So he does. In late March, he ships 3,000 or so hives home to Newcastle to prepare them to receive new queens; 3,000 travel to Washington to pollinate the pink lady apples; 1,600 go to the cherries around Stockton. On April 2, he divides his Newcastle hives and buys new queens for them; on April 5 the Stockton bees leave the cherries for Newcastle, where they too receive new queens. On May 5 he ships his apple bees from Washington to Gackle, North Dakota, his summer home, for the honey season. On May 10 he flies there, too, and plants a garden in the backyard of his summer home. As he plants, he assesses the promise of the northern spring: the subsoil and topsoil moisture levels, how warm the dirt is, the blooming of the lilacs next to the garden, the early health of the honey locust and apple trees nearby. He notices if the spring wheat has been sowed on surrounding farms, and for how long. This tells him how much supplementary feed he may need to keep his bees alive until the clover starts blooming in late June. By then all of his bees will have arrived in North Dakota. He will stay there for the summer, with brief visits home to see his wife in California.
The summer is a season of bounty, harvest, work. The honey-producing season begins June 20. The first crop is yellow sweet clover, whose flow typically coincides with the first big mosquito hatch. When the mosquitoes become obnoxious, Miller knows the clover is set to bloom. Yellow sweet clover usually blooms a few days before the alfalfa and peaks around July 4, when, if the weather has been auspicious, it can be truck-mirror high. The white sweet clover peaks ten days later. The dairy guys cut down their first alfalfa crop before the end of June; beef guys, looking for more tonnage, wait until the first week of July. Miller likes beef guys, because he prefers flowers over shorn and useless stalks. If the rains are good and the stars align, there may be a second crop of alfalfa, peaking from late July to August 4—but a smart beekeeper should never bank his honey crop on a second alfalfa bloom, because there’s no guarantee that by July 15 the flowers won’t be scorched. After the clover and alfalfa go, there’s buckwheat and gumweed, which make darker honey, and goldenrod.
August 20 marks the end of honey production. In a good year, Miller may wait until after Labor Day to begin “robbing” his harvest boxes, which are shallow wooden rectangles stacked two or three high above the main body of the hive. Those harvest “supers” contain all of the honey bound for sale. The stores in the double-deep main hive chamber at the bottom of the stack, where the queen lays her eggs, are for feeding future bees—that honey is always left alone. Bad years, he may start stripping the harvest boxes as early as August 15. The goal is to have all the salable honey off the hives between September 25 and October 5. By the autumnal equinox, around September 21, the first hives will be loaded into trucks bound for Idaho, where they will sit in big holding yards and wait until daytime temperatures drop to around 45 degrees. It takes eight weeks for Miller’s crews to get all the hives out of North Dakota. By November 25, they’re all in Idaho, where it’s finally cold enough for the bees to go “to bed”—hunker down in the climate-controlled potato cellars. A smaller batch of bees is sent to Newcastle, where they get another feed before dormancy. And then, on January 25, the almonds begin to bud and the year starts again.
This annual bee migration isn’t just a curiosity; it’s the glue that holds much of our agricultural system together. Without the bees’ pollination services, many of our nation’s crops would produce only a small fraction of the harvest they generate with the help of the honey bee. Farmers depend on honey bees to pollinate ninety different fruits and vegetables, from almonds to lettuce to cranberries to blueberries to canola—nearly $15 billion worth of crops a year. Although wind and wild insects pollinate some plants on a small scale, only bees promise the levels of production needed to meet the needs of the nation’s grocery shoppers. Like every aspect of American agriculture, beekeeping has, by necessity, joined the global economy of scale. Bees are pollination machines, and many of America’s farmers need them just as much as they need their tractors, threshers, and combines. For problems with water, labor, pest control, and soil quality, there are irrigation systems, big machines, pesticides, and synthetic fertilizers. Today the biggest factor limiting the amount of produce grown is, for many crops, the number of bees available.
“To make a prairie it takes a clover and one bee,” Emily Dickinson wrote.
