Science
A Quarter-Billion Dollars for Defamation: Inside Greenpeace’s Huge Loss
When the environmental group Greenpeace lost a nearly $670 million verdict this month over its role in oil pipeline protests, a quarter-billion dollars of the damages were awarded not for the actual demonstrations, but for defaming the pipeline’s owner.
The costly verdict has raised alarm among activist organizations as well as some First Amendment experts, who said the lawsuit and damage awards could deter free speech far beyond the environmental movement.
The verdict “will send a chill down the spine of any nonprofit who wants to get involved in any political protest,” said David D. Cole, a professor at Georgetown Law and former national legal director of the American Civil Liberties Union. “If you’re the Sierra Club, or the N.A.A.C.P., or the N.R.A., or an anti-abortion group, you’re going to be very worried.”
The lawsuit, filed by Energy Transfer in 2019, accused Greenpeace of masterminding an “unlawful and violent scheme” to harm the company’s finances, employees and infrastructure and to block the construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline. Greenpeace countered that it had promoted peaceful protest and had played only a minor role in the demonstrations, which were led by the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe over concerns about its ancestral land and water supply.
A key part of Energy Transfer’s case relied on defamation claims. For example, the jury found that Greenpeace defamed the company by saying it had “damaged at least 380 sacred and cultural sites” during pipeline work, the first of nine statements found defamatory.
Greenpeace called Energy Transfer’s lawsuit an attempt to muzzle the company’s critics. “This case should alarm everyone, no matter their political inclinations,” said Sushma Raman, interim executive director of Greenpeace USA. “We should all be concerned about the future of the First Amendment.”
Greenpeace has said it will appeal to the Supreme Court in North Dakota, the state where the trial was held. Free-speech issues are widely expected to figure prominently in that filing.
But Greenpeace was not the only party invoking the First Amendment.
Upon leaving the courtroom, the lead lawyer for Energy Transfer, Trey Cox of Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher, called the verdict “a powerful affirmation” of the First Amendment. “Peaceful protest is an inherent American right,” he said. “However, violent and destructive protest is unlawful and unacceptable.”
Vicki Granado, a spokeswoman for Energy Transfer, described the verdict as “a win for all law-abiding Americans who understand the difference between the right to free speech and breaking the law.”
The clashing comments shine a light on a central tension in the debate: Where do you draw the line between peaceful protest and unlawful activity?
“If people are engaged in non-expressive conduct, like vandalism, like impeding roadways such that cars and passers-by can’t use those roadways, the First Amendment is not going to protect that,” said JT Morris, a senior supervising attorney at the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, a nonprofit that defends free speech across the ideological spectrum. “But peaceful protest, criticism of companies on matters of public concern, those are all protected.”
The verdict landed in the midst of a larger debate over the limits of free speech. President Trump has accused news outlets of defaming him, and he has been found liable for defamation himself. His administration has targeted law firms he perceives as enemies, as well as international students deemed too critical of Israel or of U.S. foreign policy. Conservatives have accused social media platforms of suppressing free speech and have vowed to stop what they call online censorship.
“There’s nothing in this particular political climate that’s shocking anymore,” said Jack Weinberg, who in the 1960s was a prominent free-speech activist and later worked for Greenpeace. (He’s also known for the phrase “Don’t trust anyone over 30,” although that’s not exactly how he said it.) “But it’s wrong,” he said of the verdict, “and it will have profound consequences.”
There has long been a high bar for defamation lawsuits in the United States.
The First Amendment protects free speech and the right to protest, and a landmark 1964 Supreme Court decision, New York Times v. Sullivan, strengthened those protections. To prevail in a defamation suit, a public figure must prove that the statement was false and was made with “actual malice,” meaning knowledge that the statement was false, or reckless disregard for its veracity.
Carl W. Tobias, a professor at the University of Richmond School of Law, said that ruling intentionally raised the bar to win a defamation suit. “It’s extreme,” he said. “It’s meant to be.”
Eugene Volokh, a senior fellow at the Hoover Institute at Stanford University, pointed to the history of that famous case. It concerned a 1960 ad in The Times that described police actions against civil rights demonstrators in Alabama as “an unprecedented wave of terror.”
