ONE QUICK QUESTION: The Honeybee Spill
At around 4 a.m. on May 30, a truck carrying 14 million honeybees within 70,000 pounds of beehives that were to be used for crop pollination overturned near Lynden. More than two dozen beekeepers showed up to help recover the hives throughout the weekend, but it’s not clear how many bees were lost.
This isn’t the first time this has happened in Washington state. In 2015, a semi-truck carrying an estimated 14 million bees overturned on Interstate 5 near Lynnwood.
But that time, the bees weren’t so lucky. Beekeepers were on the scene within an hour of the pre-dawn wreck, and they were able to save 128 of the 448 hives on the truck before the sunlight woke the bees up. At that point, emergency personnel made the decision to spray the scene with fire retardant foam, killing millions of remaining bees at an estimated loss of up to $90,000.
We chatted with WWU Outback Farm Manager Terri Kempton about what attempting to wrangle 14 million angry bees into new homes might look like.
TK: “It’s a tough question.
First of all, I would not work alone. I would gather bee wranglers, which is an actual title; they are beekeepers who focus on removal and relocation. That’s their whole job. I would try to get together with bee wranglers and follow their lead — and of course we’d be wearing protective gear.
The second step is knowing how bees operate. When there’s an accident where a bunch of bees are spilled, knowing how they reproduce is key. I don’t mean laying eggs and hatching individual insects, because a honeybee colony really is the organism. That colony reproduces when there are so many healthy bees, the queen takes off with half the bees to find a new home and says, 'Peace out!’ to the other half that are left behind to continue living in the old hive. We call that a swarm.
When there’s an accident like this truck spilling millions of bees, it’s a bit like that swarming process: lots of bees flying around looking for a home. Knowing how swarming works, we can harness some of those same instincts of the colony. We’re able to find a cluster of bees gathered in a tree or a wall or any number of diverse locations. The queen is usually protected in the middle of that clump of bees as the colony tries to keep her warm and safe. As you relocate her, the other bees will stay together, and they’re not very interested in stinging you. Finding those queens and knowing how they behave is really, really important.
There are two approaches to collecting and relocating spilled bees; one is active and one is passive. To actively collect honeybees, wranglers take that queen and the swarm of bees and place or shake them into a box and relocate them in a proper hive at home.
A more passive approach is to set up a nice inviting space, maybe put food like honey or pollen patties inside, and hope they choose to move into that box all by themselves.
Whatever recovery does happen is thanks to the incredible resilience and problem-solving abilities of honeybees themselves. They will naturally gather themselves, protect their queen, and find and make new homes.
If we take a step back, we can see how this accident speaks to the fragility of our food system. Why are we transporting 14 million bees in one truck? How did we move from a deep relationship with honeybees to hauling them around and killing them when they’re inconvenient?
When we view living creatures as cargo, and it seems logical to ship them over vast distances for their pollination services, we risk their lives when there are accidents. It’s but one example of a very fragile system that doesn’t have much resilience.
A third of what we eat is thanks to bee pollination; we’d be wise to return the favor by figuring out more sustainable ways of growing and distributing food.”
Learn more about WWU's Outback Farm at the Fairhaven College of Interdisciplinary Studies.
Allie Spikes covers the WWU Graduate School and Fairhaven College of Interdisciplinary Studies for University Communications. Reach out to her with story ideas at spikesa@wwu.edu.