Locals volunteers step up to help recovery after a tragedy in multiple acts.
Much of the world has been buzzing since a beekeeping accident occurred outside of Lynden last month.
- “250 million bees unleashed upon northern Washington after truck overturns,” blared the New York Post.
- “Truck accident unleashes 250 million honeybees in northwestern US,” reported Al Jazeera.
- “Truck hauling honey hives rolls over, freeing 250 million bees,” was the Vancouver Sun’s headline.
Dillon Honcoop, the communications director for Whatcom Family Farmers who grew up on a local raspberry farm, told Salish Current that he was getting calls over the weekend inquiring about his family’s safety after the storied accident.
“I had to chuckle when family from Canada called and had seen the story on their national news and were concerned about potential impacts to my family,” he said in an interview.
The initially reported number of 250 million bees seemed large to Honcoop, but only because it would be difficult to fit that many bees on a single trailer. For hundreds of millions of bees to be at work pollinating area farms is hardly a stretch.
“While the headlines gave the impression of an incident of disastrous proportions, the reality is that millions of bees are working around here all the time,” Honcoop said.
Honeybees go to war
The Whatcom County Sheriff’s Office posted the picture of a gnarly-looking wreck involving a semi and its trailer — a commercial transport vehicle, moving honeybees among farms — on May 30, with a literally barbed warning.
“There are 250 million bees loose on Weidkamp Road between West Badger and Loomis Trail,” the sheriff’s office said. “Please utilize alternative routes as WSCO deputies, public works and bee experts work to contain the situation.”
It was a tragedy in multiple acts. The first two acts were the accident itself in the pre-dawn hours, as one of the trailer’s back wheels fell into an irrigation ditch; and then the attempt to right things later in the morning, via tow truck, that went horribly wrong. The straps came loose and containers housing bee hives fell out and cracked and then bees swarmed everywhere.
Honeybees are tribal creatures that can usually get along with the honeybees of other, competing colonies. But these particular bees interpreted what had happened as an attack on the queen and the hive and thus commenced hostilities.
As a result, when the few dozen local volunteer beekeepers stepped in to sort through the wreckage, they encountered murderously angry bees who were making all-out war on the bees of other hives.
Beekeepers were stuck in the middle of that insect warfare. They had to work to gather and separate the bees as best they could, under trying circumstances.
Dawn Beck is a retiree and a certified master beekeeper who lives in Bow. She answered the call to come help but “didn’t have any concept of how crazy it would be,” she told Salish Current.
“We all got stung a lot,” she said. “A couple of the guys were sick from it the next day.”
When Beck got within about a hundred feet of the bee spillage, “I was getting the crap stung out of me,” she said, and so retreated further to her car to get her heavy duty three-layer suit on.
Even at that greater distance, the bees wouldn’t let up, so Beck simply let them into the suit with her. “They can only sting me once,” she reasoned.
There were other difficulties that led to more stings. Latex gloves were not thick enough, so she had to use thicker gardening gloves. Duct tape wrapping helped make sure bees had a harder time getting into seams and acted as another layer of protection.
The beekeepers’ veils offered some protection, but their rescue efforts canceled some of that protection out. They were bending over and picking up heavy boxes, some weighing 75 pounds. Often their movements would make it so that the veils pressed up against their faces. At that point blank range, bees’ stingers could reach them.
Beck described some of the unusual physical issues of millions of bees swarming. As they pelted down on her, “It was literally like a hail storm of bees.”
This cloud created intermittent visibility issues, and the smell was pervasive. The bees were giving off this “really intense stress hormone smell,” she said.
Bees are hard to count
The thing that gave the story wings was an in-the-moment estimation by the sheriff’s office that was way off. The 250 million figure proved to be well pollinated, low lying fruit for headline writers the world over, though the frontline beekeepers doubted it from the get-go.
“The minute they (released the 250 million figure), I knew it was wrong,” Beck said. “The average number of bees is 50,000 per colony, so that’s 5,000 hives and there’s no way you can fit 5,000 hives on the back of a semi.”
So where did the erroneous number come from?
“Initial reports from the scene appear to have misidentified truck’s total vehicle weight with its cargo weight,” explained Amy Cloud, public information officer for the sheriff’s office, in a statement to the Salish Current Thursday.
The 250 million figure was thus an alarming, accidentally headline grabbing estimate.
Over the next few days, the sheriff’s office listened to what the beekeepers had to say. It also consulted the shipping company “once the scene had stabilized,” Cloud said. In statements to press and then on a social media post Sunday it issued a correction.
“Revised estimates from beekeepers on site report the total amount of bees being closer to 14 million,” the message read on June 1. “Most of them have been recovered and the road is now open.”
Even that 14 million figure shows that a lot of guesswork goes into counting bees. Which makes sense; it’s not like they just stand around to be tallied.
Beck said that hives average 50,000 bees. The truck contained just over 400 hives, which would work out to just over 20 million bees. Beekeepers on the scene reckoned, based on what they were sorting through, that the number must be lower, thus the 14 million bee figure.
Who you gonna call? Beekeepers!
Sorting millions of warring bees was a lot of hard, unpaid work for a few dozen volunteers but Beck thinks it was worth it.
“They were originally going to have to foam the bees,” she said, meaning use an insecticide foam to kill them.
“Since we were there helping, then they were able to not kill the bees,” she added.
The fear was that the swarm would perhaps move closer to a population center, where the bees could do real damage, particularly to those people with bad bee venom allergies.
Beck was not worried about the swarm moving on, provided the beekeepers could sort things out.
“Bees are communal creatures,” she explained. “They will always stay with their hive. They have a brood, and they have babies and they won’t leave them.”
Because of the open bee warfare and the way the volunteers had to stack the hives, Beck said there’s a high likelihood that many of the queens were killed.
Those colonies will have to have new queens introduced, through processes well known to beekeepers. Still, she estimates that “80% of the bees actually will survive,” and she’s glad to have helped with that.
Beck believes the rescue effort helped hold back public condemnation as well.
Over the last two decades, with stories about colony collapse disorder in the headlines, many people have become quite protective of honeybees. Whenever they are killed on a large scale, “the outcry is immediate,” she said.
Many Washington beekeepers are using this accident to help them plan ahead for the next time something like this occurs.
When Beck spoke to the Salish Current last week, she said there had just been a meeting of the Washington State Beekeeping Association. The beekeepers were trying to develop a plan for best practices that help first responders, beekeepers and the public at large to better navigate the swarm.
— By Jeremy Lott
Also read in Salish Current:
• “Giant hornet effort approaches milestone as another pest shows up,” Feb. 26, 2024
• “‘No Mow May’ keeps pollinators in mind,” May 12, 2023