A police official sued the paper and won. But the Supreme Court overturned the verdict. The court ruled that protecting such speech was necessary, even if it contained errors, in order to ensure robust public debate.
In a Greenpeace appeal, Mr. Volokh said, the evidence demonstrating whether Greenpeace’s statements were true or false would be crucial in evaluating the verdict, as would the question of whether Greenpeace’s statements were constitutionally protected expressions of opinion.
Other issues that loom: What was permitted to be entered into evidence in the first place, and whether the instructions to the jury were sufficient. Then, he said, if the statements are found to be clearly false, is there enough evidence to show that Greenpeace engaged in “reckless falsehood, acts of so-called actual malice?”
Any award for defamation chills free speech, Mr. Volokh added, whether against Greenpeace or against the Infowars host Alex Jones, who was found liable for more than $1 billion over his false statements about the murder of children at the Sandy Hook school shooting.
In the Greenpeace case, the nine statements found by the jury to be defamatory referred to Energy Transfer and its subsidiary Dakota Access. One statement said that Dakota Access personnel had “deliberately desecrated burial grounds.” Another said that protesters had been met with “extreme violence, such as the use of water cannons, pepper spray, concussion grenades, Tasers, LRADs (Long Range Acoustic Devices) and dogs, from local and national law enforcement, and Energy Transfer partners and their private security.”
Other statements were more general: “For months, the Standing Rock Sioux have been resisting the construction of a pipeline through their tribal land and waters that would carry oil from North Dakota’s fracking fields to Illinois.”
The protests unfolded over months, from mid-2016 to early 2017, attracting tens of thousands of people from around the world, and were widely documented by news crews and on social media.
Janet Alkire, chairwoman of the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe, argued that Greenpeace’s statements were true and not defamatory. “Energy Transfer’s false and self-serving narrative that Greenpeace manipulated Standing Rock into protesting DAPL is patronizing and disrespectful to our people,” she said in a statement, using an abbreviation for the Dakota Access Pipeline.
She said that “scenes of guard dogs menacing tribal members” were publicly available “on the news and on the internet.”
Videos of the incidents in question weren’t shown at the trial. Everett Jack Jr. of the firm Davis, Wright Tremaine, the main lawyer for Greenpeace, declined to discuss why.
The 1,172-mile pipeline, priced at $3.7 billion when announced, has been operating since 2017. It carries crude oil from North Dakota to Illinois.
During the trial, some arguments hinged on whether the pipeline crossed Standing Rock’s land, or how to define tribal land. The pipeline is just outside the borders of the reservation but crosses what the tribe calls unceded land that it had never agreed to give up.
There was also debate about whether tribal burial grounds were harmed during construction. Experts working for the tribe found that was the case, but experts brought in by Energy Transfer did not.
Even if a statement was false, Mr. Cole said, a defendant cannot be held liable if they had a basis for believing it. He also predicted that the penalty would likely be reduced on appeal if not overturned.
Martin Garbus, a veteran First Amendment lawyer, led a delegation of lawyers to North Dakota to observe the trial, who have said that the jury was biased against the defendants and that the trial should have been moved to another county. He expressed concern that an appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court could be used to overturn Times v. Sullivan. He noted that Justice Clarence Thomas has called for the Supreme Court to reconsider that case.
But Mr. Cole, Mr. Tobias and other experts said they did not expect the court to reconsider Times v. Sullivan.
Greenpeace has said previously that the size of the damages could force the organization to shut down its U.S. operations.
The lawsuit named three Greenpeace entities, but it centered on the actions of Greenpeace Inc., based in Washington, which organizes campaigns and protests in the United States and was found liable for more than $400 million.
A second organization, Greenpeace Fund, a fund-raising arm, was found liable for about $130 million. A third group, Greenpeace International, based in Amsterdam, was found liable for the same amount. That group said its only involvement was signing a letter, along with several hundred other signatories, calling on banks to halt loans for the pipeline.
Earlier this year, Greenpeace International filed a countersuit in the Netherlands against Energy Transfer. That lawsuit was brought under a European Union directive designed to fight what are known as SLAPP suits, or strategic lawsuits against public participation — legal actions designed to stifle critics. (State law in North Dakota, where Energy Transfer brought its case against Greenpeace, doesn’t have anti-SLAPP provisions.)
