Wanted: the bee killer of Brazoria County.

In the predawn darkness on Saturday, a sheriff’s deputy on patrol in a rural area of southeast Texas noticed flames shooting up from a patch of uninhabited county land.

It was nearly 2 a.m. The deputy pulled up to the fenced area, which he knew enclosed local beekeepers’ hives, and saw that they were on fire. He grabbed an extinguisher from his vehicle, scaled the chain-link fence and smothered the flames.

Then he surveyed the damage, according to an account on Wednesday by Lt. Varon Snelgrove, a spokesman for the county sheriff’s office. Most of the 20 hives, once thriving with bees that had nurtured mature colonies, were incinerated, but some had been tossed into a pond or toppled over. About 600,000 bees were dead, according to the Brazoria County Beekeepers Association.

“I was just in shock that somebody would actually do that,” said Steven Brackman, the president of the organization, whose 300 beekeepers make up one of 50 such groups in the state. “That’s what we don’t understand. Three years they were there, and most neighbors know about it.”