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

by Hannah Nordhaus

  The onset of CCD had fortuitous timing. Just a few months before, the honey bee genome had been decoded, providing new information on the insect’s constitution, its strengths and vulnerabilities. A group of scientists had then met in Washington, D.C., and released a report on the decline of pollinators as a whole—honey bees, bumblebees, native bees, birds. The state of Pennsylvania, for instance, has been surveying bee populations for the last 150 years, according to vanEngelsdorp, identifying more than four hundred species of bees found there. Thirty-two of them have not been seen since 1950. Bats have also disappeared in droves thanks to a mysterious ailment called “white nose syndrome.” Bats may have their backers, passionate as any other, but so far, the public has found their plight far less appealing. “I’m glad I’m a bee man and not a bat man,” vanEngelsdorp confessed in a 2008 speech. There’s less public sympathy for bats. Which means there’s less research money for bats, too.

  There is money—more of it anyhow—in bee research these days, because the public now cares about bees. With pollination prices at an all-time high during the CCD years, the almond industry, which always cared about bees to the extent that it needed them alive to pollinate crops, now cares about bees even more and has poured more money than ever into bee research. And that new research money—and the compelling mystery of CCD—has attracted new scientists. They have brought with them new technologies, such as those originally developed to study human genetics and epidemiology, enlisting and adapting them in the cause of the bee. Perversely, CCD has been, in the words of bee broker Joe Traynor, a “multimillion dollar gift” for the U.S. bee industry. “If the bee industry hired a public relations firm to convince almond growers and others of the problems beekeepers are facing it would have cost millions,” he wrote.

  CCD has been bad to bees, but it has been good for their image. The honey bee has always had an advantage over other insects—it’s fuzzy; it’s striped; it looks cute on baby clothes; it makes honey. And now, in the wake of CCD, it has also acquired a patina of tragic charisma. It pulls at our heart- and purse-strings the same way that pandas and polar bears and other vulnerable wild creatures do. Our affection for the bee is all the more remarkable considering that it’s a bug, for heaven’s sakes—a stinging, droning, unpredictable insect that crunches when you step on it and was never actually wild here in the United States because it was never actually a native. But no matter: it’s the honey bee’s fifteen minutes, too. “It’s about time people got hyped up for bees,” says Marla Spivak, one of the field’s most active scientists, who recently won a MacArthur “genius” grant for her work on honey bee genetics. “At first I was uncomfortable, I didn’t want to capitalize on bees’ problems, but then I realized: Hey, wait a minute, the public is getting this. People get how important bees are. They may never understand bee diseases, but they will understand that bees need flowers, and that there are not enough of them anymore, and many of them are contaminated with pesticides. If we encourage people to have gardens, plant flowers, and keep pesticides out, that’s an amazing cultural change. We can’t hype that up enough.”

  So bees have acquired yet another job. As if they didn’t already have enough work to do pollinating flowers, providing for the queen and her offspring, and building and protecting the hive, they have been assigned extra metaphorical tasks as symbols—of industry, selflessness, community, and domesticity, and lately as exoskeletal canaries in a coal mine. The public is fascinated with Colony Collapse Disorder because many believe that bees are Silent Spring–like harbingers of retribution for our crimes against nature. Dying bees are symbols of environmental sin, of the synthetic crimes of the chemical industry. People put a lot on bees, and they take it on, as they take on all the other tasks they perform, because they don’t have a lot of choice in how they live or what they do with their short lives or how they die. Honey bees are small creatures, but they must carry an enormous burden of preconception.

  Chapter Seven

  Survivor Stock

  AT JUST SHY OF 5 A.M. EVERY DAY IN EARLY APRIL, A BLEARY-EYED bee guy pulls his truck into a Chico, California, parking lot and places a medium-size foam cooler on the front seat of a white van. The cooler sits beside the driver as the North Valley Shuttle loads its passengers, then pulls onto the highway and makes for the Sacramento airport. The van can seat a maximum of fifteen passengers. But in the early spring after the almond petals have fallen, the 5 a.m. from Chico can predictably be expected to hold more than fifteenfold the lives it is licensed to carry—the driver, the paying human passengers, and 250 minuscule travelers crowded in the front seat.

