Flight bee-lays

NICK EICHER, HOST: If you fly often enough, you know all kinds of things can keep a plane from taking off on time. But this one has gotta be a first.

Last week, Anjali Enjeti was waiting to board her plane out of Houston when the Delta boarding agents made an unusual announcement that there was something wrong: namely, a swarm of bees had covered the winglet on tip of the plane’s wing.

Business as usual? Not even close. Anjali posted updates to Twitter for the better part of three hours as the ground crew tried to figure out how to remove the bees.

Turns out, beekeepers aren’t allowed to touch airplanes, so that’s a problem. Pest control can’t spray them. Strike two. So …

ANJALI ENJETI: They’ve lit the exhaust to smoke them. They’re going to try and smoke them off.

Right, they fired up the Tug. That’s the diesel generator that supplies power to parked planes. Didn’t work.

What did work was firing up the jet engines. They had to take that as a threat.

MYRNA BROWN, HOST: That’s what I call buzzing off. 

It’s The World and Everything in It.

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