The Beekeeper's Lament: How One Man and Half a Billion Honey Bees Help Feed America

by Hannah Nordhaus

  Langstroth then turned to more contemporary musings. He learned about François Huber, a blind French scientist who, with the help of devoted servant François Burnens, carried out a number of experiments to divine the mysteries of the bee. In 1789 Huber designed a “leaf hive” with frames that opened like the pages of a book, the first beehive that allowed observation of the interior of a colony without requiring its total destruction. He read the Englishman Edward Bevan, whose classic 1827 text described a hive with multiple honey boxes stacked atop it. He read Johann Dzierzon, a Silesian pastor who, in the 1840s, contrived a hive design that featured removable honeycombs supported by grooves in the hive’s side walls. With increased command over his combs, Dzierzon was able to increase his stock to 360 hives and produce six thousand pounds of honey in one season, despite “frequent reverses”—theft, fire, flood, and a fatal attack of foulbrood.

  Dzierzon’s and Huber’s and Bevan’s leaf and top-bar designs were vast improvements on the traditional skeps and gums. But they still required significant mangling of comb in order to break the frames apart. Without a better hive, Langstroth believed, beekeepers would be “unable to remedy many of the perplexing casualties to which bee-keeping is liable.” A better hive would minimize damage to combs when beekeepers inspected the bees and harvested honey, improving bees’ survival and beekeepers’ economic viability. “In short, I felt satisfied that bee-keeping could be made highly profitable, and as much a matter of certainty, as most branches of rural economy.” Langstroth decided to design his own hive.

  To allow access to a colony without destroying honeycomb, Langstroth needed to prevent the bees from attaching comb to the hive’s sides, top, and bottom. Bees, he had come to understand, were exacting creatures: they left a specific gap—three-eighths of an inch, to be precise—for flying and maneuvering between combs. If the space was narrower than a fifth of an inch, they would fill it with propolis—a sticky, resinous substance collected from tree buds and sap, which bees use to fill small gaps and seal and reinforce their hives. If the space was wider, they would bridge it with additional honeycomb. He termed that ideal gap “bee space,” and mulled how to design a hive that would incorporate it throughout. One afternoon in 1851, he found his answer:

  Returning late in the afternoon from the apiary which I had established some two miles from my city home, and pondering, as I have so often done before, how I could get rid of the disagreeable necessity of cutting the attachments of the combs from the walls of the hives . . . the almost self-evident idea of using the same bee-space . . . came into my mind, and in a moment the suspended movable frames, kept at a suitable distance from each other and the case containing them, came into being. Seeing by intuition, as it were, the end from the beginning, I could scarcely refrain from shouting out my “Eureka” in the open streets.

  Langstroth promptly filed a patent. His improved hive is little different from the rectangular white box with hanging frames that beekeepers use today. Among the long list of advantages offered by his simple invention, beekeepers could take out and examine the combs “at pleasure” to look for moths and destroy moth larvae, and “permit the surplus honey to be taken away, in the most convenient, beautiful, and salable forms.” They could remove old, tattered combs and furnish empty combs to allow bees to focus their energies on the production of honey rather than wax. They could move their hives more easily to follow pollen flows and protect them against heat and cold. Langstroth’s new hive also made it easy for beekeepers to divide one hive into two or three when the bees were preparing to swarm, increasing their numbers and preventing productive colonies from flying off. And they could do so without angering the bees. “Many persons have been unable to suppress their astonishment,” he boasted, “as they have seen me opening hive after hive, removing the combs covered with bees, and shaking them off in front of the hives; forming new swarms, exhibiting the queen, transferring the bees with all their stores to another hive; and in short, dealing with them as if they were as harmless as flies.”

  In 1853, he published The Hive and the Honey-Bee, which described the benefits of his hive and provided practical advice on bee management. The book is still in print. After millennia of uneasy domestication, Langstroth’s invention promised to transform the beehive into a fungible unit of production, rendering bees as tame as any other farm animal. His hive endowed the bee—or rather, its keeper—with a level of control and mobility that transformed the hive into an implement of modern agriculture. “It must be manifest to every reflecting mind,” he wrote, “that the Creator intended the bee, as truly as the horse or the cow, for the comfort of man.”

