September 22, 2014
Coastal SC

Twenty five years ago this morning I stepped out into a new world. During 
the night, Hurricane Hugo had shredded our beautiful trees, and brought many 
down. The day before, I had intuitively moved my two trucks and motorcycle 
from their normal parking spaces under trees, and all three would have been 
crushed in their normal spots. I was relieved for that, but began to cry as 
I looked around to see the destruction.

Roofs were peeled off, cars were crushed, and debris was everywhere. One 
split tree had poked a hole right through my roof, but the building had 
stood.

The aftermath was almost worse than the storm, but the worst yet was still 
to come for me - and it was a man-made disaster.

Without power, a lot of food spoiled. One guy set up a grill on the sidewalk 
downtown and cooked up all the meat in his freezer to serve to anyone who 
came by. There was some looting, but it was quickly stopped by armed 
citizens.

Stinking, rotten food was stacked up along the roadsides, together with 
limbs and other debris in huge mounds. The smell of death was everywhere, as 
many animals had been crushed by falling trees. Also, the green leaves blown 
into the rivers caused a fish kill that also stunk.
In fact the smell is the most vivid memory I have. I believe every sewer 
vent pipe acted as an atomizer in those winds and spewed out raw sewage all 
over everything.

I had a good stock of canned food, so I did not lack for food - just a way 
to cook it. And the stock quickly disappeared, as there were neighbors who 
did not have a good stock of non-perishable food.

Another good thing I did before the storm was to buy an extra bar and chain 
for my saw, as well as stock up on gas and oil. For a long time, gasoline 
was unavailable. But that chain saw hardly had a chance to cool off, for the 
next few weeks. After cleaning up the neighborhood of the fallen trees, I 
then had to cut my way to all my bees - though fields that had turned to 
mire.

Actually the bees had not fared too badly. I had 1300 hives, mostly out on 
farms for fall pollination. I lost 22 on Winyah bay from the storm surge. 
(Some kind, anonymous boater later rescued the floating and washed up bee 
equipment from around the bay and brought it back to where the bees had 
been.)

A few hives were crushed by falling trees; more were upturned or lost covers 
and were drowned or robbed out by yellow jackets. I figured the storm itself 
cost me less than 100 hives. The storm may have helped the survivors, as the 
woods were opened up, and we had a huge flush of goldenrod bloom in October.

The real disaster for the farmers and me, was yet to come. The state began a 
massive aerial mosquito spraying program in October. And much of this was 
done, in violation of the label, on goldenrod and other fall flowers that 
the bees were intensely foraging. Rather than obey the labels they told 
beekeepers to protect the bees! Every day I tried to find out where the 
planes would be, and often got false information. Some days they sprayed 
locations that they had not marked for sprays. On a given day, they often 
sprayed several spots where I had bees - and I could not get to them anyway, 
because of fallen trees or mud.

Every time I did get to the locations, I was sickened by the smell of the 
dead bees. Hives that had been roaring strong had only handfuls of 
survivors - and they were too weak to defend their winter stores from the 
yellow jackets. For the next couple months, I was in salvage mode.

Combining 3-4 hives to try to get up to sufficient strength to survive 
winter, I fed them as heavily as I could afford, trying desperately to keep 
my operation going. All my bees except for about 100 were in areas affected 
by the spraying.

By spring, I had about 350 hives left - and the majority of them were too 
weak to make splits. Normally a strong hive is like a cow - in the spring it 
will give you a calf or two - and this is the way beekeepers survive. But 
the only strong hives I had left were those that were outside the spray 
area. From this hundred, I made 300. That was a drop in the bucket to 
fulfill my spring pollination contracts.

I bought as many bees as my credit would stand, out of Georgia. I took all 
the early pollination money from fruit to buy bees. Now it's not wise to 
take current income for capital expenses, but I had no choice, if I wanted 
to honor my pollination commitments to the farmers.

I was not able to fill all my bee equipment, and the comb that was 
unoccupied was eaten up by wax worms - another major blow. You have to keep 
bees in your equipment, or you lose it. I was never able to fully recover 
from the disaster. And there was no help from anyone, except a little from 
the Salvation Army to help repair bee equipment.

My bees were not the only losses. It was five years before I began to see 
significant numbers of bumble bees again. Other wild bees were also wiped 
out. I tried to call this to the attention of the authorities. They didn't 
even want to look. Our state bee man was no help at all.

In the following couple years, I saw many cases of small farmers, who had 
always (usually unknowingly) relied on wild bees for pollination, see total 
crop failures. There were whole fields of watermelons without a single 
marketable fruit in the field. The fruit was small, misshapen, often even 
shriveled. And the small farmers generally didn't even know why this was 
happening.

There's a general but rather dim awareness that bees are needed for 
pollination, but not a full understanding that MANY bees are needed. Most 
people think that a bee goes to the blossom, and then it's pollinated. Most 
folks don't realize that a watermelon blossom needs about a thousand grains 
of viable pollen, evenly spread across the three lobes of the flower stigma. 
This is not accomplished in one bee visit; it takes MANY visits.

When too few grains of pollen are delivered, the melon may abort, or grow 
into a deformed and unsaleable fruit. This is true for all multi-seeded 
fruits. So squash, cucumbers, and cantaloupes all took a hard hit. I know of 
at least one farm bankruptcy caused by these failed crops, and I'm sure 
there were others.

So the memory of Hugo is a sad time for me. The storm was bad enough, but it 
was compounded many times over by the human-caused disaster that followed. 
Still there are many people that don't understand this.

Today we are losing our bees. The hardest hit are the wild, native bees, 
because they have no human protectors and few who care; fewer still who 
really understand. Loss of habitat is a factor; new diseases and parasites 
are factors; but the biggest and most persistent factor is pesticides.

The question still remains: If we continue on our current path, who will 
feed our grandchildren?

Dave Green
Retired pollination contractor 

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