Bees on a plane

Passengers panicked when two hives of bees smuggled onto a plane for a flight across Russia escaped in mid-air and began swarming around the cabin.

The bees - sneaked on board in cardboard boxes - became agitated during the 10-hour Yakutia Airline flight from Blagoveshchensk, near the Chinese border, to Moscow .

The trafficker claims an airport official at Blagoveshchensk had asked him to carry the cardboard boxes containing the bees to Moscow where he would be met at the airport.

Official airport documents quoted a passenger as saying that the trafficker seemed "slightly drunk", reports the Daily Telegraph.

Air hostesses eventually managed to seal the bees inside the wardrobe in the flight's business section by sealing it with sticky tape.

But when the plane arrived at its next destination, Barcelona, a new crew discovered that the fumigation had not been completely successful with five bees still on the plane, Russian newspapers reported.

Now the carrier could be stung with a massive £100,000 bill for having to fumigate the Boeing 757 jet and to compensate for the delays caused to the plane's ongoing journey to Spain.