One clover, and a bee,
And revery.
The revery alone will do,
If bees are few.
She could not have anticipated the state of apiculture today. It is no longer so simple as bee, flower, honey. The millions of acres of intensely and singularly planted crops at the center of the American agribusiness machine simply cannot produce without the help of the beekeepers’ pollinating army. Without the itinerant bee and the migratory beekeeper, we would have to forsake one in every three bites of each summer’s harvest. We would say goodbye to many of the most delectable piles of fruits and vegetables at the supermarket. Without the honey bee, the American diet would be a far more lackluster affair.
But without the honey bee, John Miller’s life would be a far more agreeable affair. Since he was a young man, he has left his wife and children for eight or so months each year, keeping company with a rotating cast of migrant workers, farmers, landowners, and beekeepers. Even before the calamities that began in 2005, the keeping of bees could be likened to a continuous economic and natural disaster: infections rage, queens die, droughts wither, semis jackknife, equipment rots, prices plummet, competitors undercut, employees disappoint, bankers demand, neighbors complain, vandals, bears, and skunks raid. Miller’s income is uncertain, his predicaments constant.
In the century since N. E. Miller ushered in beekeeping’s industrial revolution, the occupation has become commercialized, rationalized, and preposterously complicated. John Miller’s bees ply some of the same fields that hosted his great-grandfather’s hives. He sells his honey on a handshake to the same processors his grandfather sold to and competes with the sons of the very same men his father competed against. But the business of beekeeping today requires more than just a comprehension of bees. It also requires a command of botany and molecular biology and chemistry and genomics and meteorology and acarology and accounting and immigration law and truck-buying and truck-driving and truck-fixing and marketing and public relations. Where N.E. used trains and telegraphs to conduct his business, John Miller’s tools are now semitrucks and email, spreadsheets and amortization schedules. Where Nephi made his income from honey, Miller now derives his profit from pollination fees.
Nor could Nephi have anticipated the kind of nationwide, devastating losses that John Miller and his colleagues have experienced. In 1990, there were 3.3 million bee colonies; in 2006, fewer than 2.5 million remained. In the wild, honey bees have disappeared entirely. The unschooled public tends to think the recent apiary apocalypse began in 2006. In reality, it started twenty years before that. Bees have been on life support for decades now, kept aloft only by the efforts of determined—perhaps imprudent—men like John Miller. “The past twenty years have been the most tumultuous years in the history of man’s relationship with bees,” Miller says; the past five, a bloodletting.
It’s true for bees as it is for human beings:
Life brings sickness with it. You can see
The signs of it in the bees, without any doubt:
Their color changes as soon as they fall ill;
Their bodies are all disheveled and there’s a dreadful
Emaciation in the look of them;
And then you can see the other bees as they carry
Out from the dwelling places the bodies of those
From whom the life has gone; and you can see
The sick ones not yet dead that hang almost
Motionless around the doors outside,
With crossed and tangled feet; or still inside,
Listless with hunger and shrunken from the cold.
And then you can hear a mournful long drawn-out
>
Whispering rustling sound like the sound of the cold
South Wind as it murmurs in the woods, or like
The agitated hissing of the sea
As the waves draw back, or the seething noise of a fire
Eating its way as it burns inside a furnace.
Virgil wrote this, not John Miller. Bees have been dying since bees have been living. Miller has labored to keep his bees healthy in the face of various parasites and pathogens for years. But in that fateful February of 2005, he realized that the job description of a beekeeper had changed inalterably. He was no longer a mere keeper of bees. He was steward and shepherd of a species teetering on the edge of survival. Not even a Corvette can make you feel better about that.
