Oil and Honey

by Bill McKibben

  But in Addison County, Vermont, the annual Field Days, the state’s largest agricultural fair, were in full swing this second week of August. As usual I’d circled the dates on my calendar months in advance. Diane Norris, who has directed the fair for the past twenty-eight years, told the local paper, “No matter how many times you see it, every time you come it’s new again.” I hate to say it, but I think she’s mostly wrong—the biggest reason I like the fair is that it repeats with metronomic precision. The fewer changes the better. (For instance, there were new rides this year. My old favorite—a Gravitron remake called the “Starship 2000,” a bucket of bolts that dated from some distant past when 2000 seemed impossibly far off—had disappeared. Miffed doesn’t begin to describe my reaction!)

  So I headed straight for the 4-H building, where I hoped the projects on display would be suitably musty. Sure enough, the first poster board was devoted to “Making Clothes from Scratch,” and the second compared culinary outcomes across a wide variety of cookie sheets. (“The aluminum cookie sheet came out the worst.”) There were homemade fishing lures, “pillow pets,” an illustration of the various parts of a Belgian draft horse, and the classic display of Different Sized Eggs, from the quail on up to the goose. I read about “equine leg protection,” how to treat colic, and “All About Pigs” (“pig food are called slops”). Next door, in the Center of Progress building, a man sold Electrolux vacuum cleaners, the National Guard recruited new members, and the local Bible church offered a test to determine “Are you a good person?”

  Down in the horse ring the judging was under way in Class 27, Western: “All walk. All canter. Now reverse and trot.” The afternoon stretched hot and still, and I could feel the thunderstorm building beyond Snake Mountain a couple of miles to the west, so I made my way to the Maple Building for my annual maple milkshake. (As much as I appreciate those hardworking bees and their honey, I’ll always be partial to our crop of syrup from the high-mountain sugar bush.) Next door I bought a fried potato twist (“Don’t Be a Hater, Eat a Tater”), and headed into the cool of the old-time barn to look at the antique tools: the corn fork, the hay knife, the slater’s hammer, the lard squeezer. And when the rain finally came, fat-dropped and warm, I retreated to the dairy barn. The 4-Hers had shown their prize cows that morning; now the heifers mostly lay peacefully in the hay, and the kids slept peacefully curled up against their warm, breathing flanks. The names were over the stalls: Clementine, Calico, Brownie, Butterscotch. As I said, the pleasure comes from the sense that the real world goes on underneath despite all.

  Since I was in fair mode, I headed north a day or two later for the annual meeting of the Eastern Apicultural Society, drawing beekeepers from around the region to the University of Vermont. There was the requisite trade show—bee-shaped travel pillows, hive-shaped teapots, “sting-gel wet wipes,” custom bee veils (“We’ve never had a bee in our bonnet”), electric smokers that “work like a flashlight … so you’ll never have to light your smoker again.” This last item wasn’t selling so well—in fact, the six hundred attendees were toting official conference bags made of burlap, perfect for cutting up and burning in their old-fashioned smokers once they got back home. Beekeepers tend to stick with the tried and true—the basic hive box with its ten frames spaced three-eighths of an inch apart was first devised by the Reverend L. L. Langstroth in 1852, and it is essentially unchanged. The smoker dates from the same period, as well as the centrifugal extractor, and the standard technique for rearing queens.

  What’s new, of course, are the mites and other diseases that have plagued beekeepers in recent years, dangers that led beekeepers to look for help from any quarter, and some of this assistance could be seen on the convention floor. You could buy Apistan miticide strips, or CheckMite, or Terramycin Premix. But if you use the last of these, you’re “required to remove the dust six weeks before honey flow,” and if you want to buy Hivastan gel, “you must be in an approved state,” and if you go with GardStar “yard drench,” you “must not use inside the hive!” and you best keep all domestic animals, not to mention “aquatic life,” at a distance. Not only is this stuff expensive and noxious, it’s increasingly worthless. “The bees keep evolving resistance—it’s a real chemical treadmill,” said Tom Seeley, the Cornell professor whose book Honeybee Democracy I quoted earlier. He’s a friend of many beekeepers, who kept coming up to shake hands, and an old admirer of Kirk’s. “He really did pioneer this chemical-free beekeeping,” said Seeley. “He’s like a mutation. Really, in his whole approach to agriculture. He wanted to see if he could build up a business without taking on debt, and he did. And now by going without chemicals. We see untreated bees like his evolving resistance to mites.”

