At least 10 million bees were released onto a highway after a semitrailer crashed in Utah.

The truck, driven by a commercial beekeeper traveling from California to North Dakota, tipped over on Interstate 80 at around 10:40 a.m. local time Monday, Cameron Roden, public information officer for the Utah Highway Patrol, told CNN. The crash occurred because the driver was driving too fast on a curve, Roden added.

Eastbound I-80's right lane was closed for about four hours to clean up the crash site and the driver was taken to the hospital due to numerous bee stings and minor injuries from the crash, Roden reported. Several troopers on the scene also received bee stings.

Julie Arthur, president of the Wasatch Beekeepers' Association, told CNN the truck was transporting 416 boxes, each of which carried between 50,000-100,000 honeybees used to pollinate crops across the country.

"At least 10 million bees were in the air," Arthur noted. She put out a call to her team to help capture the huge swarm, but the beekeeper told authorities on site it was not worthwhile to attempt to save the bees.

It wasn't until Tuesday morning Arthur received a call saying she and her team could stage a rescue mission.

The scene was "a gigantic mess," Arthur recounted, with honey and honeycomb wax melting in the sun and boxes scattered everywhere, covered in the fire foam fighters had used to spray down some of the bees.

"Little of the equipment was salvageable," Arthur observed. "But we found a huge pile of bees on the back of the hillside." She described seeing "a wall of bees" 8 feet long, 4 feet deep, and 5 feet high. "We just started piling bees into boxes as fast as we could. They were not nice. They had just been dumped off a truck and most of them had lost their queen."

Altogether, Arthur and a group of five volunteers rescued about 10% of the wayward bees.

Whereas the rescued bees were previously destined to travel the country pollinating crops for farmers, now they're going to be used as teaching aids for burgeoning beekeepers.

"A lot of those bees are gonna be used as teaching hives for the Wasatch Beekeepers' Association," Arthur explained. "Others went to some of the beekeepers that helped, other organizations that needed bees, community gardens."

Arthur added she hopes the incident prompts Utah to develop a more unified strategy to deal with accidental bee releases.

"We had hours of confusion as to who was allowed to do what," she acknowledged. "The good thing to come out of this is that the Utah Highway Patrol and Utah Department of Transportation and local fire and police departments have said we need to come up with an immediate strategy if this happens again."

"Everyone knows how valuable honeybees are to our environment, but they were not sure what to do," she added. "It's really fortunate that we had people who wanted to come out and help."

Utah is known as the "Beehive State" and images of beehives are found across the state's signs and monuments, according to the Utah State Capitol.

LONGMEADOW, Mass. — A Massachusetts woman is accused of attacking authorities with a swarm of bees to stop a court-ordered eviction in Longmeadow.

On Thursday, the Hampden County Sheriff's Office said on its Facebook page that on Oct. 12 at around 9:30 a.m., Rorie Woods drove up in her Nissan Xterra with a flatbed trailer attached up to a residence as deputies were serving a court-ordered eviction.

"She quickly jumped out of her SUV and started trying to unleash thousand of bees in manufactured hives as a deputy jumped onboard and tried to stop her," the department said in a statement.

The department said the deputy was stung several times in his face and head.

According to the sheriff's office, Woods flipped the entire hive tower off her flatbed, which "extremely agitated" the bees. Deputies said this led to several members of the sheriff's office and other bystanders getting stung, the report said.

Donning a beekeeper suit, deputies were able to arrest Woods as she attempted to a hive closer to the door of the home, according to the statement.

As deputies walked her to a cruiser, one of them told her that he and several other deputies were allergic to bees.

“Oh, you’re allergic? Good,” she allegedly stated back, according to the report.

The sheriff's office said one department staff member was hospitalized after being stung.

The Washington Post reported that several protesters were gathered outside the residence, which Woods yelled at to ask them to take care of her dog, "which she said was unfed, and left in the SUV with thousands of bees swarming outside of it," according to the sheriff's office said.

According to the sheriff's office, the 55-year-old woman did not live at the residence where deputies were serving an eviction notice.

Woods was arrested, arraigned, and released by a judge without having to post bail, but she will appear in court at a later date, the sheriff's office said.

“Never in all my years of leading the Hampden County Sheriff’s Civil Process Division have I seen something like this,” said Robert Hoffman, Chief Deputy of the Civil Process Office, in a statement. "I’m just thankful no one died because bee allergies are serious."

DENVER, Colo. — It really is amazing how much you can learn when a beehive is right in front of you. That's especially true when you have the help of someone like Mike Rosol. He's not just any beekeeper; he's attending to bees who live on the properties of major companies like Gates Corporation.

Gates Corporation is a leading manufacturer of application-specific fluid power and power transmission solutions. Head of sustainability, Christopher Thomas, says it is prime to their mission for employees to be a part of direct impact within the community.

"We have a global footprint, offices, manufacturing, distribution, all around the world but have maintained our presence here in Denver, Colorado since our beginnings over 100 years ago," said Thomas. "We encourage people to find those causes, those missions, that make sense both to them but also what's our impact, what's the greater impact that we can create."

For Gates, the partnership with a company like Free Range Beehives was a no-brainer. Companies like IBM and Google have followed suit, dedicating budget lines to saving the bees. Co-founder and VP of operations at Free Range Beehives, John Rosol, explains there is no time to waste when educating people on the declining bee population.

"So, our goal at Free Range Beehives, and what we hope the goal of similar beekeepers and the corporations we work with, is to establish these populations that are good for the environment and the bees," Rosol said. "The situation is quite severe, unfortunately. The bees are facing threats from a number of sources that are primarily human-caused. A world without bees doesn't have humans in it. They are critical pollinators both for agriculture and for the natural world."