The next hearing in the Netherlands case is in July.
With evacuation shelters reaching capacity as more than 40,000 people were asked to leave their homes, officials laboring to prevent an explosion at a crippled chemical tank in Garden Grove reported tentative progress Sunday in ending the crisis.
TJ McGovern, interim fire chief for the Orange County Fire Authority, said firefighters had discovered what appeared to be a potential crack on the tank’s surface that could be alleviating some of the pressure resulting from the chemical reaction inside.
If they are right, it would make a catastrophic explosion or an uncontrollable leak less likely.
“With this new information, it could change our trajectory and our strategy to this event,” McGovern said. “This was a step in a right direction, and there’s going to be a lot more coming shortly.”
Enzo Soriano, 7, left, Vitto Soriano, 11, center, and Santiago Soriano, 16, right, look at their phones while camping outside the Freedom Hall shelter on Sunday in Garden Grove.
(Kayla Bartkowski/Los Angeles Times)
Lee Zeldin, U.S. Environmental Protection Agency administrator, said the new development was promising.
“I’m being told this morning that the most likely scenario is one of a low volume release, where the local authorities are going to be able to monitor, neutralize and contain the threat,” he said during a Sunday morning appearance on CNN‘s “State of the Union.”
McGovern gave no indication as to when the 40,000 people who had been forced from their homes — many into shelters — due to evacuation orders would be allowed to return.
“We know you’re out of your homes. We want to get you back,” he said. “But we cannot do that until it’s deemed safe.”
The positive note was a welcome development in a situation that has left much of Orange County on edge since Thursday.
The crisis began when the Orange County Fire Authority responded to reports of a hazardous materials incident at GKN Aerospace on Western Avenue in Garden Grove. Officials found a tank containing 7,000 gallons of a toxic chemical called methyl methacrylate, or MMA, stored in liquid form that was in danger of exploding due to a buildup of pressure from a potential runaway chemical reaction.
Methyl methacrylate is used to make plastics. While the polymer itself isn’t toxic, its liquid MMA predecessor is. If it gets into the air, it can harm people at high concentrations and through chronic or extended exposure.
The primary solution would have been to pump a neutralizing agent into the problem tank, quenching it and making it no longer explosive, but the necessary valve clogged, leaving no way to get the neutralizing agent into the tank.
Officials feared that there were only two possible outcomes: a devastating explosion or a devastating leak.
A crack in a tank containing a toxic chemical may not sound like a cause for hope, but Elias Picazo, an assistant professor of chemistry at USC, said it might be the best-case scenario.
“If the tank is going to fail, you want it to fail through a crack rather than fail through an explosion,” he said. “With a controlled leak, you can route liquid or gas out of the tank, relieving pressure and buying more time.”
He explained that as material leaks out of the tank, the pressure inside increases more slowly, potentially reaching a safe equilibrium. The leak also depletes the source for a chemical reaction, which is generating heat that, in turn, accelerates the reaction in a process called “thermal runaway.”
An aerial view shows water being sprayed on large storage tanks at the GKN Aerospace facility on Sunday in Garden Grove.
(Kayla Bartkowski/Los Angeles Times)
But the situation remains uncertain, he said. Depending on the size of the crack and the speed of the chemical reaction, it’s possible that the growing pressure within the tank will exceed what can be released through the crack, leading the tank to explode.
“It’s a positive step, but it’s not over,” he said of the new development.
If the failing chemical tank in Orange County does explode, the aerospace plant where it sits and dozens of homes surrounding it could suffer severe damage, according to a map released by authorities Saturday.
Areas within roughly 1,100 feet of the tank would suffer the most severe damage; and beyond that, areas within about 0.3 miles, moderate damage; and beyond that, areas within about 0.4 miles, light damage, from the blast.
The severe blast zone represents “areas where we can expect severe structural damage and significant harm,” said Nick Freeman, an Orange County Fire Authority division chief. There are dozens of homes in that area in a neighborhood of the city of Stanton, including along Santa Rosalia Street, south of Laurelton Avenue and north of Lampson Avenue.
