Someone Stole A Vacuum Full of Angry Hornets From A Beekeeper

There's a criminal out in Philadelphia's Frankford neighborhood will be in for quite a surprise when he opens up the vacuum that he stole from the back of a beekeeper's van.

Don Shump, who owns the truck the vacuum was stolen out of, said there are most likely hundreds of hornets inside of it.

"Whoever it was that grabbed this grabbed a shop vac that was filled with several hundred hornets," Shump told 6ABC. "And not just the workers, they had a preponderance of queens."

Shump owns Philadelphia Bee Co, which, you guessed it correctly, is a beekeeping organization based in Philly.

"We do removals of anything that flies and stings," he said.

His company will show up and relocate honeybees and bumblebees, and will often use them to make honey to sell in the Philadelphia area.

As far as hornets and wasps go, they remove those as well, but instead of relocation, freeze them for study and analyzation.

The day of the theft, Philadelphia Bee Co. had removed a few thousand hornets into a shop vac while on a call on Malvern.

Shump used the vacuum to snag all of the hornets, and then placed it in the bed of his pickup truck and made the drive home to Frankford. He was planning to freeze the insects the following morning.

"The truck I was driving was new, so I hadn't gotten a chance to put a wrap on it yet, so there was no clear signage as to what might be in the vehicle," Shump said.

Sometime overnight, Shump said someone stole the vacuum out of the bed of his truck.

Good luck to the guy who got it, because he's in for a life lesson when he opens that thing.