  But even such an enormous technological breakthrough—and it was, and remains, the transformative technology of modern beekeeping—couldn’t ensure a life of ease for the aspiring apiarist. The Langstroth hive was no panacea. It possessed no “talismanic influence which can convert a bad situation for honey into a good one,” Langstroth wrote. It couldn’t supplant hard work and vigilance: “If many colonies are kept, a competent person should always be on hand, in the height of the season, to attend to the bees. Even the Sabbath cannot be observed as a day of rest.” It promised “no splendid results to those who are too ignorant or too careless to be entrusted with the management of bees.” Despite the superiority of his hive, the greatest threat to the world’s bees was still the incompetence of their keepers.

  Nor could it guarantee prosperity. “There never will be a ‘royal road’ to profitable bee-keeping,” Langstroth warned. “Like all other branches of rural economy, it demands care and experience; and those who are conscious of a strong disposition to procrastinate and neglect, will do well to let bees alone.” Indeed, despite the “handsome profit” he promised, most beekeepers, even the most diligent, continued to struggle to make a profit. Langstroth was among them. He patented his hive in 1852 but found it impossible to enforce. Entrepreneurs quickly brought their own versions of the hive to market, and although he initiated a number of lawsuits to enforce his rights, the mental energy required to litigate sent him into an enervating bout of “head trouble.” “While under its full power,” he wrote of his depressive spiral, “the things in which I usually take the greatest pleasure are the very ones which distress me the most. I not only lose all interest in bees, but prefer to sit on that side of the house where I can neither see nor hear them.” At his lowest moments, he added, “I would see the letter ‘B’ and it would push me deeper into darkness.” He died in Dayton, Ohio, in 1895, supported by his daughter and the surrounding community, but not, in any meaningful pecuniary way, by his bees.

  STILL, LANGSTROTH’S INVENTION SPURRED AN OUTPOURING of compatible technologies. According to Tammy Horn’s Bees in America (a comprehensive academic history of beekeeping), a short span of twenty years in the mid-nineteenth century produced four innovations that transformed the industry from hobby to commercial endeavor. First, in 1851, came Langstroth’s hive. Then, in 1857, Johannes Mehring invented wax-comb foundation sheets that attached to the movable frames used in the Langstroth hive. These premade honeycombs gave bees a head start in building the hexagonal cells that house honey, pollen, and brood, allowing them to focus their energies on making honey rather than beeswax. In 1865, an Austrian beekeeper named Francesco de Hruschka invented the honey extractor, which used the centrifugal force of a drum spinning inside a barrel to pull honey from cells without destroying the comb and forcing bees to continually repair and rebuild. Moses Quinby’s smoker, invented in 1873, added a more reliable bellows to the traditional firebox used to calm bees when working in hives. At the same time, two new national publications were launched. The American Bee Journal began publishing in 1861. A. I. Root’s Gleanings in Bee Culture: Or how to Realize the Most Money with the Smallest Expenditure of Capital and Labor in the Care of Bees, Rationally Considered started up in 1873 and is still the nation’s predominant beekeeping journal (though now it has a slightly pithier title: Bee Culture). Both helped disperse and popula
rize those innovations among American beekeepers.

  Suddenly it was possible, for a handful of beekeepers at least, to consider quitting their day jobs. Quinby, a contemporary of Langstroth’s who developed not only the bellows smoker but also his own variation on the Langstroth hive, kept 1,200 colonies in New York’s Mohawk Valley. He was a prolific writer and inventor and is considered among the first Americans to support himself exclusively as a beekeeper. Another early commercial beekeeper, Dr. C. C. Miller (no relation to John), was a trained physician who took up beekeeping as a hobby in 1861. In 1878, he closed his medical practice and turned full-time to bees, gathering material for Fifty Years Among the Bees, a memoir and practical guide that explained how he had successfully made the production of honey his “sole business.” On the heels of the Gold Rush, an entrepreneur named John Harbison imported thousands of colonies from the East Coast to California by sea, by train across the Isthmus of Panama, and then by steamer to Sacramento, where he sold them for thousands of dollars in profit. Harbison’s success sparked a “bee-fever” that brought an estimated 10,000 hives by the sea-and-isthmus route to California. Harbison kept 2,000 colonies in the sage and buckwheat fields of Southern California, and was, during the 1870s, the biggest honey producer in the world. Likewise, John Miller’s great-grandfather N.E. harnessed a restless nature to emerging technology and a dream of apiary greatness. At his peak, N.E. managed 10,000 hives; 30,000 if you count those owned by his children and the former employees he launched in the business.

