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

by Hannah Nordhaus

  Scientists also suspect that this unnatural life cycle—the double-time migration pioneered by John Miller’s great-grandfather—may disrupt the rhythm of the hive. The bees work all summer, get loaded onto semis, take a brief nap, then start summer again in February, going from complete dormancy to white-hot stimulation in the almonds, then to a nectarless postbloom desert and, after a brief ride in the back of a huge truck, to the apple bloom, and then to the windswept northern prairies to wait for the clover flow to begin. This is a lot of stimulation and dearth, and at some point all of those conflicting signals may be disruptive to the superorganism of the hive. The colony is manhandled, jostled, exposed to pesticides and parasites and to lots of feast and famine, and it does not come out of the process stronger. Farmers expect bees to function like yet another farm machine—like shakers, sweepers, tillers, and combines. But bees are living things, with short life spans to begin with—about six weeks from larva to winged maturity to senescence. Riding in trucks and eating fake flowers and living in a constant state of natural or artificial peak bloom can take it out of a bee. There are too many crops to pollinate, too many miles between them.

  In the wild, one would expect to find three to four colonies per square mile; in the prelude to the almond bloom, apiarists must often stack thousands of hives in tenement-like holding yards. In North Dakota, Miller keeps only 40 hives per yard; in California, he places around 240 hives per yard. Some beekeepers must keep 2,000 hives in one spot, their bees competing with millions of others for what meager wild forage exists, subsisting on syrup and pollen patties and engaging in periodic interhive death matches. If the bloom comes late, the situation is even more precarious—a delayed bloom in 2007 coincided with the initial onslaught of CCD deaths. And even when the trees finally flower, it is crowded. A healthy hive can typically pollinate about an acre; but with two or even three hives per acre in the orchards, these arrangements bear far less resemblance to wild meadows than to feedlots for cattle or swine.

  And then of course there’s the danger of contagion—the fact that, for that six-week period when nearly every commercial hive in the country has been shipped to California, the Central Valley is essentially a single four-hundred-mile-long bee yard, with bees from Florida “swapping spit,” as Miller says, with others shipped from North Dakota, Arkansas, Pennsylvania, Texas, and Florida. Each winter, pests and pathogens from one region hop with ease onto still-untainted bees from the rest of the country. Miller tries to rent his hives close together during almond season to limit their exposure to other beekeepers’ misfortunes. But the laws of supply and demand aren’t always so accommodating. He currently has bees with three large growers, but a few years ago his hives were scattered across three hundred miles and twelve growers, exposing them to that many more threats. “You may be applying best management practices” to stave off varroa mites or nosema or hive beetles or foulbrood, Miller notes, “but if your neighbor is not, the mites vector from his hives into your hives.” And when beekeepers return home from the almond fields, they infect bees that have stayed at home with smaller-scale beekeepers, as well as whatever feral bees may have survived the previous season’s contagions.

  The almond orchards have been compared to a brothel for their remarkable capacity to transmit disease across the country; another apt metaphor might be a wartime military barracks, or a slave ship. Bees have been favorably compared in their work ethic to “volunteer pollinators,” so logic would suggest that commercial honey bees are in fact conscripts—and the conditions of conscription are rarely conducive to health. The age of mass production has not been kind to bees.

  Bees were always mobile, but the almond industry has made them almost blithely global: they are hauled across the country or across the Pacific to pollinate trees that produce merchandise—nuts—that is hauled to a port and placed in a shipping container and hauled back across the globe. The almond tree, though less obviously peripatetic, has made a similarly far-flung journey that began, perhaps, in China, and from there moved to Spain, and from there to the California coast, and from there to the Central Valley, where it found a home so hospitable that it became a global icon of health and prosperity, which brought it back to China, which has conscripted its own slaves to produce the nut. The almond has come full circle—and as it has risen, billions of bees have fallen. But while it has consumed legions of bees, it has kept their keepers in business—and without those keepers, there might not be a European honey bee alive anywhere. It is, says Miller’s friend and bee broker Pat Heitkam, a “Faustian bargain.” Almonds pay the bills “but they are also what brought us all of these problems.”

  Many of the writers of old found occasion to write about bees. In Paradise Lost, John Milton compared the zealous industry of bees to the labors of angels.

