Tropical Storm Helene snapped 60-foot tree in Port Royal. Then bees started swarming

At 2:45 a.m. Friday, Port Royal’s Mark Sutton heard a bang as winds from Tropical Storm Helene roared through the town of 16,000 residents. Sutton jumped and looked out the window in time to see a 60-foot-tall pine tree crash down on his 12-by-24-foot utility shed.

“It got clobbered,” Sutton said of the structure, which is a total loss.

But Sutton might get something sweet out of his sour run-in with a tropical storm whose herculean winds turned the Beaufort River and Battery Creek angry and toppled trees by the dozens.

The big pine that crashed onto this property, it turns out, was filled with thousands of honey bees. And now, Mike Sutton, Mark’s twin brother, plans to contact a beekeeper to see if the bees — and their honey — can be saved.

“If they can get the queen, they can lure the rest to the box and relocate them and get the honey,” Mark Sutton said.

As of 1:30 p.m. Friday, thousands of bees continued to stick close to the toppled nest.

“I think I can see the honey comb in there,” Sutton said. “They are swarming all around it. I can see them out the window.”

It was too dark to see the swarm early Friday morning when the winds blew the tree down. “I didn’t know they were there until the next morning,” Sutton said.

Sutton has lived in the area all his life and through countless hurricanes and tropical storms.

But Helene, a storm that was downgraded Friday to a tropical storm, rattled him.

“It was actually pretty scary,” Sutton said.

Sutton estimates the wind was gusting more than 65 mph at the time.

The high winds also snapped a cherry tree in his backyard. “It snapped off up high, like severe wind would do,” he said.

He suspects the pine tree that came down had a weak spot because of a cavity inside where the honey bees were living and therefore “twisted like a noodle.”

Downed trees were reported across Port Royal and Beaufort because of high winds from the storm. The storm also damaged the waterfronts of both communities. A section of the boardwalk and Port Royal washed away. And several boats moored at the Beaufort marina ended up on the shore of the Beaufort River.

Sutton, a senior construction manager and architect for Beaufort County, is moving into a new house at the 1703 Edinburgh Ave. He had brought the utility shed, where he planned to store his tools, with him as part of the move. It wasn’t even in its final location before the tree squished it like a bug. “I waited too long,” he said.

Although utility building was destroyed, a leather couch and chair inside it went undamaged. And the tree missed his house by about 20 feet.

This story was originally published September 27, 2024 at 2:32 PM.

Karl Puckett

The Island Packet

843-256-3420

Karl Puckett covers the city of Beaufort, town of Port Royal and other communities north of the Broad River for The Beaufort Gazette and Island Packet. The Minnesota native also has worked at newspapers in his home state, Alaska, Wisconsin and Montana.