He found hives without bees but filled with honey still in the honeycombs. Because yellow jackets pilfering honey in the 20 hives died, he believes someone poisoned the bees.

What he doesn’t know is why someone would kill the bees when bees are already struggling, he said, referring to colony collapse disorder, in which worker bees in a colony disappear, a phenomenon not understood by researchers.

“There’s other things that would have hurt a lot less,” Depew said. “These guys we need to try to help along as much as possible because we’ve almost reached the tipping point.”

Read more here from the Peninsula Daily News: Sequim Bee Farm hives vandalized; no leads so far