Honey factory goes up in flames in American Fork

AMERICAN FORK — A honey manufacturing plant caught fire early Sunday morning in American Fork. The building was considered a total loss.

Justin Whatcott with the American Fork Fire Department said firefighters were dispatched to the area at approximately 4 a.m. As of Sunday night, the cause and origin of the fire was unknown.

Beekeeper Prenten Frazier runs the business, Beehive State Honey, with his dad. He said their honey factory now looks like a warzone.

“The processes for beekeeping are all done in here, so without that, really, just without a home,” Frazier said.

Frazier said none of his employees were inside the factory at the time of the fire. Some of the business’ bees were inside their boxes around the factory, but they were also unharmed.

Frazier said bees don’t fly at night and they typically stay inside when it’s raining, which is what happened as firefighters fought the blaze.

“It was amazing how they worked and they saved the bees right along the building,” Frazier said.

Frazier said Beehive State Honey sells “cold extract” raw honey at farmer’s markets and through word-of-mouth sales. Beekeeping runs in his family.

“It had been a hobby in our family for generations,” he said. “We decided to bring it back more commercially to do something with our time. And I wanted to use a business that had meaning and value. It’s not a lucrative business.”

He found a couple of jars of honey under the ash, but the rest of what they bottled during this year’s harvest was melted.

Frazier said the 1,000 colonies of bees they manage mostly live on private properties around the state.

“We still have the bees, we still have our truck to drive those bees around, we still need to bring the bees in for winter,” he said. “We don’t have a hangar anymore to put them in that we usually do in wintertime.”

Frazier said those bees make up a lot of Utah’s natural pollinators.

“Across Utah, we have more than 50 locations where we take our bees to divide them out so they can gather resources,” Frazier said. “It’s a community service, especially here in the county… I don’t think most people realize how important that is, but it’s right under their noses.”

Frazier said he and his team will have to do some juggling to move forward with the business.

“For me, it was not a business,” Frazier said. “This was our identity. This is what we were. I just really can’t imagine doing anything else. That’s a hard one to figure out.”

A *fundraiser was organized to help Frazier’s efforts to do exactly that.

Fire crews from American Fork, Pleasant Grove, Lehi and Lone Peak arrived to fight the fire. Whatcott said the building was burning heavily, and multiple other structures were endangered, but none ended up being damaged.

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