In the moderate blast zone, “we would expect again structural damage and harm to those within that zone,” Freeman said.
The light-damage zone includes Wakeham Elementary School and a Home Depot on the corner of Chapman Avenue and Beach Boulevard. “There, we might see some structural damage, but it would be a little bit more limited,” Freeman said.
Officials have also warned that in the event of an explosion, there could be fire or flash fire in some areas, as well as areas where the chemical cloud would be immediately dangerous to life and health, and a much larger area where the chemical would be smelled, but at nontoxic levels.
Evacuations around the failing tank in Garden Grove include tens of thousands of residents in six Orange County cities: Garden Grove, Cypress, Stanton, Anaheim, Buena Park and Westminster. Four of the five shelters that the county set up are full. As of Sunday afternoon, only Los Amigos High School in Fountain Valley still had space.
On Saturday, three days into the crisis, a South Pasadena law firm filed a lawsuit on behalf of two people residing in the evacuation zone. The X-Law Group and Presidio Law Firm are seeking class-action status.
The lawsuit says that residents were subjected to “evacuation orders, shelter-in-place directives, exposure concerns, noxious chemical odors, fear of contamination, interference with the use and enjoyment of their homes and properties, and other damages.”
The suit seeks unspecified monetary damages, alleging that GKN Aerospace did not protect the community from the crisis.
The lawsuit is also asking for “accountability for residents facing evacuation orders, property disruption, potential health risks, loss of use of their homes, related expenses, and diminished property values.”
A man walks past the Freedom Hall shelter on Sunday in Garden Grove.
(Kayla Bartkowski/Los Angeles Times)
“Clients are naturally very concerned,” said Carlos X. Colorado, an attorney at the X-Law Group. “It’s a scary situation, especially for those in the vicinity, and in addition to that. For a large number of people, it’s an inconvenience.”
GKN Aerospace didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.
In a nod to the seriousness of the situation, three federal lawmakers representing California have appealed to the Trump administration to issue a disaster declaration over the incident.
U.S. Rep. Derek Tran (D-Orange) co-signed a letter with Sens. Adam Schiff and Alex Padilla requesting that the federal government provide additional resources in response to the event. Tran posted a copy of the letter on X.
“The severity of this disaster requires additional coordination and federal support. Therefore, we urge you to expeditiously approve California’s request for an Emergency Declaration and to provide emergency protective measures and direct federal assistance under the public assistance program for Orange County,” says the letter, dated May 24. “The safety and security, and well-being of evacuated residents and the surrounding communities remain our absolute highest priority.”
Gov. Gavin Newsom made a similar appeal to the president. The White House did not respond to a request from The Times.
In the meantime, officials have stressed that they are trying to keep the chemical inside the damaged tank at the aerospace facility as cool as possible. They said they have received help from experts nationally to come up with alternative plans. Nothing specific, however, has been mentioned.
Continuing to pour cool water on the tank could allow the liquid chemical inside to cure at a slower rate — becoming a solid at a slower speed — and reduce the buildup of pressure inside the tank, said Craig Covey, an Orange County Fire Authority division chief.
“Like an ice cube that freezes from the outside in — this stuff cures, it heats up and cures from the outside in,” he said. “While it’s doing that process, it’s building that pressure.”
The tank has some capacity to hold some pressure. There is a gap between the MMA chemical surface and the tank ceiling.
“We’re hoping that that space can absorb a slower cure rate and not over-pressure and blow up,” Covey said.
Most years, when thousands of psychiatrists gather for the annual meeting of the American Psychiatric Association, they walk past a scattering of protesters. There are Scientologists with megaphones; Falun Gong groups doing their exercises; and, often, former patients, saying they have been harmed by medications or electroconvulsive therapy.
This year, though, the profession is facing criticism from the highest levels of the federal government. The American Psychiatric Association gathered just 10 days after Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. announced a set of policies to encourage doctors to deprescribe, or assist patients in stopping, the most widely prescribed class of antidepressants.
