May 23, 2003
By Ross Dolan - Staff Writer - Castlerock Daily Star
Bears and bees faced each other in court yesterday and nobody won – yet.
A case that was to run a single day has grown both in length and possible precedent-setting importance.
Local beekeeper Paul Hendricks was the complainant in yesterday's action against the Colorado Division of Wildlife (DOW) in County Court with Judge Grafton Biddle presiding.
At close of business Thursday the state had cross-examined all witnesses for Hendricks' side of the case and Assistant Attorney General Tim Monahan was ready to present the DOW's side of the matter.
Hendricks is suing the DOW for nearly $30,000, the amount he claims he lost to bear damage during 2001.
That amount includes lost honey revenues, stress that contributed to the winterkill of many of his bee colonies and repayment for time he spent erecting and maintaining electric fences to keep bears from his various apiaries or bee yards.
Hendricks said at one point he owned 700 bee hives, but he now owns about 150 and is rebuilding his business.
Hendricks' attorney Anne McGihon of McGihon Associates, a Denver law firm, spent the entire morning laying groundwork for Hendricks' case.
The basics included taking the testimony of Boulder beekeeper Tom Theobald.
By mid-day Monahan said he was getting concerned about the trial's pace. McGihon assured him that the trial's pace would quicken, yet by days end much remained to be done. Judge Biddle assured Monahan he would have sufficient time to fully present his case
Many others see this as far more than a civil damages case. Hendricks and other beekeepers claim that the losses they are suffering are a direct result of DOW decision to suspend the spring bear hunt, a policy that began with the suspension of the first hunt in 1992.
Before that time, claim Hendricks and his allies, problems between bears and bees were virtually non-existent; and that with the halt of the bear harvest the situation has grown worse.
Tom Theobald, owner Niwot Honey Farms and president of the Boulder Beekeepers Association said, "The DOW characterizes the bear problem as the result of spring freeze and drought conditions," both of which decimated bear feeding habitat.
"The DOW also says we've got a stable bear population and I say, based on what? It's all just conjecture except for one random sampling of the bear population."
He adds that a more practical indicator of the growth of bear numbers might be increasing road-kill statistics.
"Until 1992 under nine bears a year were killed on state roads," said Theobald, "last year that number was 114 – that's a rise of 1,200 percent."
He also testified that the pre-'92 spring bear harvest accounted for anywhere from 72 percent to 88 percent of the bears taken by hunters in a given year.
The DOW is not insensitive to the needs of the beekeepers. They supply beekeepers with electric fence systems and batteries to power those systems.
But Hendricks said yesterday that the fences don't always work as they should; that charging systems are inadequate to the task. Bears pushed through his fences several times, he said, either ignoring the electric jolt or merely pushing through fences that weren't properly charged.
Hendricks is alleging that the balky equipment didn't begin to work correctly until new systems with large, deep-cycle batteries were supplied. The older systems used smaller batteries about the size used by motorcycles.
Hendricks is asking the DOW to repay him for more than 160 non-productive hours he spent dealing with bear matters. Theobald testified against the quality of the fencing equipment on Thursday.
The DOW, on the other hand, is charging that Hendricks just didn't pursue bear mitigation diligently or use the equipment it supplied properly. That part of the case will be further developed today.
Lyle Johnston of Rocky Ford, president of the American Honey Producers Association also testified on Hendricks' behalf on Thursday. He said honey producers are just beginning to recover from a series of ecological and economic disasters that nearly destroyed the industry.
Both China and Argentina dumped cheap honey on U.S. markets as late as 2001, a practice that drove bulk honey prices as low as 39 cents a pound, he said.
"Even back in 1974 we were getting as much as 49 cents a pound," said Johnston, who said it cost national honey producers about a $1 million to win the honey-dumping suit and that it's taking about $.5 million to maintain that protected status.
With recently enacted protective tariffs, U.S. honey producers have seen wholesale prices rise to about $1.50 a pound.
But the question at hand on Thursday was bears.
"We've even had bear problems in Rocky Ford," said Johnston, who uses his bees to pollinate the area's important melon crop.
"We've seen bears as far east as Las Animas which is about 80 miles east of Pueblo and about 120 miles from the mountains," he said.
"I'm a third generation beekeeper and my family has been running bees in Colorado since 1908 and we never thought about bears until two years after they banned the spring bear hunt in 1992.
"We started having our first problems in '94 and '95. Before that our biggest problem was rattlesnakes."
Johnston said that lost and bear-damaged beehives themselves should be a good gauge of bear overpopulation and said Colorado beehives have been "sacrificial lambs" to DOW policy. "The DOW has done a horrible job of managing wildlife," he said.
As he stepped into the sunlight outside the Robert A. Christensen Justice Center Hendricks' face brightened as he saw blossoming trees filled with working bees.
"Look at all those bees," he said. "Those are probably my bees from my hives from just over the hill."
Read the trial results here.
