© AP PhotoDeputy Brandon Jenkins sits inside the police cruiser while the bees are collected.
Sheriff's Deputy Brandon Jenkins, 31, had been called to the scene of a broken down lorry in North Carolina. The lorry was pulling a trailer loaded with 60 boxes of bees and the insects had escaped.
Officer Jenkins arrived at day break just as the bees were waking up and they swarmed him, forcing him to retreat to his car and radio for assistance.
"It was mind boggling how many bees were out there. At some point, it was hard to see out of the windows," he said.
The officer admitted using deadly force on some of the insects who got in.
"It was more or less self-defence. There were a couple of bees in my personal space, my comfort zone, and I just wanted to get them out."
At one point he drove the car down the road but that failed to dislodge the bees.
Police called in two beekeepers who used smoke and sugar water spray to calm the insects and then collected them. They said the bees had been attracted by the light colour of the patrol car.
Beekeeper Charles Heatherly said: "The bees were hot and bothered.
They got a little testy." Jennifer Keller, a honeybee technician at North Carolina State University, said: "The were just very confused. They don't have a queen to guard and they were kind of lost."
not necessarily white, (the bee keeper in the picture is dressed in white) as the car is. Had the Officer turned off his blue flashing light they may have dispersed from his car.
Smoke does not calm bees, quite the opposite it makes them very active. If they smell smoke in the hive they go into action and re-absorb honey for a flight to a possible new destination. There was no honey available to them at this point.
Had Officer Jenkins actually been swarmed (sic) the bees would have been far quicker than he and had they been mad enough they would have stung him to death.
The bees did not escsape from the hive they would have stayed there to protect the queen. Something else happend here which Officer Jenkins is perhaps not telling us.
I would say that the hives possibly fell off the lorry and broke open, this would make the bees very angry.