MASSACRE at FLOWERTOWN

2.5 MILLION DEAD BEES, AND AN UNLIKELY TEST OF PUBLIC HEALTH POWERS

- ERIC BOEHM

MITCH YAWN KNEW something was wrong long before he got to the hives.

“I got a phone call. I was at work—working on an air conditioner. And she was—oh my God, she was just devastated,” he says.

“She” was Juanita Mae Stanley, Yawn’s then-fiancée and co-owner of the Flowertown Bee Farm in Dorchester County, South Carolina. Yawn and Stanley had started the farm a year earlier, with the goal of raising bees to sell to honey makers and hobbyists across the South. So far, they had 46 hives—a modest size, as bee farms go. That means Stanley and Yawn owned somewhere around 2.5 million bees.

On this muggy morning in August 2016, most of them were dead.

It was a firefighter who noticed the dead bees first. Piles of them littered the ground near the firehouse, not far from the meadow near the small lake where Yawn and Stanley had established their apiary. He called Stanley, who called Yawn after seeing the carnage.

“There were just dead bees everywhere,” Yawn recalls. “They were sweeping them up by the panful.”

The bees were dead because, according to court documents, the head of the county’s Mosquito Abatement Division, Clayton “Scott” Gaskins, had ordered a plane to spray deadly insecticides over portions of the county. Gaskins in turn had been directed by the state Department of Health and Environmental Control (DHEC), which had ordered the use of insecticides