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(CNN) --
At least 10 million bees were let loose on a highway after a semi-trailer crashed in Utah.
The truck, driven by a commercial beekeeper traveling from California to North Dakota, overturned on Interstate 80 around 10:40 a.m. local time Monday, Cameron Roden, public information officer for the California Highway Patrol, told CNN. Utah.
The accident occurred because the driver was going too fast in a curve, Roden added.
The right lane of eastbound I-80 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 said.
Several policemen who were at the scene of the accident also suffered bee stings.
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Julie Arthur, president of the Wasatch Beekeepers Association, told CNN the truck was carrying 416 boxes, each carrying between 50,000 and 100,000 honey bees used to pollinate crops across the country.
More than 10 million bees were released when a semi-trailer crashed on a Utah highway.
"At least 10 million bees were in the air," Arthur noted.
He called his team to help him capture the huge swarm, but the beekeeper told the local authorities that it was not worth trying to save the bees.
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It wasn't until Tuesday morning that Arthur received a call saying that she and her team could carry out a rescue mission.
The scene was "a gigantic mess," Arthur recounted, with honey and wax from the combs melting in the sun and boxes scattered everywhere, covered in the firefighting foam that firefighters had used to spray some of the bees. .
"Little of the team was salvageable," observed Arthur.
"But we found a huge mound of bees at the back of the slope."
He described seeing "a wall of bees" 2.4 meters long, 1.2 meters deep and 1.5 meters high.
"We started piling bees into boxes as fast as we could. They weren't pretty. They had just been thrown off a truck and most had lost their queen."
In all, Arthur and a group of five volunteers rescued around 10% of the lost bees.
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Whereas the rescued bees were once destined to travel the country pollinating crops for farmers, now they are to be used as teaching aids for new beekeepers.
"A lot of those bees are going to be used as teaching hives for the Wasatch Beekeepers Association," Arthur explained.
"Others went to some of the beekeepers who helped, to other organizations that needed bees, to community gardens."
Arthur added that he hopes the incident will prompt Utah to develop a more unified strategy to deal with accidental bee releases.
"We had hours of confusion as to who could do what," he acknowledged.
"The good thing to come out of this is that the Utah Highway Patrol and the Utah Department of Transportation, and the local fire and police departments said we have to come up with an immediate strategy if this happens again."
"Everyone knows how valuable bees are to our environment, but they weren't sure what to do," he added.
"It's really lucky that we had people who wanted to come out and help."
Utah is known as the "Beehive State" and images of beehives are found on state signs and monuments, according to the Utah State Capitol.
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