Hilton Head honeybees on own Hurricane Matthew evacuation plan

Even honeybees will evacuate Hilton Head Island for Hurricane Matthew — if they get a mind to.

David Arnal, who keeps 75 beehives around the island, was moving his “seed stock” Russian bees to higher ground Thursday morning at his home on Marshland Road.

But all his bees will be riding out the hurricane on Hilton Head.

“Bees have made it through hurricanes for millenia,” he said. “They’ll be OK, except for flooding.”

If the wind knocks over a hive, the bees stay put, said Arnal, a local and national leader in bee preservation.

But if water comes in the hive, the bees will launch their own evacuation plan.

They head out, and are unlikely to return, Arnal said.

“They were fine through (Tropical Storm) Hermine (last month),” he said.

But last year during extraordinarily high “king” tides, he lost 10 hives.

The bees evacuated.

Arnal is president of the Beaufort-Jasper Beekeepers’ Association, which includes 70 beekeepers. He is a master beekeeper and founder of the Bees Across America. Its website said it is “working to restore bees to their proper place in nature as ambassadors of healthy and safe environments for all creatures — including us.”

He has been keeping bees since 1988. He said there were few beekeepers in the area when he started keeping them on Hilton Head in 1993.

Moving the bees can do more harm than good, he said. It’s not a great option. The bees could be stuck for hours in an 80-degree trailer, he said. And he has too many trailer loads to evacuate them all.

So he moved his USDA-bred Siberian seed stock for next year from a place with an elevation of 3 feet above sea level to 12 feet. And then he and his family was headed for the hills.

This story was originally published October 6, 2016 at 12:51 PM with the headline "Hilton Head honeybees on own Hurricane Matthew evacuation plan."