A 70-year-old Spanish beekeeper was so upset about being stopped by traffic police that he set his bees on the officers, causing them to take shelter in a restaurant.

An unusual incident took place last Friday, on the N-II road in Cervera, a small town in the Catalonian province of Lleida. A local police patrol noticed that the driver of a van wasn’t wearing a seatbelt and was driving erratically, so they pulled him over. The 70-year-old man immediately set the tone of the interaction with the phrase “I should have run you over!” and things only got more heated from then on. Suspecting that the man was under the influence of alcohol, the officers asked him to take a breathalizer test, which yielded a result of 0.38mg/l, but when they asked him to repeat the procedure to confirm the first reading, the driver became really upset and threatened to kill them.

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“Now I’m going to kill you,” the irritated beekeeper allegedly shouted at the traffic cops, and before they could even react, he went to the back of his van and unleashed a swarm of honey bees that immediately started attacking the policemen. According to the Catalan newspaper Segre, the two policemen were stung several times and had to flee the scene to take refuge in a nearby restaurant, while the beekeeper casually got in his car and drove off. After calling for reinforcement, the policemen were able to leave the restaurant and track down the elderly beekeeper. The unnamed man was arrested but released on bail just hours later after giving a statement. Meanwhile, the two policemen were taken to the emergency room and administered cortisol to mitigate the effects of the bee stings. This week, reliable sources told Segre that the offender was judicially acquitted of the crime of assault, but the newspaper was not able to verify the information.