Honey bees without hive, queen 'doomed' after wreck

NEWARK, Del. — Several hundred hives of honey bees that survived intact when a truck carrying them overturned Tuesday on a freeway ramp near here were reloaded Wednesday night and sent on their way to blueberry fields in Maine, the shipment owner said.

Steven Eisele, owner of Pollination US Inc. in Felda, Fla., said a company representative retrieved the surviving insects — about half of the 16 to 20 million bees that escaped 460 crated hives — from a holding area.

"I've never had an interstate issue with bees, and I've been shipping bees for over 20 years," he said. "We ship at least 20 semi loads a year."

Adolpho Guerra, 55, a contract shipper from Miami, was at the wheel of the tractor trailer about 6:10 p.m. ET Tuesday when it rolled over onto a guardrail while navigating an Interstate 95 on ramp. Guerra and two Florida men in their 20s riding with him each suffered 50 to 100 bee stings and were treated at Christiana Hospital, state police spokesman Sgt. Paul Shavack said.

Guerra was cited for having an unsafe load.

The accident shut the roadway for about 13 hours as emergency responders activated the state's "honey bee swarm removal plan" for the first time since it was created 19 years ago, drawing local beekeepers and handlers to the scene, Shavack said.

Bee experts from Delaware and New Jersey coordinated with state troopers and firefighters to disperse and incapacitate the swarms with water spray.

To recover a hive, beekeepers needed to find the queen — which does not fly — and place it in a box.

If a queen is reinstated, the other bees will return to their colony, said beekeeper Kate Hackett, who happened upon the accident on her way to a beekeepers' meeting at the University of Delaware.

"There's kind of a window of opportunity," of about 36 to 48 hours to recover the swarming bees, she said. Otherwise, the chemical cues that keep a hive together begin to disappear.

Bees without a queen won't survive long, said bee researcher Deborah Delaney, an assistant professor at the University of Delaware in the College of Agriculture and Natural Resources.

"They're doomed anyway" without their queen, she said. They won't join another hive and with their own hive damaged or destroyed, they haven't had time to breed another queen.

By Wednesday morning, digital road signs warned drivers of potential swarms, advising them to shut their car windows as they traveled through the area.

Bees are critical pollinators, especially for fruit growers, and are transported through Delaware on a regular basis.

"It's very difficult on the hive to go through something like this, just as it would be hard on a person to have an accident," Eisele said.

The total value of the truck and cargo was about $250,000, including the bees, the hives and the profit expected from the bees' pollination efforts, he said.

"We're looking at a number less than that because we were able to salvage half of those bees," Eisele said.

Accidents involving live shipments are not rare on Delaware roads:

• This past June, 23 cows died or were euthanized after a double-decker cattle truck overturned near the Port of Wilmington when the driver failed to negotiate a curve on an off ramp from northbound I-495. The trailer turned over onto the guardrail, which pierced its side and many of the cattle.

Several dazed animals wandered onto the highway after the trailer cracked open, and workers hustled to round them up. Some were euthanized at the scene, some died in the trailer. Nineteen survived.

• In June 2005, thousands of chickens — alive and dead — were scattered over the west lanes of Delaware 20 after a load flew off the back of a tractor-trailer just east of Seaford, Del.

That accident happened when the truck driver, who was hauling 13,500 birds to a Perdue plant in Salisbury, Md., swerved to avoid hitting a car that pulled out in front of him.