  At 6:10 a.m., one of John Miller’s employees leaves Newcastle to meet the van at the Arco station inside the Sacramento airport boundaries, and, promptly at seven, or whenever the shuttle arrives, “scratches on the window three times to alert the driver to the prearranged secret action code,” Miller says—although we all know that no such thing actually happens. The employee transfers the box to the passenger seat of one of Miller’s bee-emblazoned pickups, hands the driver some empty foam coolers and a bottle of honey, and departs “without signaling right or left.” There is no time to waste. It is day 15, and if it were day 16 or even day 15½ it might be too late. If too much time should elapse, carnage will ensue. No leisurely cups of coffee now. The truck stops just long enough to pick up some supplies, then drives the foam box to a recently assembled apiary, where bees roam in disgruntled unease amid the blooming mustard.

  There, the crew takes the Styrofoam lid off the cooler, removes the eggshell-foam lining, some sixteen-ounce hot-water bottles, and a few damp T-shirts, and extracts a bullet-shaped plastic plug encased in beeswax. The workers pull the top off each hive, pry open a quarter-sized space between frames two and three, and gently, very gently, place the plug between the top bars of the two frames, then carefully replace the top, then patiently wait a few minutes or hours, until a set of tiny mandibles eats through each wax cap and a pair of tiny antennae, then a tiny head and elegant, tapered body, emerge. Then there is no more waiting and no more confusion: a young, and we do hope vigorous, virgin queen clambers out of her cell, and the bewildered leaderless bees in her newly formed hive have found a reason to seek nectar and pollen and order, and spring is in its glory, and the future beckons.

  Timing is everything in beekeeping, but for most events—preparing for honey flows, winter-proofing the hive—a few days here or there don’t truly matter. The dates on which a beekeeper splits and requeens his hives, however—those are truly inviolate. On those specific dates, the beekeeper divides one colony into two or three new “nucs”: bare-bones “nucleus” hives stocked with a brand-new queen, a couple of frames of brood, a couple of frames of honey and pollen, and some empty frames for the bees to fill with more brood and honey and pollen. In late March, when the bees are released from the almonds, Miller sends half of them to Washington state to pollinate apples and brings half home to Newcastle to be split and “nuked” and requeened. The language suggests atomic precision: the complete and indivisible hive unit is, by an act of human fission, divided into unstable parts. It is a sensitive transaction. If an egg is laid on March 17, the virgin will hatch April 2—no sooner, no later—and the hive must be nuked three days earlier to receive her. There is no margin of error. She will start her mating flights between April 6 and 13, conclude her flights by the 18th, wait five days for her ovaries to mature, and then start laying eggs. By April 22 the beekeeper should know, by observing the egg-laying patterns within the brood chamber, whether the queen has survived and been successful in her reproductive efforts.

  Most beekeepers travel from yard to yard to split their hives, hauling the extra boxes, frames, and pallets to each apiary, opening each hive, and finding the queen. If she is especially productive, some beekeepers may let her remain for another year, although most beekeepers kill their old queens—with bees as with humans, the young are more fertile, and no one wants to risk a whole year with a queen who lays two hundre
d eggs a day instead of two thousand. The keepers take half the frames from the old hive and place them in two new hives (or sometimes three), filling the vacant slots in each with empty frames. Then they leave the new hives alone for three days so the workers get used to the idea that their old queen is not coming back. If a new queen and her unfamiliar pheromones are introduced too soon, the hive’s bees may sting or rip or “ball” her to death, surrounding her en masse until she suffocates or overheats. Once the chemical memory of the old queen has faded, however, the nucs can be easily requeened with mail-order matriarchs. And through this act of partition and proliferation, one hive becomes many, the winter’s losses are recouped, and hope begins anew that this year, unlike the last one, or five, or twenty, will be a good one.

