The man driving the flatbed truck carrying the hive of killer bees, and who gets killed by them, is actually Norman Gary, the bee wrangler/handler for this film. Gary had done the same two things in this film's predecessor, The Savage Bees (1976).
This is one of several films about Africanized honey bees (a.k.a. "killer bees") that were released during the 1970s' fear of, and fascination with, their predicted future invasion into the U.S. Southwest via South America in the early 1990s (which actually happened in the predicted time period, but not in the same ways the films had said it would, of course). Other films in this subgenre include Invasion of the Bee Girls (1973), Killer Bees (1974), The Savage Bees (1976), The Bees (1978), and The Swarm (1978). This film is the sequel to the third film on this list.