A shop worker returned to their car to find it covered in bees. Kass Thomas had only bought the car a few days earlier and parked it behind a pub before going to work at a charity shop.
A "mortified" Kass returned to find a pest controller and bee expert was there. An estate agent, Carlos Hernandez, who works nearby had spotted the bees at around 10.30am and called Chris Bowyer.
Kass told CheshireLive: "I must have arrived at about 8.45am. I came back to pick something up around 2pm and the car was covered in bees."
When Kass opened the car's boot, the group was further shocked when they saw that hundreds more bees had made their way inside the new car while it was parked in Northwich town centre.
Kass continued: "They were in my car, my brand new, three-day-old car. I drove off from the showroom on the Saturday and that happened on the Monday."
Chris managed to move the bees into a temporary hive before Kass finished work - but the bees came back, Kass said, with around 100 bees once again in the back of the car. Chris returned, removing the final bees before moving the whole colony to his Middlewich farm, where he has 75 bee hives.
"It wasn’t funny at the time, but now looking back at it, it was absolutely hilarious," said Kass.
Subscribe here for the latest news where you live
Chris, owner of Paul Jones Pest Control, explained: "There could well be a feral colony in a building in Northwich that I don’t know about, that nobody knows about. When a hive swarms, the queen decides that there’s not enough room there anymore and to move on to somewhere else.
"The queen takes flight and settles somewhere. Scout bees then go out from that swarm and look for another cavity to go into.
"They just go to any old resting place. I’ve done quite a few on cars, it's fairly frequent, there was one in Winnington in May, but normally they just go on branches of trees, bushes and hedges."
Chris explained how he dealt with the situation: "You get the majority of the bees into a temporary hive, hoping that you’ve got the queen. The bees will let me know whether the queen is in the box, because of the queen is in the box the bees will walk into the box. They’re currently in the same temporary hive and they’ll be transferred into a full-size hive hopefully Wednesday."