  This is the way most beekeepers split their hives, and it’s the way John Miller would prefer to do it if his outfit were small, if he didn’t have so many bee yards scattered across so many miles of the Sierra foothills, if he didn’t have to haul his entire crew and all the necessary equipment from yard to yard, and if he weren’t John Miller and thus obsessively concerned with making things more efficient in the world of beekeeping. But instead of dragging his crew from yard to yard for two and a half weeks in March and April, he drags 3,500 hives home to Newcastle. There, under a tent in a clearing below his headquarters, he has designed his own proprietary “nuking machine,” a Y-shaped conveyor belt that mechanically conducts much of the labor-intensive business of taking apart a hive. First, an employee pries open the top of a hive box and places the hive on a moving belt, which rolls under an overhanging machine that scrapes the top bars free of wax and propolis. The hive then rolls onto a foot-powered thruster that rams the frames from below, releasing them from the body of the hive. Another employee removes the frames and sorts them into stacks: one for frames full of honey; another for pollen; another for brood frames (those are where the queen is usually found, and if employees spot her, they’ll sometimes squash her so the new queen has no competition, though usually they ignore her—“If she survives the drama of nuking,” says Miller, “she is good in my book”). The assembly line forks there, and an employee places two empty hive boxes on each fork of the Y and pushes them down the line, where other employees reassemble the hives with brood, honey, pollen, and filler frames, then stack them on pallets. When a pallet has received its full complement of four hives, it is forklifted to the edge of the clearing. The dislocated bees spend a fitful night of confusion and bereavement and the next morning they are moved into a yard to await their new queens.

  Like most of John Miller’s beekeeping innovations, his nuking line started with a vision. Unlike his Mormon fore-fathers, who tended to receive their visions on pillars of light and such, Miller gets most of his at the gym, often while doing leg lifts. That’s how it happened this time, anyhow: there he was, doing five sets of ten leg lifts at fifty pounds, and there it was, “right in front of me”—the nuking machine. The idea wasn’t completely his own: “I know a good idea when I steal one,” he likes to say. This one he stole from the Cowens of Parowan, Utah, who’d invented a scraper that removes the wax comb from the top bars of frames. Few beekeepers seem inclined to steal the nuker idea from Miller, however. Even he would prefer yard-by-yard nucs, because fewer bees drift and swarm and die; but what he loses in bees, he more than saves in labor costs. With his machine, he can split two hundred hives an hour; doing it the normal way, even the most efficient crew can split only eighty a day. Still, most of Miller’s colleagues find the nuking machine disturbing. His invention has won few—to be honest, no—converts. “Every bee guy just stares,” he says.

  In fairness to other beekeepers, Miller’s nuking line is truly appalling. He is the first to admit it. There is no approaching the tent without a full bee suit and veil, and double gloves, if you’re smart. Angry, confused bees fill the air like a black hailstorm, alighting on any warm surface—the apex of the tent, the crowns of employees’ heads, their temperate butt cracks. Bees swirl and dive-bomb, bouncing off veils like popcorn. The nearby trees droop with escaped swarms, which Miller will visit with an empty hive later in the evening, when the bees’ ill tempers cool, and coax back to safety. Even up the hill at Miller’s office, the air is filled with angry drifters (this is where I got my “scalp hit”); they blast through the air and cluster on coffee tins and honey pails and shrubs. They litter the carpet in his office. It is no fun for the bees; it is no party for the beekeepers, either. During nuking season, Miller’s hands and gloves are speckled with stingers. He sees bees in his dreams. But he knows no better option. The survival of his bees, of his business, and indeed, of the honey bee in America, depends on this violent springtime ritual.

  Here’s a surprising fact: for all the carnage of recent years, the actual number of managed beehives in the country has held steady. Individual honey bees are unimaginably fragile, but as a community, as a species, they have an astonishing capacity to regenerate. They work hard, remember: a queen can lay thousands of eggs a day to repopulate a hive. That’s the strategy honey bees use to recover from the misfortunes that befall them daily, and it’s also the strategy beekeepers like John Miller use to recoup lost hives. Introduce a good, hardy new queen each spring, and much of the winter’s carnage can be forgotten. Without new queens, around 20 percent of a keeper’s bees might be nonproductive during the honey flow, even during good years. Without new queens, national hive numbers would have plummeted disastrously in the recent bad years. New queens are also the reason that predictions of imminent honey bee extinction are probably off the mark. Lucky for bees, they have beekeepers to keep them going. No one has ever doubted that honey bees, with their wee nine-hundred-thousand-neuron brains, are, as organisms, awfully savvy in their quest for survival: just look how they have enlisted these improvident humans to risk all manner of painful indignity each spring so that they can prosper. How smart is that?