  Even the majority of beekeepers who do use chemicals are increasingly employing “soft pesticides” that require more skill and effort to apply but leave less residue, Seeley said. The big commercial apiaries, trucking their hives by the thousands to California for the almond harvest, aren’t a part of the revolution yet (Seeley: “There’s a lot about big-time beekeeping that isn’t bee friendly”), but thousands of new beekeepers were joining the fraternity, part of the same locavore wave bringing chickens to suburban America.

  I kept running into beekeepers from New York—New York City—at the Vermont meeting. Wally Blohm, who’d been keeping bees in Floral Park, Queens, described the explosion in hives since the city relaxed its laws two years before, permitting rooftop colonies. “I do classes all the time now. People have them on rooftops everywhere,” he said. And when they swarm, watch out! After the city legalized beekeeping in 2010, “everybody and their mother” took up the hobby, a city official explained to the New York Post—even the Waldorf-Astoria put hives on the roof. But plenty of people got bored, or didn’t know how to prevent swarming, hence the mother and the baby trapped in an SUV for two hours because of an Upper West Side swarm, or the swarm that delayed a Delta Airlines flight at La Guardia, or the guy in Queens with three million bees in his backyard, which as NBC noted was more than the human population of the borough. Despite the boom, the bees seem able to find plenty of nectar. “So many people in the city have backyard gardens, flowerboxes,” Blohm said. “If there’s something there, they’ll find it.”

  Seeley was listening to our conversation. “The hive sends out hundreds of scouts,” he said. “It’s random. And most don’t find anything. But all it takes is a few to come back with good news, and then they can concentrate their labor on that particular place. It’s a great example of collective intelligence—it’s what we mean when we talk about the ‘wisdom of the hive.’”

  In this case, the wisdom of the hive seemed to be moving in Kirk’s direction. One of the biggest crowds of the whole convention crammed into the university’s largest auditorium to hear a talk by Warren Miller, the president of the Pennsylvania State Beekeepers Association, on chemical-free beekeeping. He described the halcyon days before mites (“It wasn’t even beekeeping then—it was more like bee having”), and he told of his early experience with pesticides. “Like everyone else I jumped on the chemical bandwagon,” he said. “But I was still losing colonies. It was pretty clear I was just breeding stronger mites.” So he went cold turkey—he stopped buying new queens and started raising his own, selecting the most resistant colonies for their genetic toughness. “Queen rearing is the pinnacle of beekeeping!” he said to great applause. “Everyone should do it!” He reported proudly that he was now losing fewer than 20 percent of his colonies each winter. Foot-stomping applause!

  And where was Kirk? He was at work, forty miles south of Burlington and a mile west of the county fairgrounds, at one of the beeyards where he raises nucleus colonies. These hives weren’t for honey production; they’d be sold the next spring to hobbyists from around the Northeast for $220 apiece, and he had the potential to earn something like $30,000 from this small yard. It was a 4-H project made real, and therefore could be just a little stressful. As we opened each hive, he’d check to make sure i
t was producing brood and storing enough honey to overwinter successfully. “Ooh, this is as good as we’ll see,” he said—and then the next one was just as lovely, with fat white honeycomb bulging from the edges. “They don’t get much nicer than this,” he said—but the next one was, if anything, nicer. “Oh, we’re on a roll here.” Eventually we reached a struggling hive, which he decided to combine with another, which meant getting rid of one of the queens. He found her after a moment’s search through the frames, and pinched her dead between thumb and index finger. “Sorry,” he said. “This is the playing-God part, I guess.”