A current of anxiety ran through the meeting, held here this week. Many physicians in the crowd said they worried that Mr. Kennedy’s statements would prompt people to refuse medications, or to quit them and relapse. The plenary session erupted in applause when Dr. Marketa Wills, the organization’s chief executive, declared, “We will never support governmental interference in the practice of medicine.”
“We are standing tall for evidence-based care,” she continued. “We are standing tall against stigma, oversimplification, and anything that would move patients further away from the care that they need.”
But there were also signs that the field’s leaders are engaging, albeit cautiously, with Mr. Kennedy’s effort to curb overprescribing. Numerous sessions offered training in helping patients taper off medications. In July, the association’s president will take part in a panel convened by the Department of Health and Human Services to develop clinical guidance on tapering antidepressants.
In an interview, Dr. Wills said she had been “encouraged” by the invitation to participate in the panel, and she credited the administration with “putting mental health front and center.”
“It feels like the beginning of a conversation, one that we welcome,” Dr. Wills said. She added, “It would be odd to have that conversation without psychiatrists at the table.”
Outside in the corridors, some rank-and-file attendees were less diplomatic.
Many providers took issue with Mr. Kennedy’s negative characterization of selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors, or S.S.R.I. s, the most widely prescribed class of psychiatric medications. Clinical trials have found that most patients’ depressive symptoms improved with S.S.R.I.s, and they are considered safe enough to be prescribed by general practitioners.
A 2026 study found that 16.6 percent of U.S. adults, or roughly one in six, reported currently taking an antidepressant.
“He just doesn’t like S.S.R.I.s,” said Dr. Sung Hyon, a psychiatrist from Pasadena, referring to Mr. Kennedy. Dr. Hyon said S.S.R.I.s had been “foundational” in his practice — “boring drugs that are well established, have good safety evidence and have zero chance to cause addiction.” He called them “God’s gift to psychiatry.”
And patients know it, he added. “So many millions” of Americans already take S.S.R.I.s, he said, and the vast majority are fully aware of their downside, like sexual side effects and withdrawal symptoms.
“And they say, ‘You know what? It’s worth it,’” Dr. Hyon said. “Because there are so many of them, it would be a pretty big political firestorm if he really tried to restrict access. And there is very, very little medical evidence to do so.”
Mr. Kennedy has long signaled that curbing the use of psychiatric drugs was a goal of his. Earlier this month he began taking steps in that direction, announcing guidelines and regulatory changes meant to provide an incentive for clinicians to help patients taper off psychiatric medications. The steps would not affect patients’ access to antidepressants.
Andrew Nixon, a spokesman for the Department of Health and Human Services, said the agency had had no discussions about banning S.S.R.I.s., “and any claims suggesting otherwise are false.” The aim of the new initiative, he said, is to “promote appropriate psychiatric prescribing and drive deprescribing when clinically indicated.”
Some psychiatrists said they worried that Mr. Kennedy’s deprescribing initiative was the beginning of a wider effort that might, in later stages, discredit psychiatry more broadly and restrict access to care.
“I think it is actually putting more questions in people’s minds about whether psychiatric treatment is safe or effective,” said Dr. Eric Rafla-Yuan, who chairs the A.P.A.’s caucus on the social determinants of health. “The data has not changed on S.S.R.I.s. It’s the narrative that has changed.”
He said the A.P.A. should be pushing back forcefully against Mr. Kennedy’s claims about psychiatric treatments, and should steer clear of seeming to endorse any part of the initiative.
“It’s a fine line between having a seat at the table and being used as a tool to legitimize their agenda,” he said.
‘Much Too Medicated’
At the same time, deprescribing seemed, at the meeting, to be on everyone’s lips. A new book, “Stahl’s Deprescriber’s Guide,” was selling like hot cakes in the exhibition hall. There were panels titled, “Deprescribing Antipsychotics,” “The Much Too Medicated Patient” and “Stimulants for A.D.H.D.: Did We Get It Wrong?”
Dr. Chris Aiken, who delivered an address about multidrug cocktails, said a generational change is moving through the psychiatric association, as a younger cohort of physicians, in their 30s and 40s, take a more prominent role.
Millennials were part of the first generation to be prescribed stimulants and antidepressants as children and teens, he said, and physicians in that group are more conscious of poor outcomes years later. “Meds are not the answer, and they have seen this in their own lives,” he said.
