The Monday morning scene at Juanita Stanley\u2019s apiary in Summerville, S.C., was ghastly and stunningly quiet: Everywhere one looked were clumps of honeybees, dead after a dousing on Sunday with the potent pesticide with which the local authorities had intended to kill mosquitoes.<\/p>\n
\u201cThere was no need for a bee suit Monday morning to go down there, because there was no activity. It was silent,\u201d\u009d Ms. Stanley said on Thursday. \u201cHonestly, I just fell to the ground. I was crying, and I couldn\u2019t quit crying, and I was throwing up.\u201d\u009d<\/p>\n
For Ms. Stanley and her business, the death toll easily exceeds two million bees, and Dorchester County officials are still tabulating how many more might have been killed when a day of aerial spraying, scheduled to combat mosquitoes that could be carrying viruses like Zika, went awry. The apparently inadvertent extermination, the county administrator said, happened after a county employee failed to notify Ms. Stanley\u2019s business, which the administrator said should have been alerted about the spraying strategy. Some hobbyists were also caught by surprise.<\/p>\n