  As bees in spring time, when the sun with Taurus rides,

  Pour forth their populous youth about the hive

  In clusters; they among fresh dews and flowers

  Fly to and fro, or on the smoothed plank,

  The suburb of their straw-built citadel.

  The angels he described were fallen; they were building hell. So too today’s honey bees pour forth into the almonds, unstinting, diligent, forbearing; they are assembling their own demise. The almond industry is killing John Miller’s bees. But it allows him to do what he loves, which is to keep bees—so all in all, it is a pretty good deal with the devil. And on a sunny morning sometime after Valentine’s Day when the valley floor turns white-pink with almond blossoms, he can drive into an orchard and park his truck. He can turn down his Pink Floyd CD and open the windows. He can sit still among the pale pink blossoms for a time. Sitting still, recall, does not come easily to him. But for this, he can sit still. So he does. He sits and listens to his bees hum in the almond trees, making nuts and money. “Bee guys like that,” he says. And in that first flourishing of spring, Miller’s bills get paid.

  Chapter Five

  Trespasses

  WHEN JOHN MILLER WAS A BUDDING BEEKEEPER, HIS FATHER gave him a painful task. The year was 1976 or so, the early days of almond pollination. It was just on the cusp of the bloom, and the Miller bees had been distributed on Ed Thoming’s farm at the intersection of State Route 132 and Bird Road in Tracy, California—a place where occasional farmhouses and migrant dorms marked the thin edge of civilization. A few days after the bees were placed, Neil received a call from Ed Thoming, who had received a call from his pesticide consultant. The guy had been visiting an almond orchard in Newman, California, about forty-five minutes away from Tracy, and he’d happened to see 136 hives with a suspiciously fresh, thin veneer of white paint sprayed over still-legible one-inch stenciled black letters: Miller Honey Farms, Blackfoot, Idaho. It seemed weird to the pesticide guy, because he knew the Millers’ bees were already spoken for in Tracy, and he probably also knew that the Millers were meticulous in the care and branding of their bee hardware and would never brook a sloppy paint job.

  The Millers checked on their hives, found them missing, and alerted the sheriff. The sheriff looked into the situation and ascertained that the bees had in fact been stolen from the Millers. The villain was a bee guy named Allred—try as he may, Miller can’t remember the first name—who had entered into a pollination contract with the farmer in Newman for more hives than he possessed. To make up the deficit, Allred had used a (stolen) forklift to remove the Millers’ hives from their pallets in Tracy and put them in his own (stolen) truck, then tossed the pallets into the nearby California Aqueduct.

  Allred was, in his way, a “clever bugger,” John Miller says. He had given some thought to his caper. Each of the hives Allred stole had been stacked two boxes high—the lower box holding the brood chamber with the queen and nurse bees, the upper harvest box holding worker bees and honey. Allred brought his own empty bee boxes—no frames, no bees, just empty white boxes—and placed them on the bottom layer of his own pallets. Then he divided the Miller hives in two and stuck the full Miller boxes
on top of the empty Allred ones—thus “doubling” his hive count and also doubling his rental fee from the duped almond farmer. Split this way, only half of the new hives were “queen-right,” with a resident matron to calm and organize the workers. The other hives were full of bewildered, pissed-off, queenless bees, far more interested in stinging hapless passersby than in pollinating almond flowers. Such an arrangement wasn’t a great way to establish a long-term relationship with an almond grower, once he found out that most of his trees would not be pollinated. But it did hold the promise of a quick buck.

  Now Allred had been found out. Everyone agreed that he had done a bad thing. His tactics were unsavory, his beekeeping mores abysmal. There was no question he’d stolen the bees. But he had signed a contract with the farmer, and a contract was a contract. Regardless of whom they belonged to, the bees could not be moved until the farmer released them from their duties. This didn’t seem fair to the Millers, who had the bees under contract to pollinate an orchard forty-five miles away. So the next night—sheriff be damned—Neil went to get his bees back. He drove to Newman, dressed up bee-commando style (that is to say, in a white suit and veil), and, in the darkest hours of night, stole back his hives. He hauled them to a secluded spot in the Sierra foothills near Penryn, California, which lies somewhere between Ophir and Loomis, Auburn and Roseville. It was a place Allred, the sheriff, and the duped almond farmer were unlikely to find, and where, more importantly, the still-angry bees were unlikely to find human flesh to punish for Allred’s trespasses. John was given the job of recombining the hives. The bees were furious, and it was not fun. Nor was it painless. “I can still remember that day’s work,” John Miller says. “Vividly.”

