COEUR d'ALENE - It couldn't have happened at a worse time.

As emergency crews were already stretched to their limits dealing with a record-breaking heat wave during the Ironman 2015 triathlon, a semi truck carrying millions of honeybees overturned on Interstate 90 near the Sherman exit.

It was only a few hundred yards away from the Ironman running course, but Coeur d'Alene Fire Chief Kenny Gabriel said the bees did not swarm the racers.

Gabriel said he was paged at 1:45 p.m. to respond to the scene. It took until 8 p.m. to clean the mess up, Gabriel said.

Bees were swarming from the hives, so firefighters began spraying the bees with foam so they couldn't fly.

"They got Cannon Hill to come in with loaders to scoop them up and put them in dump trucks," he said, adding he believes Cannon took the hive boxes to its yard for disposal.

Gabriel said almost all of the bees were killed.

Scott Weston, a local beekeeper and volunteer firefighter, said all of the bees will most likely die because they have nowhere to go after they are separated from their hives.

Weston said each hive has one queen bee and all of the brood is born to serve that queen.

"If they don't have a queen they have nowhere to go," he said. "So they will just die."

Weston said those bees had to be angry and while no Ironman athletes reported stings from the accident, some of his firefighting colleagues were posting on social media that they got stung a few times while cleaning up the mess.

Weston said it is customary to move bees during the night after they have all returned to the hive boxes, and that may have been the case in this accident.

"If you try and remove a hive during the day, you are going to miss a third of them who are working during the day," he said. "They all return to the hive at night."

Weston said it is sad to hear that all of the bees were killed. He said each hive is a big investment in both time and money.

The truck was carrying an estimated 400 hive boxes, and each hive of 30,000 to 40,000 bees will usually fill three hive boxes. That means, if all the boxes were full, the truck could have been transporting 4 million bees.

Weston said he saw another truck carrying a bunch of hives on Monday. He said in the early spring, commercial beekeepers send their bees to California to pollinate crops, and then they move them up north in the early summer.

The Idaho State Police has yet to release the cause of the crash, which is still under investigation. It did not return phone calls seeking additional information.