  We got through the last hive. “This yard is set now for months,” he said. “I shouldn’t need to come back, which is good, because the honey harvest starts next week.” I lay back in the sun in my bee veil, listening to the thrum of the bees that filled the air, and behind it the background note of the crickets’ song swelling and falling: the comforting sound of life on automatic, the planet working as it should.

  * * *

  The honey harvest started right on schedule at the end of August, but not without at least a hint of trouble. Just before Labor Day, the state health department reported the first death in Vermont’s history from eastern equine encephalitis. EEE, as it was being called on TV, is a mosquito-borne disease—one that public health officials had predicted, just a few years earlier, would appear in the state if climate change continued unchecked. Mosquitoes love the warm, wet world we’re creating for them—if you were watching our planet through a telescope from some other galaxy and trying to figure out why we were changing the atmosphere, a reasonable hypothesis would be that we’d decided to embark on a planetwide mosquito-ranching business. Along with the deer ticks spreading Lyme disease, they were the clear local beneficiaries of our new climate.

  Since EEE kills about a third of the people who contract it, local officials were taking no chances: they were about to begin emergency aerial spraying of an insecticide ominously named Anvil. And since the victim had lived on the edge of the county, the southernmost of Kirk’s beeyards would be in the line of fire. The authorities promised local organic growers they’d steer the airplanes away from the borders of their farms—if they didn’t, the farmers’ organic certifications could be revoked. But Kirk’s beeyards were too small and scattered, so he wanted to at least collect the honey supers before the spray dropped.

  It was a hot day, and the bees were agitated—though probably not because they knew about the planned aerial assault. “I saw some skunk droppings over there,” Kirk said. “They come at night and scratch at the hives. They get the bees to come out and then they eat them, which makes the bees mad.” One would think. We were pulling the supers off the top of the colonies and stacking them on the truck; bees were everywhere in the air, and if a drop of honey smeared on some surface half a dozen would descend on the slick and clean it up without a trace. It felt slightly out of control, so we worked fast, tying the supers down and hauling them back to the farm, stacking them in one end of the small trailer permanently parked next to the barn that served as Kirk’s extracting room. (Inevitably dubbed the “honey wagon.”) Inside, it smelled of honey, and without the loud drone of the bees it was easier to relax.

  “I built this seven seasons ago,” he said of the trailer. “Since I was renting space, I didn’t want to convert a whole room of someone else’s building; I always hoped I’d have my own land so I could just move it there.” So he meticulously laid out the floor plan for the trailer, making sure he’d have just enough room to maneuver between pieces of gear.

  To extract the honey, he pulls one of the ten frames from each super and pivots toward a heated, vibrating electric knife he uses to slice through the waxy caps that the bees have built over the honey cells. The wax drops into a tank, and the frame goes down a small conveyor to the right. Once he’s uncapped a couple of dozen frames, he walks a few steps and loads them into the extractor—a big drum that operates more or less like that Gravitron that’s no longer at the fair, spinning them so fast that the honey comes out of the cells, collects on the walls, and then slides to a sump underneath the drum. When it collects to a depth of about six inches, a float triggers a pump, which sucks the honey up a two-inch clear plastic pipe—it’s a tube of gold that crosses the room to the first of four settling tanks. The wax and other debris slowly rises to the top, and the honey flows into the next tank, and then the next; by the fourth, it’s ready to eat. Unlike virtually all commercial honey, it’s unfiltered and unheated—as pure honey as you’re going to find anywhere. Kirk packs it into fifty-gallon drums and sends it off to his main customer, a Massachusetts retailer called BeeUntoOthers.com, which sells it in glass jars for seventeen dollars a pound, a bargain even at that price. If you go to the farm, you can also buy it straight from Kirk in thirty-pound buckets.