Some senior physicians had a similar message.
“If I have any regrets about my recommendations as a physician, it’s about the medications that I did not withdraw sooner,” said Dr. Ronald Winchel, an assistant clinical professor of psychiatry at Columbia University’s medical school, at one panel.
He said a number of concerns had prevented him from doing so: Sometimes, patients were taking multiple medications and it was difficult to say which was effective. Sometimes, patients were doing well, and he was afraid of setting them back. And there was a dearth of research on how patients do after they quit medications.
“The fear of withdrawing medications has really complicated our work,” he said.
Dr. Winchel compared this year’s churning discussion to a watershed moment in the A.P.A.’s history: In 1973, sustained pressure from protesters caused the organization to reverse its century-old position and declare that homosexuality was not a mental disorder.
“Instead of getting into a defensive crouch, they looked at themselves and they made progress,” Dr. Winchel said. The same kind of advancement, he added, could result from a rigorous discussion about prescribing practices. “If some of this agitation is coming from outside,” he said, “what is wrong with that?”
In his presentation, Dr. Aiken urged colleagues not to dismiss the stories Mr. Kennedy has highlighted of patients who have encountered serious difficulties quitting antidepressants.
“I don’t really know how common it is, but I do know that when it does happen, it can be quite severe,” he said. “It may be rare, but let’s take it seriously, because it can really burn people when it happens.”
Others said working with Mr. Kennedy around mental health policies was a matter of simple pragmatism.
“There’s definitely a need for us to be talking to the people who are making decisions,” said Dr. Hammad Khan of Sacramento. “We can’t let Joe Rogan decide what the F.D.A. approves or doesn’t approve.”
An Inflection Point
Dr. Awais Aftab, the author of “Psychiatry at the Margins,” a popular mental health Substack, said he expects the H.H.S. effort to focus on raising awareness about tapering off medications. There are few pathways for the government to reduce the prescription of drugs like S.S.R.I.s, which have gone through F.D.A.-approval pathways and are widely used by the public, he said.
He described “a sense of alarm” among psychiatrists at the virulent critique of the field coming from Mr. Kennedy’s circle. Psychiatry, he said, has been late to acknowledge the complaints of patients like Laura Delano, an author and activist, who say they were overmedicated as children or teenagers and got little support from doctors when they wanted to reduce or stop the drugs.
“The mainstream psychiatric community has been fairly insulated, and suddenly they are hearing now about this issue,” said Dr. Aftab, a psychiatrist at Case Western Reserve University.
He added that he believes that the use of antidepressants in the United States may have reached a natural limit. “The demand is going to, at some point, go into an equilibrium with the reality of the lack of effectiveness and the reality of the tolerability issue,” he said.
But the experience of some other countries suggests that the demand for antidepressants may continue to rise, even amid warnings about overprescribing.
In 2017, Britain commissioned a major report on overprescribing and then followed up with a series of reforms, including updating clinical guidelines to require regular prescribing reviews and instituting a national audit program to monitor drug use.
But a study of prescribing in Britain found that the use of antidepressants continued its steady rise through 2023, the last year for which data was available. In contrast, recent years have seen a decline in the use of anxiety medications and hypnotics, which were also the subject of updated clinical guidelines.
The study’s authors said the rise was most likely driven by patient demand, reductions in stigma and the lower cost of antidepressant medications available in generic form.
Many psychiatrists at the conference in San Francisco said that they routinely urge patients to try therapy as an alternative or a complement to medications, but that many patients have no access to that care, because their insurance will not pay for it.
Dr. Michael Bostwick, a suicide researcher and professor of psychiatry at Mayo Medical School, in Rochester. Minn., said it remained unclear what alternative treatments Mr. Kennedy is recommending to patients who quit antidepressants.
“Toward what end?” he said. “Is he going to put more resources toward therapists? Is he going to tell us to eat more red meat, or work out more, or take psychedelics, like the president has advocated? There is no alternative plan.”
Spring is when honeybees are bringing in food, the hive is healthy and growing, and they simply … run out of space. That’s when they decide to split their overcrowded hives and send half swarming off in search of greener pastures.
