Complaint Review: Ed Costanza - Edgewood New Mexico

Sean Covey ordered 2 nucs from us in spring of 2016 for 380.00.  We were not able to deliver them to him because of a loss of bees to extreme heat in Goodyear, AZ in late June that destroyed 107 of our bee hives.  We refunded Sean 390.00 by the first week of September 2016.  We contacted Sean and told him we would come to his home the next day to refund his money and to speak with him.  When we arrived he was not home so we obtained a postal money order for an amount greater than what he had paid and mailed it to his home.  We have taken pictures of the front of his home, the money order and the postal verification that it was mailed to him.  Sean has refused to remove this report to this day.

There are a few other customers who did not receive bees because of our loss.  They have all agreed to wait for bees for next year or to receive a refund.

I have been in the bee business for 50 years.  since 2008 we have sold and delivered package bees, nucs, hives and equipment.  From time to time we have had some customers not receive bees for various reasons such as schedule changes on their part or they are out of town, but we have made good on all of them that we are aware of.

We have delivered over 1,800 package bees, nucs and hives since 2011.  This year we delivered about 450 out of 500, but were not able to complete all the deliveries because of the bee losses.  We have sent out to all customers that did not receive bees this year the following letter:

Hi ,

This is the letter that I have been sending out to all who did receive bees and/or equipment. 

We lost 107 hives in Goodyear to high heat at the end of June. This translates into 250 to 300 and single hives . The temperature was 124 degrees one day during that high heat spell and some of the bees absconded while other died of the heat. We also had the honey in the hives melt and run out the entrances.

We are having to recover. We have two beekeeping friends in NM that are letting us breed from their hives to replace our losses. We are running a two queen system in their hives while feeding to push the hives to produce bees for splits. We are planning on bringing the hives back to Goodyear in the fall to overwinter so we can make distributions to those who did not receive their bees.

We will be filing a loss report with the FSA under the ELAP bee loss program in place by the USDA. Funds will not be paid out until around April 15, 2017.

We are offering several choices to those who did not receive their bees in 2016:

 1. Wait and receive the bees in the early spring of 2017. We will double the amount of bees and brood in the hives from what was stipulated in the 2016 order and you will receive your bees first over new customers.

2. Receive a full refund. The refunds will take a while and may not be fully paid until we receive funding from the FSA ELAP Loss funds.

We are sorry for the unexpected turn of events this past year. As you know the first event was the City of Mesa ejecting all the beekeepers from their orange groves at the end of April. There was a major fire in one of the orange groves where we had several hundred hives. The firefighters would not let us back into the orchard for over a week as the fire continued to burn. We lost two pallets of bees in the fire and a number of other hives were affected by the high heat from the fire. The managers of the orange groves had been piling their pulled out dead trees in large piles for several years and were preparing to chip them up when it appears two teenagers playing in the canals lit one of the piles on fire. During this period the Mayor of Mesa had their real estate department send us a letter along with all the beekeepers who were keeping bees in the 6,000 plus acres of citrus groves to remove all of our bees and equipment from their property within 3 days. We spent three weeks scrambling to relocate the bees to new locations. This scrambled our breeding program and caused much confusion amongst our hives. And the second and worst of the events was the loss of bees to the high temps in Goodyear.

Please let me know what you decide you would be willing to accept. Feel free to give us a call at 505-286-4843

Sincerely, 

Ed Costanza