  When he built the wagon, though, there wasn’t a special market for untreated honey; he just took whatever the commodity market was paying. “That first year was an amazing crop—thirty thousand pounds of honey,” said Kirk. “Astonishing. But the price was really low—maybe seventy-five cents a pound. Anyway, as I was cleaning out the last tank, I started feeling sick, like I’d eaten something wrong. And by the next day I was in the operating room getting my appendix out. And then it got infected. It was weeks before I was well again. I hadn’t had time to sell my crop—and by the time I got out of the hospital the price had doubled to $1.50 a pound. I made enough money that year to pay for the whole wagon.” The price had doubled because the FDA had inspected a freighter from China full of honey and found it was contaminated with antibiotics; it sent the whole cargo back to Beijing, which left the nation’s little-plastic-bear honey packers desperate for supply. And the incident started educating consumers that honey wasn’t just honey, helping set up a new honey economy that’s taken Kirk out of the commodity business.

  But he’s still a farmer. And farmers, in my experience, usually have something to complain about—the harvest has never quite gone as well as it might have in their imaginations. Some of the frames Kirk was pulling from the supers were bulging with honey (the white wax folding off the edges looks like the almost obscene white fat on an aging steak). But others held barely any honey at all. “This is going to be a mediocre crop, I fear,” he said. “There just never was a prolonged honey flow. It started off with such a big rush, but then it dried up. We never got quite the rains we needed to really make the plants blossom.” The colonies were in good shape—the hot, dry weather had been far easier on them than the previous year’s cold rain. And they’d produced more honey, too: instead of 2011’s meager 6,000 pounds, Kirk was guessing this crop would yield 12,000 pounds, maybe 16,000. But it wasn’t the bonanza he’d been dreaming of.

  I don’t think it was the money that irked him—he can cover his expenses just selling queens and nucleus colonies, so the honey is … the honey on top. It’s more like he’s an amateur athlete who’s prepared for an event all year: trained for a marathon, say, gotten up in the dark to go jogging every morning. And on the big day it goes … just okay. Or maybe it’s more than that—he’s so identified with the bees that he takes their output personally. “A lot of beekeepers don’t like extracting,” he said. “They think it’s boring, it’s the first thing they hire people to do. But to get to see the crop move into a new form—it’s just so magnificent to think that it’s the result of so much work by so many bees.” To have sat and watched for hours as bees arrived at the hives with a few grains of pollen tucked in their saddlebags, and now to see oil drums filling up with honey: it is kind of awesome. And it was pure collaboration—Kirk had fed them syrup to get them through the winter, insulated their boxes, made sure they had queens; in return he’d taken the honey they wouldn’t need. I thought of something Tom Seeley had said the week before at the beekeepers’ meeting: “Sometimes people say this is the ultimate in capitalism, the bees do all the work and the keeper owns the means of production. But the beekeeper is also a guardian angel. He take
s the surplus. But if there’s a big rainy spell in September that would starve a wild hive, well, the beekeeper can step in and give them the help they require.” The odd bargain between wild and domesticated has its sweet payoff as the harvest starts, and who can blame Kirk if he wants to hit the full-tilt lights-flashing Vegas jackpot? “I just hope global warming hasn’t ruined the possibilities of a run of good honey years,” he said. “I so enjoy producing those crops.”

  And having figured out, painstakingly, a system that makes him a comfortable living, he enjoys equally, I think, spreading the gospel. In the rush of the first year’s work on the new form, his plan to take on apprentices hadn’t yet happened. And he was picky, looking less for enthusiastic new college grads than for people who would understand the commitment required. A few days earlier, a pair of young Amish men had ridden bikes over from New York State for a visit, intrigued by what they’d heard about his operation. “It was good fun to see them roll up, on modern bicycles, with their straw hats and suspenders,” said Kirk. “One was sixteen—but since they stop school at eighth grade he’s already a full partner with his father in their dairy. And he has a trapline, getting pelts—he works that on his bike.” His friend was in his early twenties, and he was the one interested in bees. A few of his Amish neighbors kept hobby hives, but they didn’t think an apiary was profitable enough to be a full-time business, especially since without trucks you couldn’t cover a wide territory; Kirk’s example had lured him over to see. “With the usual method, the most you could produce from one beeyard was maybe seven thousand dollars,” Kirk said. “But now, if you’re raising queens and nucleus colonies, the theoretical maximum is more like thirty thousand. You won’t actually get that much most years, but it changes the math.”