Chapter Two
Beekeepers’ Roulette
IF YOU SPEND ANY TIME WITH JOHN MILLER, YOU WILL SPEND much of it in cars. Or rather, trucks—big trucks: two-ton Fords, and 515-horsepower Freightliner Cascadias, and lately, against his every inclination, an un-American Toyota Tacoma (the “yoda,” he calls it), which he bought with patriotic reluctance but calls “the finest pickup I have ever owned.” When he backs into a ditch to catch a swarm, he knows that if he’s driving his Toyota, his “little black mamba,” he’ll get out. It can also do airport pickups. In January 2009, Miller picked me up at the Sacramento airport in his black Toyota, a stash of almonds, mandarins, and Honey Stinger bars tucked in the console to keep us going. We sped due west, heading to the annual American Beekeeping Federation conference in Reno. There, Miller told me, “twelve hundred of the least competent people in America” would gather to discuss their role as gatekeepers of America’s food supply and contemplate why their bees are dying. We climbed through steep snow-clogged river valleys, topping out among the genteel granite crags of the high Sierras, then raced down through towering conifers and the foothills’ stunted shrubs to a russet desert and a boxy city. We pulled off the highway straight into the parking lot of John Ascuaga’s Nugget, a monstrous casino and convention center that covers an entire city block. The parking lot was full of other beekeeping outfits; Miller could identify each owner by his rig. “There’s Krause’s truck!” he said. We parked right beside Miller’s good friend and headed to the conference.
Inside, we rode an escalator away from the slot machines, music, flashing lights and bells and beeps, emerging into a cavernous conference hall with movable walls and a bold-patterned carpet. The beekeepers sat on folding chairs, wearing plaid shirts and baseball caps, looking alternately bored and befuddled as one skinny scientist after another spoke of mitochondria and morphology, single nucleotide polymorphisms and marker-assisted selection. Miller wore a bee-striped polo shirt and rarely managed to sit through more than one presentation at a time, disappearing into the hallway and reappearing five or twenty minutes later. Others lasted longer, staring bleary-eyed at the PowerPoints, listening politely to a diminutive Croatian who spoke of bee “dee-arrhea.”
In the hallway, beekeepers hovered, chatting. Zoologist Karl von Frisch discovered some fifty years ago that bees return to the hive to perform a “waggle dance” communicating the location of nearby flowers. Beekeepers go to conferences for similar reasons—to share essential information about the bounty that might be expected from the blooms. They don’t often dance, at least not well; but they talk. Incessantly. “We swap canning tips and recipes,” Miller jokes, though they don’t. What they do is trade gossip, debate the merits of orange or red hive tools, and compare balance sheets, hive losses, pollination fees, and honey prices. They pay too much for honey at the silent auction. They buy raffle tickets from the wholesome, if less than glamorous, “honey princesses” who wander the halls in skirt suits and shoulder sashes. Both the princesses and the bee guys looked terribly out of place at the Nugget, a monument to artifice and quick cash—quick cash has never been a defining characteristic of the beekeeping profession. And beekeepers work outside. In the enormous Nugget you could spend the entire convention without once exiting the climate-controlled interior.
BEING TERRIBLY OUT OF PLACE IS NOT A NEW EXPERIENCE for beekeepers in this country. Honey bees are not, after all, native to North America, and neither are beekeepers. The nation’s first bees and beekeepers came from England around 1620 on the same boats that brought the nation’s first colonists and their crops, as much a tool of European conquest as the muskets, microorganisms, and ambitions that also debarked from the settlers’ ships. The insects did fine—did great—in their new environment, taking to the wooded eastern forests with aplomb. Escaped swarms spread quickly across the frontier, working their way westward toward the Great Plains at a rate of forty or so miles a year. “The bees have generally extended themselves into the country a little in advance of the settlers,” Thomas Jefferson wrote in 1788. “The Indians, therefore, call them the ‘white man’s fly,’ and consider their approach as indicating the approach of the settlement of the whites.” Domesticated since before the Egyptians built their first pyramid, bees have traveled the paths of human migration over the millennia from Africa to Europe and Asia, then to North America, thriving wherever they went. No surprise then, that the New World proved an entirely agreeable place for the European honey bee.