  THE QUEEN IS, AS ANY OBSERVER OF BEES OR CONSUMER OF metaphor knows, the focal point of the colony. She is long and lissome, with shorter wings than the worker bees and a slimmer body than the drones. She is, wrote Lorenzo Langstroth, the only “perfect female” in the hive—the only creature that is capable of laying both male and female eggs. Some worker bees can, in a pinch, lay drones, but only a queen, with her fully developed ovaries, can produce both males and the female workers who will form the backbone of the hive. And produce she does. At her reproductive peak, a queen can lay as many as three thousand eggs a day, dropping her tapered bottom into cell after cell and leaving behind an upright nearly-rice-grain-sized deposit that will develop, with time and care and tending and feeding, into a juvenile bee. She single-handedly populates the hive with workers: newly hatched nurse bees who clean the hive and care for the brood and feed the queen and build the cells, and then after a couple of weeks grow up to be guard bees who protect the hive from intruders, and then finish their brief lives as foragers who wander out for honey and pollen and propolis. She also lays the drones, the males who sit around eating, “in gluttony and idleness,” wrote Charles Butler, “living by the sweat of others’ brows,” in case their sperm should be needed for mating flights. Without her singular reproductive purpose and powerful pheromonal influence, the thousands of bees in her orbit are utterly bereft. “If she is taken from them,” wrote Langstroth,

  the whole colony is thrown into a state of the most intense agitation as soon as they ascertain their loss; all the labors of the hive are abandoned; the bees run wildly over the combs, and frequently rush from the hive in anxious search for their beloved mother. If they cannot find her, they return to their desolate home, and by their sorrowful tones reveal their deep sense of so deplorable a calamity. Their note at such times, more especially when they first realize their loss, is of a peculiarly mournful character; it sounds somewhat like a succession of wailings on the minor key.

  The queen exerts a powerful pull on bees and their keepers alike. Beekeepers like nothing more than seeing a bustlin
g, queen-right hive, and they pride themselves on locating the queen before anyone else can. She is always found in the double-deep brood chamber at the bottom of the hive stack, usually in one of the interior frames, and always at the center of a whorl of attendants grooming and feeding her and spreading her pheromones throughout the colony, her influence radiating outward like ripples in a pond. She is the star of the show; she rules the roost. She can live one to five years; the average worker, by contrast, lives one to four months. The preservation of her life is indispensable to the colony’s survival. Queens are the last to perish in any fatal incident, because without her, the other bees die as well. When a colony becomes “hopelessly queenless,” wrote Langstroth, its destruction is certain. “While the common bees are ready to sally forth and sacrifice their lives on the slightest provocation, a queen-bee only buries herself more deeply among the clustering thousands.” She is the colony’s ruler and also its foremost prisoner, an egg-laying machine who, after one brief period of loveless flight into the larger world, is confined for the rest of her life to the lower reaches of the hive where the eggs are laid and stored. That is, until her reproductive capacities wane; then she is unceremoniously tossed aside for a younger model.

  In nature, queens are created in panic or in prosperity. When a queen dies or fails to lay sufficient eggs to keep the colony going, the bees feed royal jelly—a thick, creamy substance secreted by nurse bees—to multiple freshly hatched larvae who would otherwise develop into workers. Although all larvae are fed royal jelly mixed with honey for the first two or three days after they hatch, developing queens are fed royal jelly exclusively and in large amounts through the entire larval period, spurring the formation of the mature ovaries required for queens to lay fertilized eggs. In a failing hive, the bees feed the jelly to larvae in worker cells that they enlarge in the hopes of growing a new queen before the hive falls apart. That’s the panic mode. Then there’s the prosperity mode: if the colony is too successful and all the hive’s cells fill with eggs and honey and pollen so there’s nowhere to lay eggs or store food anymore, the nurse bees go on a royal-jelly binge, feeding the highly nutritious substance to worker-bee larvae in specially built peanut-shaped “swarm cells” to raise a new queen so that the old one can depart with a swarm of young workers in search of roomier digs. In both modes, the workers cap the cells and wait for the queens to hatch. The first to do so eats her way out, then promptly chews through every other queen cell and stings her rivals to death—the queen’s stinger is not barbed like those of worker bees, so she has the capacity to sting multiple times without sacrificing her life. After she has dispatched her sisters, she goes after her mother if necessary (“only room for one mom,” says Miller). She feeds for four or five days, then flies out to mate.