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Someone snuck onto the grounds of the Lincolnshire Marriott Resort earlier this month and used pesticides to kill thousands of honeybees, officials said.
Kristin Duncan, the resort’s general manager, said this week that when her executive chef, Pierre Daval, went out to the hives on Nov. 6 to collect that day’s honey, he found five of the 20 hives completely devoid of life and three cans of Raid bug spray lying on the ground.
Whoever sprayed the hives did not damage any of the structures, said Duncan, and she estimated that each of the five hives had between 30,000 and 50,000 bees inside them. She said she had no idea what the person’s motive might have been.
“We were all very disappointed and saddened that someone would make that effort to do this,” Duncan said. “These are not attacking bees. These are bees that are just around to make honey.”
Lincolnshire police said they are investigating the matter but offered no further details.
The colonies began in 2013, and operated under the direction of then-executive chef Joe Plucinski. There may have been up to one million bees in the 20 hives before the attack, Duncan said. The hives are located at the south end of the resort’s vegetable garden — a location purposefully placed a golf cart’s drive away from the resort and the golf course, Duncan said.
Before the attack, the bees produced enough honey to be used in the restaurant’s food and make a few bottles as gifts for guests, with enough left over to sell bottles of it in the resort’s gift shop, Duncan said. Plucinski said in 2013 that his worker bees made a “wildflower” honey blend similar to that found commonly on grocery store shelves.
The 15 hives that remain are still churning out honey, Duncan said, and she and Daval hope to eventually repopulate the other five hives. The hives and garden have no fence around them, a fact that she said is now up for discussion.
“We obviously need to consider that,” Duncan said.
University of Illinois Professor Gene Robinson, who studies honeybees, said he had heard of rare cases of bee poisonings. He said that, for most bee owners, putting up a fence seems counterintuitive, because most people know better than to go near a beehive. But, he said, the insects are actually quite vulnerable at night.
“That would be when maximum damage is inflicted,” Robinson said.
That’s for a pair of reasons, he said. The bees would all be together, resting for the next day’s work, and honey bees do not see well at night, because flowers only produce pollen and nectar during the day.
“They’re working flower hours,” Robinson added.
A Nov. 17 story about an attack on honeybees in Lincolnshire misstated the total number of beehives at the Marriott Resort as well as the total number that were attacked. There are 20 hives, and five were attacked. Additionally, the story misused the term “colony.” A colony is a group of bees living in one hive, and a group of them together should have been referred to as colonies, hives, or an apiary. Pioneer Press regrets the errors.
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