For a Sherwood Park man who makes a trip to Saskatoon four times a year, his latest trip, he says, will be hard to forget.
“This will be a memorable trip definitely,” said John Hildebrandt. “I got the pictures and I’ll always look back and talk about it, it will be a great piece of conversation.”
That’s because thousands of bees covered his pickup truck in the city’s southeast Costco parking lot on Monday afternoon. While the swarm grew bigger on his truck, Hildebrandt was inside manning a sales area for Lennox furnaces.
“I saw the pictures, someone said, ‘is that your truck’ and it was,” Hildebrandt said, adding he couldn’t abandon his posting in the store to check out the scene immediately.
Michelle Vilness, who works at the Costco at The Meadows, told CTV News bees were swarming the parking lot and then started landing on the driver’s side of a parked truck. The bees then moved to the passenger side. The employee said she believes the bees were following the queen, surrounding her for protection.
A couple bee keepers responded to the incident to remove the insects. For Hildebrandt, he has an idea of why the bees chose his truck.
“I guess it’s because I have such a sweet nature, that they loved my truck and my good nature was all over my truck,” he said. “The queen loved my truck and instead of choosing any other vehicle in the parking lot my truck was chosen.”
Hildebrandt said the bees didn’t cause any damage to his truck.
