made for an “intense setting,” she said, describing how rogue bees that flew out of their boxes had clumped onto nearby trees and a fence. Ms. Ray stayed into the night and came back the next day to save as many bees as possible.
No people were injured, “but maybe a few got stung,” said Joel Ardoin, a director for the Orange County Office of Emergency Management.
Chris Moore, a professional beekeeper, had made it to church on Sunday when his son, who is also a beekeeper, told him he was going to the scene to help clean up.
The Texas summer heat can leave beekeepers and their suits soaked with sweat — and more penetrable to stings, Mr. Moore said. Clearing the truck took more than six hours.
“Each of those guys got probably 50 bee stings. That’s part of the job,” Mr. Moore said. “It still hurts.”
The boxes of bees could be moved only by hand because of the precariousness of the truck’s resting place, Mr. Moore said. Beekeepers had the delicate task of removing the boxes from the truck and stacking them in other vehicles in the same order, hoping that the colonies would not stray from their queen bees.
The bees were not far from home when they flipped over on the way to North Dakota, where they would have been employed as pollinators during peak bloom, Mr. Moore said. Many commercial beekeepers seasonally move their bees around the country by truck to make enough honey to get by, he added.
The owner of the honeybees has not been publicly identified.
Some of the surviving bees were taken to Ms. Ray’s home nearby, she said, where they joined her own. Other bees were transported in boxes to ranches and farms in the area. The success of the rescue would rest on the queens, who play key roles in sustaining the population of a colony.
“We’ll find out now how much of fighters they are,” Ms. Ray said.
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