  N. E. Miller was born in 1873 in a log cabin in Cache Valley, Utah, the fifth of fifteen children of Mormon immigrant farmers from Germany. As a youngster, he found a hollow tree in the woods that harbored a swarm of bees. It sparked a lifelong interest; in the fall of 1894, at the age of twenty-one, he persuaded his father to allow him to trade five bags of leftover oats for seven colonies of bees owned by a neighbor. He discovered that he had a gift for handling bees, and his apiary grew rapidly as he captured swarms and purchased colonies wherever he could find them. In 1904, after a disappointing grain harvest, he extracted four five-gallon cans of honey from ten colonies of bees and made twelve dollars—the best day’s pay he had ever received. The next day he did it again. He soon concluded that the production of honey could be more profitable than farming, if only he could keep enough bees to produce it in quantity. He quit his job on a wheat-threshing crew to focus exclusively on beekeeping, and in 1906, with three hundred hives under his management, he moved his growing family to Logan, Utah, to be closer to shipping routes. He placed hives on local farmers’ land throughout the area and northward toward the Idaho line.

  In 1907, he heard that a California beekeeper had developed a promising new method for processing beeswax. “So in December, 1907 I borrowed $107 from Orval Adams at the bank in Hyrum, Utah, and went to Southern California,” he wrote. (His stories were collected in Sweet Journey, a biography by John Miller’s great-aunt Rita Skousen Miller, who married N.E.’s son, Woodrow.) In California, N.E. saw that the bees were still flying and gathering nectar long after those in Utah were huddled in their hives against the cold. Until that point, he had placed his hives in cellars for the Utah winters, covering them on three sides with straw and dirt to protect them, but he lost dozens of colonies each winter. If he shipped his bees somewhere warm in the cold months, it occurred to him, he might halve his winter losses and double his honey and beeswax production. He might even be so lucky as to double the number of his colonies. The San Bernardino area seemed perfect for winter forage, with vast stretches of flowering orange groves and sage fields and nearby railroad stations that would provide easy access to market. So the following winter, Miller took to the rails with his apian cargo to pursue his endless summer, chasing the blossoms and pollen flows from the clover fields of northern Utah to San Bernardino and back.

  N. E. Miller wasn’t the first migratory beekeeper. In ancient Egypt, beekeepers transported small numbers of colonies by boat up and down the Nile River. Fifty years before N.E.’s first migratory eureka, Lorenzo Langstroth wrote of a man in Germany who moved his stocks throughout the honey season: “Sometimes he sends them to the moors, sometimes to the meadows, sometimes to the forest, and sometimes to the hills.” In the 1870s, a man named C. O. Perrine enlisted a fleet of barges to bring one thousand colonies up and down the Mississippi River. His staff of fifteen men may have known something about river navigation, but they knew little about beekeeping. They timed landings poorly, missing the honey flows and losing many bees to starvation, drowning, and the toppling of hives overboard. Perrine gave up after one abysmal season, advising a group of attendees at a meeting of the North American Beekeeping Association to “keep as far as possible from large bodies of water.” This didn’t dissuade O. O. Poppleton—nineteenth-century beekeepers had a thing for initials—who moved hives up and down the Indian River in central Florida with some success at the turn of the twentieth century. Both John Harbison and the aptly named Migratory Graham hauled colonies around California, moving them dozens of miles by rail or wagon to take advantage of shifting honey flows. N. E. Miller’s contribution was to adopt these practices at an industrial level, using trains to pioneer the large-scale interstate movement of beehives.

