Millions of Bees Let Loose When Truck Tips

More than 400 colonies of honey bees escaped from their crates when the truck they were in tipped on a Sacramento highway.

Firefighters and police officers were stung as they attempted to contain the bees, which were being shipped to Yakima, Wash., on Highway 99, CNN reported.

There was somewhere between 6 (million) and 16 million of them running around out there, Officer Steve Merchant of the California Highway said.

Bee handlers reportedly worked for seven hours to relax the bees with smoke and corral them. The bees were eventually put back into crates and transported on new vehicles, CNN said.

The Sunday incident comes at a time bees are a particularly precious commodity because of a mysterious phenomenon affecting bees in the United States known as Colony Collapse Disorder. During the past 20 years the bee population has declined 40 percent, CNN reported.