But Southern California beekeepers saw that happen unusually early this year, which left many of them scrambling.
“Never before have I seen so many bees swarm in late February and March,” said Daniel Barkanov, a beekeeper with Bee Specialist who works primarily in the San Gabriel Valley. “Usually that happens between May and June,” he said.
“The shift this year was quite, quite dramatic in many areas, especially in Central and Southern California,” said Mateo Kaiser, a beekeeper and managing director at Swarmed, a network of 10,000 beekeepers focused on monitoring and safe hive relocation.
Beekeepers typically try to guide swarming so their their colonies can grow. They divide their own hives at the start of swarming season to prevent bees from flying off, and pick up unwanted ones that land in people’s attics and walls.
But this year, many were caught unprepared.
“They were scrambling to even just have the materials ready to catch the bees and get them into beehives,” Kaiser said.
Climate change is one likely culprit for the early takeoff.
“There’s substantive evidence that climate change alters bee reproductive cycles and colony dynamics,” said Boris Baer, co-director of the Center for Integrative Bee Research at UC Riverside.
Some beekeepers and scientists think the warm winter in the West and early flowering season this year led bees to go into their high-activity mode early, leading to earlier swarms.
That can pose a problem if they then run into food shortages with an unexpected cold snap or dry spring, like the one now in the West.
“If you give bees a kind of early signal here, like that spring has started, it’s warm, they jump into action,” Baer said. “Then you have drought, or you don’t have the normal amount of resources they can rely on, and the bees can run out of food during a very critical time of the year.”
Some bees are on the move at other times of year, but true swarm season kicks off when numbers cross a threshold after a period of warm, spring “growing degree days,” a term used by farmers to predict the growth of plants and insects.
Kaiser dated the start of Los Angeles County’s swarm season to March 12 this year, the earliest in the last five and probably the last 10 years. It’s also more than a month earlier than last year.
Barkanov thinks that one reason, besides the warm winter and spring, could be that the bees didn’t swarm enough last season. Air pollution and habitat loss are known to affect them, and last year was particularly difficult for hives here, with beekeepers reporting slow bee activity and losses from the January fires.
He said he was prepared for early swarms this year, but what he observed then was unexpected — a pause. “It doesn’t make sense why they started swarming, then stopped this year,” he said. “Bees are really, really confused on what’s going on.”
Many are reporting fewer bees on the move overall, which could mean fewer colonies are growing and splitting off this year in search of more space and food.
That could be a sign of poor health, said Barbara Baer-Imhoof, Baer’s co-director. “At this time of year, bees should be bringing in a lot of food, but we’ve been having to feed our bees constantly, throughout winter up until now,” she said.
U.S. honeybee declines have been making headlines since the early 2000s. Last year saw the largest die-off in recorded history, with beekeepers losing over 60% of their hives. Pesticides and environmental factors such as climate change and urban sprawl are known stressors. Research also links last year’s massive colony collapses to parasitic varroa mites that feed on bee larvae and transfer viruses to hives.
A shorter winter and earlier swarm can make bees more vulnerable to these pests.
Typically, bees stop laying eggs during the winter, or at least slow down activity, which represses mite activity. But warmer winters and “the spring season starting earlier means the mites have more prime time to reproduce and grow up in the colony,” Kaiser said.
San Fernando Valley-based beekeeper Nicole Palladino, who runs the relocation service Bee Catchers Inc, said she isn’t particularly concerned by a March start to swarming season.
“I think the bee population looks a lot better than it did last year,” she said. “Seeing the early swarm showed that a lot of the bees that we saw after the fires maybe became more stable and got stronger later in the season.
“If we were fully in peak swarm in January, that would terrify me,” she added.
Elina L. Niño, an apiculture professor at UC Davis, said many factors can contribute to earlier-than-usual swarm reports, as well as reports of fewer swarms, and an annual beekeeper survey out later in the year will provide a clearer picture of how the last year’s conditions have affected bees.
Kaiser agreed, but he said the survey will come out too late in the season for beekeepers to address shifts in swarming behavior and monitor for mites. “We chose to alert beekeepers to this now, and to have them keep an eye on this behavior,” he said.
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