He’s building hives to help beekeepers rebuild their colonies lost to Helene

Houses were floating down rivers in videos on John Pledger’s phone as Helene moved through the North Carolina mountains.

He watched at his home in Asheboro and wondered how he could help.

“Then I saw a beehive go by and I thought, ‘Hey, that’s what I can do.’”

Pledger, 69, had a career as an industrial chemist, first in textiles, then furniture. When those went overseas in the 1980s and ’90s he shifted to making and selling beekeeping supplies, turning his hobby into Triad Bee Supply.

One of Pledger’s specialties is building hives and frames — what beekeepers call woodware — from cypress harvested in North and South Carolina. He’s won awards for his designs and has customers so devoted they drive in from out of state.

Since Helene, he’s built more than 60 hives to donate to small-scale hobbyist beekeepers in the mountains who lost all of theirs. Most of the destroyed hives were taken by flooding because they had been placed between people’s houses and a river or creek that could provide water for the bees.

“The ones that didn’t get washed away or crushed by trees were killed by the pollution in the flood water,” Pledger said. They would drink from the streams, tainted with hydrocarbons, and bring the water back to the hive, killing the other bees, Pledger says.

Pledger will be delivering hives through the winter. Come spring, he’ll bring the bees.

Helene hit at a time when honeybees had been doing a bit better after some years of hardship, Pledger says, plagued by different pests that caused widespread losses.

Recently, Pledger has set up an option on his company’s website for people to support the work through donations, and has hired some extra help to build the hives.

Replacing hives helps hobbyist beekeepers who can make extra money selling honey but can’t afford right now to buy new woodware when they have so many other needs. Replenishing the lost hives also will help maintain pollinators, benefiting the environment.

Pledger talks about honeybees the way some people talk about emotional-support dogs.

“Beekeeping is addicting, worse than any drug you can imagine,” he said. “They’re calming. A lot of military folks who have come back with PTSD have found that working in beehives is calming. You may be highly stressed, and then you go out there and you are forced to relax. You have to let go of the stress,” or risk getting stung.

Pledger, who has lost hives of his own in the past, knows the sadness of having a colony wiped out.

“If you work with bees, you get accustomed to the sound of the bees flying around you,” he said. “And when they’re not flying around you, you feel like you’re about to fall off the edge of the Earth because the sound is not there.”