I am a novice beekeeper. This is my third year of responsibility for bees. I keep hives at our son’s farm, 2.7 miles from our house. However, I often ride my bike to and from the farm, and the main road is too narrow and too busy for bicycles, so the route I take when I ride my bike is just over 7 miles each way. The exercise of the round trip is about right for a daily jaunt for me. I have colonies of bees that have survived two winters now, and I harvest enough honey for our family’s use and a bit extra to give as gifts. The process has allowed me to learn more about honey bees. Bees lead extraordinary lives, and there is still much more to learn. I have completed the novice level of beekeeper training offered by the Washington State Beekeepers Association, and my hives are registered with the Washington Department of Agriculture. Over the next two or three years, I hope to become a master beekeeper, which includes training and experience. I needed a few years of keeping bees before being eligible to take the next level of training, which I intend to start over the winter of 2025-26.

My bees have an easy life compared to the lives of many other bees. They remain in the same hive for many cycles of life. A colony can survive beyond the lifespan of its queen by raising new queens as needed. The bees we keep have access to various pollinating and nectar-producing plants on the farm. There is an orchard with apple, pear, and plum trees. There are rows of blueberry plants. There are strawberries, raspberries, and blackberries nearby. The pastures have clover, dandelion, and other flowering plants. Many bulbs bloom in the spring, including daffodils, tulips, and hyacinths. After those flowers have run their course, poppies emerge. Soon, the lavender will begin blooming, followed by the dahlias. The bees in my hives rarely travel more than a half mile to keep the hives thriving. I feed them in winter and warm the hives on the coldest days. I keep their boxes painted and in good repair. I harvest some of their honey, but also leave some for them.

Production bees, however, have very different lives. Commercial honey producers have a lot of ways to encourage their bees to produce more honey. And those raising bees for income charge for pollination services that create more income than honey production. To maximize production, commercial operations move the bees over long distances. Hives may be located in California during the winter, earning money by pollinating almond trees, then come to western Washington for the berry season in spring, and off to the alfalfa fields when the berry season is over. A typical load of bees might be 450 to 500 hives on a single semi trailer. Depending on how much honey is in the hives, the load can exceed 70,000 pounds. With roughly 50.000 bees in each hive, millions of bees travel down the road. The standard way to transport bees is to wait until most bees are in the hive at night, load the hives onto a flatbed trailer using large forklifts, and drive through the night. If the trip is too long to be completed in a single night, the truck travels to a rural area where it can be parked during the day before moving on the next night.

Sometimes, as was the case yesterday, something goes wrong. A few miles northeast of our place, near the Canadian border, a semi load of bees was traveling down a narrow rural road when it veered off to the ditch on the left. The driver over-controlled and the truck started toward the opposite ditch when it tipped onto its side, spilling the hives. The bees began venturing in huge swarms a few hours after the accident. Master beekeepers estimate that there could have been as many as 25 million bees spread out along about a mile of roadway. The sheriff’s office closed the road, and the master beekeepers went to work. About 25 local volunteer beekeepers began righting and repairing hives. They worked through the day, hoping the bees would return to the hives.

Because of the disruption, the bees will take a while to find the correct hives. Each bee belongs to a specific colony with its queen. Some queens were likely forced to leave their boxes in the crash. Those swarms will take longer to find a suitable hive. It is estimated that the road must remain closed for another 24 to 48 hours to allow most bees to return to their hives. They will then be loaded onto a different trailer and head off to alfalfa fields for the rest of the summer and honey harvest in the early fall before being trucked to California for the winter.

I don’t know the exact destination for those bees. They might have been headed to alfalfa fields as close as a few hundred miles away or farms as distant as eastern Montana or the Dakotas. Honey bees get around. Even though the accident occurred within a short distance of the border, they were not headed to Canada. There are restrictions on honey and bee imports to Canada. Canadian bees travel around Canada, and many are heading east from the berry fields about now, but they rarely cross the border.

I’ll go to the farm today and set up an empty hive with some frames sprayed with sugar water to attract bees, just in case a queen with a swarm has gotten away from the main cluster and finds her way to the farm. It is unlikely, but one way small hobby beekeepers like me get bees is by attracting swarms that have left other hives.

Keeping bees is a quiet and slow task most of the time. It is best when there is no excitement. I am careful not to agitate my bees when working with them and try to minimize disruption of their hives. But for our rural county, yesterday was a big day for beekeepers. Even those of us who did not respond to the accident will have stories to tell for years to come about the morning the bee truck tipped over.