The European beekeeper, on the other hand, found the going rougher. The first recorded professional apiarist on American shores was a man named John Eales. He was induced to move from Hingham, Massachusetts, north to Newbury in 1644, according to local court papers, to run a communal apiary, “with ye expectation of his doing service which the Towne was not acquainted with.” By 1645, he was also among the town’s first recorded paupers. “Being found unable to get his living,” he was remanded to the town’s constable “until this Courte sh’ld determine the waye to dispose of him.” After some deliberation, a judge determined that Eales “should be placed in some convenient place where he may be implied in his trade of beehive making, etc.; and ye Towne of Newbury to make up what his work wanteth of defraying ye charge of his livelyhoode.” Eales was the first known American beekeeper to lose his shirt; he certainly wasn’t the last. “It takes longer to go broke keeping bees than in any other business,” John Miller says—he stole that maxim from another California beekeeper. Yet it didn’t take Eales long at all.
Miller’s banker once told him that a beekeeper should be prepared to fail two out of every seven years. That’s today, with all of our modern technologies and economies of scale. It was even easier to go broke a couple of centuries ago. Beekeeping had been, in its first two and a half centuries on the American continent, a cottage industry and a sideline. Farmers bartered crops for bees and traded or sold what little surplus honey they couldn’t use. They didn’t dream of making a living from it. That changed, however, after a talented but melancholic minister from Andover, Massachusetts, got into the business. Lorenzo Lorraine Langstroth was born in 1810. Dignified, with a broad, open face and a shock of thick hair, he developed a love of insects early, studying the movements of ants on the ground until, he wrote, he wore out the knees of his pants. In 1833 he took up beekeeping, in part to help with his “head troubles,” serious jags of depression and “hysterical muteness”—most likely bipolar disorder—from which he suffered his entire life. He acquired a colony in a log hive, and then another, and another, and soon had hundreds and was spending every spare moment caring for and observing his bees.
It was not a propitious time to take up beekeeping. The nation’s hives had been besieged by a mottled grayish brown pest called the wax moth, whose larvae fed on wax comb and hive debris and left behind a sticky white web of discarded cocoon shells and a sickly-sweet smell of rot. The bees were also increasingly at the mercy of a deadly new bacterial disease called American foulbrood, which killed young larvae and was highly infectious in hives. There was, moreover, no easy way to rid colonies of such pests and pathogens, because at the time, even the typical activities of beekeeping exacted a dismal toll. Most beekeepers still used traditional round straw skep baskets or hollowed-o
ut log “gums,” and they could not open their hives to examine the colonies without destroying vast sections of comb. The only way for a beekeeper to collect honey was to cut the comb out of the hive and in the process kill its bees. The only way to increase his colony count was to build a strong colony with lots of healthy workers, and then capture a natural swarm of bees as it departed the hive to find a less crowded home. By the time Langstroth came along, scores of observers, from Aristotle to Columella to Virgil, had described the life of the honey bee. Still, Langstroth wrote, “the interior of a hive was to common observers a profound mystery,” and this ignorance compounded beekeepers’ problems.
Hoping to do better with his own bees, Langstroth began reading. He quickly concluded that there were no American beekeeping manuals worth examining and so turned to the Europeans. He read Charles Butler, England’s “father of beekeeping,” whose Feminine Monarchie was the first full-length beekeeping guide written in the English language, and who was among the first to posit that the large bee that controlled the hive was female. He read the seventeenth-century Dutch biologist Jan Swammerdam, who spent every daylight hour for five years examining his bees, “all the while exposed in the open air to the scorching heat of the sun, bareheaded, for fear of intercepting his sight.” Swammerdam’s exhaustive treatise Historia Insectorum Generalis featured the first near-perfect drawings of bee anatomy and “proved so fatiguing a performance, that Swammerdam never afterwards recovered even the appearance of his former health and vigor.” The book was published posthumously in 1737.
The Beekeeper's Lament: How One Man and Half a Billion Honey Bees Help Feed America Page 3
