NAIA probes swarm of bees at airport terminal

MANILA, Philippines—Airport authorities still don’t know where the bees, which disrupted airport operations and caused flight delays on Thursday, could have come from.

Andrew Balde, assistant manager at Ninoy Aquino International Airport Terminal 2, said they are not discounting the possibility that the bees could have been smuggled by a passenger.

“It’s possible that a passenger brought the insects in and they escaped from the cage,” he said.

However, he also said the presence of the bees was discovered even before the aerobridges were opened for the arriving planes.

Balde added that another possibility was that the insects came from grassy or woody areas near the airport vicinity.

He said they are checking closed circuit television cameras in the hallways leading to the aerobridges where the bees were found swarming.

Another airport official said they already sent samples of the bees to the Bureau of Animal Quarantine to determine the insects’ origin.

“Personally, I suspect they came from Palawan where bees thrive,” the official, who declined to be named, said.

Airport employees were stunned Thursday afternoon when bees suddenly swarmed around the control panels of at least five aerobridges at Gates 32 to 38 at around 1 p.m., preventing controllers from attaching the movable walkways to arriving airplanes.

Airport authorities immediately ordered the temporary closure of the terminal gates, saying the incident posed a danger to passengers and airport workers.

Passengers were made to use the service stairs down the ramp to get to and off the planes that were forced to park at the tarmac.

Birds are also a problem in many airports around the world but NAIA now has equipment to “minimize bird strike”, said NAIA general manager Jose Honrado.

He said there is a bird sanctuary in Parañaque, where the airport is located and the issue has already been raised before the city government.

International air safety regulation says that there must be no bird sanctuaries within five kilometres from airports.