A man who went shopping in New Mexico returned to a car filled with 15,000 honey bees who had apparently got in through an open window while he spent 10 minutes buying groceries.

Astonishingly, the man – who was not named in the New York Times report detailing his unexpected travel companions – did not notice the sudden presence of a giant swarm of buzzing insects on his vehicle’s back seat until he was driving away.

“Then he turned back and looked and like was ‘holy cow’,” Jesse Johnson, an off-duty firefighter and paramedic whose hobby is beekeeping, said of the man’s reaction in an interview with the paper. “He called 911 because he didn’t know what to do”.

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Johnson, and his fellow firefighters, helped the man remove the bees and put them in an empty hive box.

Read more: The Guardian