There are a few reasons this effort is so different than simply having a hive in your backyard. Expert beekeepers are on site taking care of the hives, companies have more funds to invest, and thousands of employees are impacted by the education they provide.

"Bees are incredibly interconnected with humans and they pollinate 1 out of 3 three bites of food we eat, so over 30% of our crops come from bees, and those are things like avocados, onions, and coffee, which I know I couldn't' live without," Rosol explained.

They found a void to fill, all while connecting these companies to the communities they are a part of.

"There's lots of people here and generally if the leadership cares about these kinds of initiatives, it trickles down," Rosol said.

Another co-founder of Free Range Beehives, Dave Mathias, says by having these partnerships the bees have a better chance of rebounding.

"The impact as it relates to educating employees and the community can be very fruitful. We do a lot of engagement with employees where we take them into the hives," Mathias said. "Any company can write a check to an organization and we just appreciate and I know our clients and partners appreciate that it's something that they are doing that has direct and measurable impact within the community."

They say it's a win-win situation. It's an effort to save the declining bee population and an opportunity to make great impressions and investments within communities.

If you would like to learn more about Free Range Beehives and the work they do, click here.

It's the busiest time of year for beekeepers. Billions of honeybees from across the country have been shipped to California for almond pollination season.

Almonds are California's top crop, bringing in billions of dollars for the state every year. The state grows so many almonds, in fact, that they rely on out-of-state beekeepers to ship in pollinators to allow the trees to bloom.

But thieves have stolen more than a thousand beehives in the past few weeks, and it's costing beekeepers. It's been a growing problem that has prompted some to start putting GPS trackers inside the hives.

BeeHero, a company that has developed a sensor to help beekeepers maintain their hives, says the location tracking feature has actually helped get stolen equipment back.

"Because we had some of our systems there, we managed to identify the location, and the local sheriff went there and actually caught the guy who stole the the equipment," said Omer Davidi, the CEO and co-founder of BeeHero. "So, I think that the thieves are probably smart enough not to steal those hives where they can see the sensors. And I hope that's going to be good enough to make this phenomenon stop."

Stolen hives and equipment costs beekeepers thousands of dollars and can have a big ripple effect.

BeeHero says if there are fewer bees to pollinate crops and prices for farmers go up, consumers end up paying more at the grocery store.

It could also mean danger for the environment. Most thieves are likely not trained beekeepers, and if they're not caring for the bees properly, Davidi says mites can get into the hives and cause disease to spread.

"As farming becomes more and more intense and we have monoculture and a lot of crops in the same location, which requires a lot of hives to be in the same location, the same time, every mistake of a single player can affect other places in the industry, and that's not sustainable," Davidi said.

Davidi also encourages the public to report any hive thefts they may suspect to local authorities and for beekeepers to write their names on equipment, so if a stolen hive ends up on social media, it's easier to track down the rightful owner.

A man is dead and at least five people were injured after a bee swarm attack in an Arizona neighborhood on Thursday.

The man, whose identity has not been released, died after he was among three people "believed to have been stung hundreds of times" by the bee swarm in Marana, the Northwest Fire District said on Facebook.

The two other people needed medical attention. The swarm forced a residential street to be shut down for several hours in the town northwest of Tucson.

Three responding firefighters, including one who was hospitalized and later released, also were stung.

Workers discovered an open beehive in a nearby tree. They estimated it weighed about 100 pounds, according to the Northwest Fire District.

"Bee handlers have killed most of the bees and have removed the hive," Marana Police Department said on Facebook. "Although the area is much safer, there are still some lingering bees."

Police warned residents in the neighborhood to remain cautious.

PHILADELPHIA, Pa. — In the world of honeybees, it’s all the buzz: an agricultural mystery as complex as a beehive.

“There seems to be no end in sight,” said beekeeper Don Shump. “It's never boring.”

For 10 years, Shump, the owner of the Philadelphia Bee Company, has faithfully tended to beehives, selling the honey they produced to the public.

Then, one day, something changed.

“I walked into my honey house and one of my workers was cracking open a container of honey,” Shump recalled. “And I walked in and I said, ‘Who's eating maple bacon?’”

No one was.

The unusual smell was coming from the honey.

“I'd given it a taste and I was like, ‘I don't know what this is,’” Shump said.

Other beekeepers in the area started noticing the same thing in their honey.

“We sent our honey samples up to the labs to determine what it is, to try to do some sleuthing,” Shump said.

The agricultural detective they turned to for help? Robyn Underwood of Penn State University answered the call.

“We launched an investigation into where this strange new honey was coming from,” she said.

After multiple tests, including running a DNA profile on the honey, the culprit turned out to be the Asian lanternfly.

It’s an invasive species that began appearing in the Philadelphia area several years ago and has now spread to multiple states. Lanternflies can be destructive, potentially responsible for hundreds of millions of dollars in agricultural damage.

“What they’re really interested in is sucking out plant sap,” Underwood said.

That is where the honeybees come in; they access what the lanternflies have left behind and add it to their honey.

“We do know that it’s safe for people to eat and it’s safe for honeybees as well,” Underwood said.

The middle of Philadelphia isn’t exactly the kind of place where you would expect an agricultural drama to play out, but that’s exactly what happened, and the result has been delicious.

“It got paired with the blue cheese and people went nuts over it. They loved it,” Shump said. “And at that point, I said, ‘Well, we might have something here.’”

The Philadelphia Bee Company calls the new honey flavor the “Doom Bloom.” Yet, there’s no love lost for the lowly lanternfly.

“They're a horrible invasive species and they're not something we want around here,” Shump said. “However, you know, if we can take advantage of them, however we can until we can get rid of them, then we'll make good on a bad thing.”

It’s a bad thing that turned out to be pretty tasty.