Today is the anniversary of the Atlanta flood

Today is the anniversary of the Atlanta flood (and thus the Blue Heron flood).  Last year on this day seven hives floated down Nancy Creek in the swollen flood waters and 300,000 to 450,000 bees were killed in seven wet hive topples.

(photo taken on Sept 22, 2009)


We lost bees and equipment which floated down the creek.

Today the Atlanta Journal published pictures of what various area locations looked like on September 21 last year and what the same location looks like today.

To follow their lead, above you can see the catastrophe of one of the toppled hives.  Below you can see the present day at Blue Heron.  We now have a new high-on-a-hill location for our Blue Heron hives and have kept on keeping on as beekeepers in the apiary there.

(photo taken March 30, 2010 as we installed the nucs)

Ah, we are persistent beekeepers, Julia, Kevin, Peter, and I (the owners of the four hives there).

New Bee Locale for Blue Heron Bee Hives

Seven beehives floated down Nancy Creek in the floods in September, 2009, in Atlanta. We want to start back up but everyone is anxious - both about the possibility of the creek jumping the bank again and the need to have stable hives. Kevin and his brother Pete are getting new bees in March and Julia and I have bees coming at the end of March or in April, so we are all invested, just uncertain.

Today Kevin and Pete set up a new location for the Blue Heron hives. They cleared an area up on a bank, above the area where the highest water was in the flood. They put in these great rock steps to allow easier access.



Then they moved all of our cinder blocks up so that we could envision the new apiary at Blue Heron.



Here are two cinder blocks overlooking Nancy Creek from (this time) high above the water line. The highest flood waters stopped at about the base of the tree you can see on the left.



If you double click on the picture below to enlarge it, you can see the outline of the fence around the community garden and Roswell road off the other side of the hill. Again, we are well above the 500 year flood line. Julia and I walked the trail at Blue Heron and took these pictures so we can dream again of our hives there.

Homes for the Homeless Bees

Today was an amazing day. One of Julia's friends called her from Chastain Park (about a mile from the Blue Heron as the creek flows). She had seen a hive box in the creek over at Chastain. Julia and two friends met there and really got down and dirty.

They pulled hive boxes and hive parts out of Nancy Creek and in effect salvaged whatever they could find.

Then they went to Blue Heron and found another stash of hive stuff cast into the brush on the creek bank by the flood. Julia said there were even bees flying around.

I couldn't get there until 2, so Julia and I met there, suited up and tried to fashion a home for these homeless bees. We called Cindy Bee who said to put together a dry hive box with drawn comb frames and feed honey to the bees in an effort to gather them in one place.

The hardest part was seeing the survivor bees. Julia and I each suited up for fear that in their confusion they would want to sting us, but it was like being in a swarm - the bees had no inclination to sting - they had nothing to protect. We saw a few live bees that were muddy and trying to just move and it was awful to watch. Heart breaking, really.

We did everything Cindy said and the results you can see in the slide show below. Julia took most of these pictures. If you click on the slideshow, you can view it in a larger size:



We'll check in a few days and if the bees are in any organized position to be moved, we'll move them home and combine them with a thriving hive. Cindy said if enough moved in, we could order a queen and start another hive.

This whole event has been so sobering for us as beekeepers. The thought of "here today, gone tomorrow," is not one we have considered often as beekeepers and it made us sad.

A man who works at the Blue Heron headquarters stopped by while we were working:

"We loved having the beehives," he said. "I hope this won't discourage you from putting them here again."

And we talked about the probability of another 100 year flood!

Below is the graph of the level of Nancy Creek - it's remarkable to see the difference in the flood yesterday and the level today:

Tragic Bee Loss at Blue Heron

Atlanta has had torrential rains in the last few days. The Atlanta paper said that two storm systems came together to create this perfect storm that has dropped 12 inches of rain onto some parts of Atlanta in the last 24 hours. The Blue Heron Nature Preserve is located beside Nancy Creek.

The USGS monitor reading as per their webpage at the Blue Heron gauge for Nancy Creek is currently two feet above "Major Flood Stage" of 13 feet. This morning creeks and rivers all over the city jumped their banks. Roads were closed, including the downtown connector because the water made them impassable.



My friend Julia took the two pictures below at Blue Heron around 5:30 today. The sign in the center of the first picture marks the entry to the community gardens and describes who has what plot in the flooded garden to the left of the picture.


Julia took this picture below of the area where our hives were located. To the left of the green tree, you can see something white. We thought at first that this was a hive (because it's where a hive was located) but now we think it's the sign about the bee area that has floated there.



This picture below shows how the area looked from my car at 6:45. You can see that the flood covers the drive into the Preserve. Our hives were located behind the tree with the reddish top. All seven of the hives were swept away by the flood. Julia and I had two of the hives and the rest belonged to nice guys who were just getting started with bees.

I imagine the waters rushed into the front entrance of the hives and drowned the bees before they could abscond, but Julia and I plan to watch the trees in the area for signs of absconded bees hanging in a cluster. We hope that some got out but are not expecting that they did because neither of our hives had a top entrance. If seven hives each had at this time of year around 40,000 bees each, that's 280,000 bees that died last night or this morning.



I put little boxes into this photo where the seven hives were at the Blue Heron Preserve. It was a great place for the bees and we had a good time sharing our hives with beekeepers who came on inspections with us.



More thunderstorms and rain are expected to start between 11 PM and midnight tonight and last through the night. What will tomorrow bring?