A commercial truck carrying 70,000 pounds of honey bee hives tipped over early Friday morning, releasing millions of bees in Whatcom County, just west of Lynden.
As odd as the entire incident may seem, trucks carrying hundreds of millions of bees are fairly common.
“Shipping honey bee colonies around the country is pretty standard practice these days for most commercial beekeepers,” Katie Buckley, pollination health coordinator at the Washington State Department of Agriculture, told The Herald in a phone call.
250 million bees escape transport vehicle in Washington after rollover
Why trucks carry millions of honey bees
The practice has been going on for the better part of the last century, as commercial farms and orchards grew too large for their local bee populations to pollinate.
“In the olden days, when populations weren’t so big, the acreages went so large, the native colonies could easily handle pollinating the crops that would bloom,” Tim Hiatt, legislative liaison for the Washington State Beekeepers Association, said in a phone interview. “I think it was the 1940s or ‘50s when biologists noticed increased production in apple orchards by having supplemental beehives there.”
According to Buckley, the practice became especially widespread after California’s almond crop grew large enough to incentivize the country’s beekeepers to go mobile.
“It’s really become standard practice for commercial beekeepers to be moving their hives all around the entire country because of just one crop: almonds in California,” Buckley said. “Basically, we’re at the point where the acreage of almonds requires nearly all commercial beehives to go to California just to pollinate them.”
These days, Buckley estimates that commercial beekeepers make more money from pollination than from harvesting honey or beeswax.
“Now commercial beekeepers make most of their money off of pollination services, so they made contracts with growers of many different crops to basically bring their bees when that crop is in bloom, so that the crop gets pollinated,” Buckley said.
Bee transportation in Washington
Like most states with significant agricultural production, Washington farms rely on bees brought in from other states.
“We have in the Pacific Northwest some of the best conditions for growing certain crops. And there’s not enough native pollination services when you plant a quarter million acres of crops that need pollination,” Hiatt said. “Washington itself doesn’t have all the forage it needs to support the hives that would be required to pollinate all those crops. So Washington, and the Pacific Northwest generally, is relying on transportation hives between states.”
According to Buckley, in Washington that typically includes apple, stone fruit and berry growers in Washington.
“That is pretty standard practice for pretty much most of our orchard crops. So apples, stone fruit — pears, cherries, peaches, plums. … Quite a lot of other fruits need that, too,” Buckley said. “So that’s not just things like blueberries, strawberries, blackberries, raspberries — those all need to be pollinated, but that includes stuff like tomatoes.”
It’s just as common for Washington beekeepers to transport their colonies to other states as well, according to Hiatt.
How common are honey bee truck crashes?
Nothing about the truck that overturned outside of Lynden seemed out of the ordinary, according to both Hiatt and Buckley. However, both said the numbers used to describe the shipment need to be understood in context.
“For a semi truck, that sounds normal. A lot of that poundage is not necessarily going to be the bees,” Buckley said. “Here’s a tip for you. Honey is heavy.”
Hiatt said he would estimate the shipment contained around 22.5 million bees based on pictures that he’s seen, but that it’s difficult to get anything more than a rough estimate.
“Those numbers are kind of made up. That particular load looked to be like about 450 hives more or less. And each hive could have 50,000 bees in it.”
Hiatt said that he had no information on where that particular shipment was headed, but that it’s common for trucks in that part of the state to carry bees to Montana, North Dakota and South Dakota.
“I suspect those bees were done with blueberry pollination and were probably headed out of state for honey production in Montana or the Dakotas,” Hiatt said.
Despite the proximity of the incident to the U.S.-Canada border, Hiatt said that the bees likely weren’t going to Canada — the country has a partial ban on live honey bees imported from the U.S.
The accident wasn’t entirely out of the ordinary either. According to Buckley, trucks carrying bees tend to drive at night, which brings lower visibility and the occasional accident.
“When it gets dark, all of the foragers come back to the hive. So you know you have all of the bees back in the hive once it gets dark,” Buckley said. “So when it gets dark, they load them onto the trucks and they move them. Unfortunately, this means that it’s not uncommon for these trucks to get into accidents, because visibility for us humans is also lower at night.”
However, while mishaps happen occasionally, Hiatt said that it’s been roughly a decade since the last accident he remembers occurring in Washington.
“In a given year, into Washington, there’s probably hundreds of semi loads of bees that come and go. And in any given year, there’s no problems with any of them,” Hiatt said.
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