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Apiary owners thankful fire wasn't worse
[October 10, 2009]

Apiary owners thankful fire wasn't worse


Oct 10, 2009 (The Reporter - McClatchy-Tribune Information Services via COMTEX) -- The day after a fire gutted their commercial apiary business, a family of beekeepers are picking up the pieces.

Shortly after 8:30 p.m. Thursday, a fire ravaged a 25-by-50-foot wooden building on Herst Lane in Dixon, a structure which was at the center of Noble Apiaries beekeeping and honey-processing business.

Jackie Hofland -- who runs the family business with her husband, Phil, his parents, Gary and Ellen, and Phil's brother, Mark -- had just gotten off the phone with her husband when she heard a "pop," followed by several more "pops." Looking out the window, she saw flames and immediately called Phil and screamed, "The shop's on fire," while simultaneously dialing 911 on a land line.



"It probably would have been 20 minutes later if I hadn't heard the pops," Hofland said. "God was watching over us. It could have been a lot worse." Inside the shop were several 55-gallon drums of honey, hundreds of small jars of honey, buckets of bee pollen and a $40,000 CNC router, used to make racks for their special "bee boxes." Noble Apiaries also specializes in queen bees and packaged bees for sale.

Phil Hofland was standing among the charred remains Friday morning, lamenting the loss of the router and honey product but maintaining a positive outlook. No bees were harmed in the fire.


"You think it's never going to happen to you, but you've got to keep plodding along," Hofland said. "Thankfully, nobody got hurt." Hofland said that, luckily, a Delta breeze swept through Thursday evening, fanning flames away from the family's home, which sits just a half-dozen paces away.

He thinks it's possible that a pile of sawdust spontaneously combusted inside the building, sparking the fire. Barrels of sawdust remained smoldering outside Friday, remnants of the work he had been putting into making the specialized "bee boxes" used for shipping and raising their queen bees.

The damage to the property is estimated to be $100,000. Only a fraction of the honey, pollen and honeycomb that would normally be sold to specialty honey retailers could be salvaged.

His advice to fellow beekeepers was to be more careful than he was and to keep their sawdust cleaned up.

"Be more fastidious than I was," Hofland said. "We lost a lot, but we could have lost a lot more." To see more of The Reporter, or to subscribe to the newspaper, go to http://www.thereporter.com. Copyright (c) 2009, The Reporter, Vacaville, Calif.

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