  Allred’s misadventures with the Millers’ bees did not dissuade him from a life of bee crime, however. He proclaimed himself the “Jesse James of Beekeeping” and continued to steal from apiaries across the Central Valley. He must have had some aptitude around bees, because he managed to get away with it for quite a while. His spree ended only when, Miller vaguely recalls, he was caught in the act by a bee guy named Knoeffler, “shotgunned in a bee yard,” and held until the police arrived. Allred did time as “a guest of the state” in some prison or another. And that was the last Miller heard of him. For the life of him, Miller can’t understand why Allred decided to make a career of stealing bees—why not take something valuable, like almonds? Stealing bees is like—it’s hard to find the right metaphor for such feckless decision making—“like stealing a two-year-old. You’re just making more work for yourself,” Miller says. Nonetheless, bees get stolen all the time.

  The “robbing” of hives is surely as old as the profession of beekeeping itself: “All agreed on this one point, at least,” wrote Lorenzo Langstroth, “that stolen honey is much sweeter than the slow accumulations of patient industry.” Bears and skunks and honey badgers grab handfuls of honey, bees, and larvae to stuff into their mouths. Human “honey hunters” have long stalked the woods searching for wild “bee trees” from which to extract a sweet reward. Beekeepers, as a matter of course, deprive colonies of their hard-earned provisions. Bees too steal from other hives—it is much easier than gathering nectar, snoutful by snoutful. Typically, stronger stocks assail weaker ones, especially in times of low honey flows. But sometimes bees steal honey from other hives just because they can. “There is,” Langstroth wrote, “an air of roguery about a thieving bee which, to the expert, is as characteristic as are the motions of a pickpocket to a skillful policeman. Its sneaking look, and nervous, guilty agitation, once seen, can never be mistaken.” Bees that learn to plunder the honey of others rarely return to “honest courses,” Langstroth continued. The marauders become “so infatuated with it as to neglect their own brood.” They sally out with “the first peep of light” and continue their depredations until so late that they sometimes can’t find the entrance to their own hives in the dark.

  Honest bees leave the hive light and return laden with heavy burdens of nectar and pollen. Their plundering kin reverse the process, losing all moderation. They enter “as hungry-looking as Pharaoh’s lean kine” and exit with the “burly looks” of an alderman who has “dined at the expense of the city,” stuffed to utmost capacity. Human bee thieves are, by contrast, more difficult to spot. Because all beekeepers wear white suits and veils; because most hive boxes are nearly identical; because there are a million and a half beehives being moved on thousands of trucks up and down the Central Valley during almond season; because almond acreage is vast and resources to enforce bee crime are small—for all these reasons, it is difficult for law enforcement and almond growers to tell who is moving his own bees in the dark of night and who is stealing someone else’s.

  Beehives are not the easiest things to steal. Thieves must have a working knowledge of beekeeping in order to emerge unscathed. They must have equipment—a truck, a bee suit, a smoker, perhaps a forklift. That’s why most bee thieves come from within. They are renegade beekeepers looking to pocket a quick payday in an orchard or to expand their businesses or to make up their losses without purchasing new bees and equipment. Bees are worth a lot of money before almond pollination; they’re worth less after, when a beekeeper is faced with the prospect of keeping them alive for another year. When the almonds are in bloom and bees are in hot demand, almond ranchers must do anything and everything to pollinate their trees or risk losing their crop. Most pay what they feel are extortive prices for a sufficient supply of hives. Or, if they are desperate, they may resort to renting bees from shady amateurs at bargain-basement prices. As pollination prices have risen, Miller and other beekeepers across California have seen increasing losses to theft in the weeks before the bloom. Each almond season, around one percent of Miller’s hives “evaporate,” he says, and the only time he’s recovered any bees was the time he and his dad stole those 136 hives back from the notorious Allred.

