REHOBOTH – The state Department of Agricultural Resources was in Rehoboth Friday investigating a massive bee kill, said Wayne Andrews of the Bristol County Beekeepers Association.

“It’s probably the biggest bee kill I’ve seen in my entire career,” said Andrews, a Dighton resident and retired superintendent of the Bristol County Mosquito Control Project.

Andrews said a member of the Bristol County Beekeepers Association who lives on Carpenter Street started noticing his bees were dying Wednesday afternoon.

By Thursday morning when Andrews stopped by the hive of 70,000 to 80,000 bees had been almost entirely wiped out. He estimated that 50,000 or more bees had been poisoned in some fashion.

Andrews said he called in the state Department of Agricultural Resources, which sent an apiary inspector over Friday morning. The inspector took some samples to test for pesticides in the agency’s chemistry lab to try to determine the culprit.

Andrews said bees can fly as far as three or four miles in search of food and water but he suspects the Rehoboth bees consumed the poison closer to home, likely no more than a mile away.

“The inspector and I recommended he box it up and not use the equipment. It’s all contaminated,” Andrews said.

Andrews said the owner of the bees had been keeping the hive for about three years as a hobby.

Bees are like pets and it’s devastating to watch an entire hive you’ve been nurturing and caring for meticulously decimated in a matter of hours, Andrews said.

“To a beekeeper, it’s like sticking a knife in your heart,” said fellow Bristol County Beekeepers Association member Marcie Taylor of Dighton.

Andrews said the way a hive works is that a small number of bees go out and gather food and water for the entire group. They transport it back by storing food in sacs on their bodies and water in their stomachs.

Those bees – as many as a thousand or as few as dozens – apparently consumed something poisonous and then brought that poisoned pollen, nectar or water back to share with the rest of the hive, he said.

Or the bees could have been directly sprayed with pesticides while they were out and about collecting food and water, he said.

Andrews is no stranger to bee kills. Several years ago some of his bees got hit with pesticides from a nearby corn farmer, he said. He lost several thousand bees from three hives but not the entire hives.

In his case, the pesticides were so strong the bees never made it back to his hives to spread the poison, he said.

That was bad enough but nowhere near the damage he witnessed on Carpenter Street Thursday, he said.

It was hard to look at the carpet of poisoned bees who so recently had been flying around, productive and full of life, Andrews said.

“He used to watch them everyday from a chair. He can’t do that anymore,” Andrews said of the Rehoboth beekeeper.

Andrews said when he ran Bristol County Mosquito Control he proved that pest control doesn’t have to mean killing bees.

“We had the greenest program in the country,” he said.

Even aerial spraying can be done in a way that is safe and effective, he said. It has to be done at the right time of day, using the right chemicals, droplet size and calibration.

“The takeaway message is for people to be careful with pesticides and careful what they spray. These things are dangerous to pollinators,” Andrews said.