California Floods Sting Washington Beekeepers

The wall of water that gushed into California’s Tuolumne River Valley in January devastated Washington state beekeepers whose honeybees were pollinating the almond crop there.

Thousands of beehives were submerged in California--along with homes, roads, orchards and vineyards--when officials were forced to open the Don Pedro Dam floodgates, releasing churning water into the valley about 130 miles east of San Francisco.

Of the about 30,000 hives drowned statewide in California, up to a third belonged to Washington beekeepers. Each hive--a wooden box serving as home to as many as 50,000 bees--is worth $100, which means Washington’s mostly small, family-owned beekeeping businesses may have lost up to $1 million total.

About half those losses were sustained by four Yakima-area beekeepers.

Ray Temple of Yakima arrived in California a week after the Jan. 2 flood to find 500 of his hives destroyed. He was able to recoup some of his losses by salvaging the bees’ boxes. He returned to Yakima recently from Modesto, where he sanitized the boxes and set his surviving colonies into blooming almond orchards. He’ll retrieve them this month.

“I stood out there and cried the first day,” Temple said. “There was $40,000 sitting out there in a muddy yard.”

Temple said he thought his bees were safe because they were placed on a rock bluff 38 feet above the valley’s floor, but the water rose enough to lift the bees’ boxes and scatter them across an area about the size of two football fields.

Terry Bounds of Toppenish believes his $115,000 worth of bees wound up in San Francisco Bay. When he arrived in California a day after the deluge, the land where his colonies had been--three-quarters of a mile from the Tuolumne River--was covered by four feet of water.

“I could hardly find anything to salvage,” said Bounds, who has raised bees for 24 years.

With 60% of his resources gone, the second-generation beekeeper said he is considering closing shop.