  N.E.’s first step was to approach the Union Pacific Railroad, which made a cattle car available. He purchased six hundred California colonies for his first “test flight” from California to Utah. The bees, labeled as “livestock” so as not to scare railroad employees, survived the trip, and N.E., who already had six hundred hives in Utah, doubled the numbers he had available to ply the clover fields. In the winter of 1909, he shipped his entire operation to California. That too proved successful, and in 1910 he brought his family with him. His sons traveled with the bees for the four-day journey, sleeping with the hives on the floors of the railcars, using wagons and Model Ts to deposit the colonies in the San Bernardino bee yards. The interstate shipments promised more honey and money but brought with them an entirely new set of hassles: Hives had to be stacked, braced, screened, and plugged so the bees could neither escape from the railroad cars nor suffocate; colonies were hauled to the trains by horse and wagon (or in winter, sleds) manned by drivers equipped with veils, gloves, and rudimentary knowledge of the behavior of bees. There needed to be enough bees and brood in each hive to gather a honey crop on arrival, but not so many that they would asphyxiate en route; enough honey to feed the bees until they were able to forage in the fields, but not so much as to incur unnecessary shipping costs. The trains had to run quickly and on time: in the summer, traveling over the sands of the Mojave Desert, engines stopped and broke down frequently. When they did, the beeswax would melt and run to the bottom of the hives, killing the bees. In early shipments, losses often exceeded 50 percent. But Miller persisted, experimenting with boxcars, cattle cars, automobile cars, refrigerator cars, various methods of stacking and bracing the hives, even spraying the hives with water in transit to keep them cool. His perseverance paid off. By 1911, he had three thousand colonies.

  N.E. was restless and grandiose, an “extremist,” said his daughter Florence, John Miller’s great-aunt, with a “galloping personality.” Like John Miller, N.E. was prone, Florence said, to “sudden strokes of ideas.” He was also meticulous. His honey warehouse was spotless. His trucks received oil changes every thousand miles. As a practicing Mormon, he consumed neither tea nor coffee nor alcohol nor tobacco. He would hire no one who did. “Profanity was unknown to him,” wrote Rita Miller in Sweet Journey, though he “sometimes used the expression, ‘By the hell fires and damnation’ to express utter disgust or disappointment.” He would always look a man in the eye before selling him honey; if he deemed him worthy, he would then ship thousands of pounds to him on open account. Particulars mattered to N.E.: “A successful manager watches all details,” he wrote in a company manual, “because the honey business is a detail business if success is obtained.” The manual included instructions on nearly every aspect of beek
eeping, from the proper hand to lay on the hive when prying it open (the left), to where to place the cover while working the bees (in front of the entrance).

  N.E. was a gifted beekeeper, but aspired to more. Like many of his contemporaries in other fields, N.E. believed he could make a proper industry of commercial beekeeping. It was the era of scientific management. Barons of business, from Henry Ford to John D. Rockefeller, were developing meticulous procedures to render their employees and operations more efficient. Systems were essential. Mass production was key. N.E. applied the same principles to his beekeeping operation. He was, according to John Miller, the first commercial beekeeper to ship bees on a huge scale, the first to buy a carload of honey jugs and jars for a year’s harvest, the first to ship a carload of honey to eastern markets. When large trucks became available, N.E. quickly abandoned the rails. With a truck, two drivers could make a nonstop haul from California without the frequent, bee-killing layovers required of trains. N.E. believed that, with a few good systems and forward-thinking ideas, beekeepers could, Rita wrote, “accomplish in the honey industry what Henry Ford had done in the auto industry: namely, to put honey in the price range so the people living in large cities and in thickly populated sections could afford to use it as a regular food.”

  Such ambitious expansion required breathtaking debt, which N.E. accrued liberally in search of an ever-elusive economy of scale. “Debts could always be paid by increasing his production,” Rita wrote, “more branches—more bees—more honey to sell.” When finances began to look shaky, N.E.’s response was to take out a loan and buy more bees, dispatching his sons across the West and Midwest to open new honey territory. John Miller’s grandfather Earl opened a branch in Blackfoot, Idaho. Earl’s brother Dell also opened an outfit near Blackfoot, moving to California later. Their brother Woodrow opened an ill-fated branch in Nebraska. Another brother, Ray, ran an operation in Salt Lake City. When N.E. moved to California full-time, Ray took over all of the Utah holdings.