  Here’s how the thieving works: You see a batch of hives—a stack of money, if you are crazy enough to associate bees with income—sitting on the side of a desolate stretch of rural road, away from the shaded interior of an orchard. If you have a flatbed and a forklift, it can take all of ten minutes to load up ten thousand dollars’ worth of hives. All you have to do is watch the semis roll through and wait until just after the bees are placed. The beekeeper probably won’t be back for a few days while he tends to other hives. You pull your truck off the road just a tinch so you don’t block traffic—and the bees are yours. You drop them off with a grower, who generally pays half the pollination fee when the bees are delivered and half when they are removed. Many bee snatchers are happy to collect the first payment (for two hundred hives, it would have hovered around fifteen thousand dollars in recent years) and abandon the bees in the orchard.

  For big operations the loss of a hundred hives is a costly nuisance; for smaller beekeepers it can be ruinous. To deter thieves, beekeepers brand their boxes, pallets, and frames (Miller is registered as beekeeper number 42 in county number 31, thus all his frames are branded 3142). “We strive to get behind locked gates at all times,” Miller says, “and if there’s a mean dog there, all the better.” For many years, Miller staged his syrup tanks and other beekeeping equipment in an open-air shed belonging to Gary Thompson, a Modesto fire chief who also paid the Millers to pollinate his almonds. Thompson had lots of guns and liked to shoot. His son also had lots of guns and liked to shoot. But Miller’s brother Jay inherited that contract when they split the business recently, and now John stages his equipment in an orchard that is sadly deficient in firearms enthusiasts—too bad, because a few years later, thieves stole all the diesel from Miller’s trucks there.

  Beekeepers also enlist local agricultural cops to run periodic “sting operations” (pun very much intended) to deter thieves. During almond season, ag cops will pull over beekeeping rigs for traffic stops to make sure the operations are legitimate, and sometimes, they run night patrols with aircraft and chase-cars. Some beekeepers have even installed radio freq
uency and GPS tracking devices in hives, though the technology is too expensive for widespread use. So really, the main idea is to discourage thieves by convincing them that there’s some remote likelihood they could get caught.

  Unfortunately, that likelihood is slim. Prosecuting agricultural offenses is never easy—produce doesn’t carry serial numbers; heifers aren’t much use in a lineup; almonds look the same no matter who grew them—but bee detective work is particularly thankless. For police who lack the proper gear and training, patrolling bee yards can be dangerous. It’s no surprise, then, that most perpetrators get away with their buzzing booty and that beekeepers rarely bother to report thefts. “You see people working on beehives in the middle of the night with white outfits and netting, you assume it’s their bees,” says Frank Swiggart, who was a deputy sheriff with the Modesto County Agricultural Crimes Unit until he was promoted to sergeant in 2009. Swiggart had been a cop for going on fifteen years, working patrol, street level narcotics, sheriff’s tactical and recon. Then he became a deputy on the rural crime unit—but he had never prosecuted a big-time bee rustler until 2003. That’s when he nabbed an amateur beekeeper and state firefighter named Daniel Suarez. Swiggart is the first to admit that he only caught him because Suarez was spectacularly inept.

  Suarez worked for the California forestry department overseeing fire crews. Each day on his way to work, he’d drive along the rural roads of the Central Valley, passing the hundreds upon thousands of hives that migrated to his neighborhood every winter. Each night, on his way home, he’d load a few into his truck and stash them in a holding yard in Merced County. In late November 2002, Orin Johnson, the white-haired, wide-faced, second-generation beekeeper from Hughson, California, set out to visit a bee yard near Sonora, in the foothills above the fog line. Johnson kept seven hundred hives altogether, and he’d left sixty-four on an isolated ranch behind locked gates. But when he got there, he found the lock on the gate cut and the bees gone. He had no cell phone service, so he drove to a high spot in the almonds where he could get a signal. He called the police, waited a few hours until a deputy could get there, and gave his report. The deputy dutifully took down the information: “I’ll keep my eyes out for ’em,” he assured Johnson. Johnson was not assured. There were twenty thousand hives wintered in a ten-mile radius, and it wasn’t likely the deputy was going to recover the bees simply by keeping his eyes out.