Italian bees were adopted quickly throughout the United States, and today the familiar yellow-and-black bees dominate the American beekeeping industry. Second in popularity is the dusky brown-and-gray-striped Carniolan, another European subspecies that originated in the Balkans and Eastern Europe. Miller keeps mostly Carniolans, which he prefers because of their extreme gentleness, their superior resistance to some insect pests (although not, unfortunately, the varroa mite), and their impressive wintering-over capacity in colder climates. The hives tend to expand rapidly in the spring as the nectar flows and cut off brood production just as quickly in the fall, thus producing more nectar in the summer and consuming less honey over the winter than Italian bees do. Breeders have also experimented with designer bees, such as the Buckfast, a hybrid bred and patented by a Benedictine monk named Brother Adam, who kept bees at Buckfast Abbey in Devon, England. After concluding that certain breeds of bees—Italians, for instance—survived a notorious 1915–’16 British bee die-off better than the native black bees, Brother Adam traveled the world searching for superior queens, developing a cross of French, Greek, Egyptian, Moroccan, and Turkish bees that combined the traits he was looking for: good honey and brood production, gentle behavior, and disease resistance. Brother Adam is credited with introducing the idea that careful breeding could be used to create bees that were more resistant to disease and pests. The Buckfast is still sold by queen-breeders today.
Typically, bee breeders mass-inseminate their queens, or mate them on the wing in isolation from other breeds, then sell them to queen-rearers, who open-mate them with their own stock in larger numbers. Breeders have always tried to tailor the gene pool to favor traits that make bees easy to manage; now they’re striving just as hard to create bees that resist the varroa mite as well. Essentially they are seeking to mimic the process of natural evolution, in a hurry. Some populations have survived the onslaught of the mite in Brazil, South Africa, and isolated pockets in France, Sweden, New York state, and the American Southwest—though often, when those resistant populations are moved to locations where the mites are more active, they too crash. Bee guys hope that with careful breeding, European bees might be able to develop more successful mechanisms to resist the mites. In 1997, the Honey Bee Breeding Laboratory in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, imported Russian bees hailing from the Vladivostok area and supplied them to breeders. Because the varroa mites first made the jump from Asian to European honey bees in that region of the world, the bees there have, over the 150 years that they have been exposed to varroa mites, developed some resistance. Some beekeepers swear by the Russian bees, though they fare best—no surprise—in cold climates, and their resistant traits tend to be quickly diluted in the gene pool once they are exposed to nearby bees of other breeds.
Since 2001, the Baton Rouge lab has also distributed a line of queens bred specifically for “varroa-sensitive hygiene”—or VSH. VSH worker bees are able to detect and remove mite-infested brood. They do so at some cost, however. The bees are refined so specifically for their varroa-resistant properties—they are so deeply inbred—that they aren’t as good at all the other things bees need to do, like producing lots of brood and collecting lots of honey. The Minnesota Hygienic bee, developed by University of Minnesota entomologist Marla Spivak, is another resistant breed. Spivak developed a line of varroa-resistant bees by freeze-killing brood with liquid nitrogen and raising queens only from productive colonies whose workers detected and cleaned out the abnormal brood within twenty-four hours. She has since worked with queen-breeders across the country, teaching them to test for hygienic behaviors among their open-mated bees. The hope is that as more breeders select for varroa resistance—Heitkam, for instance, has been doing it for years—the drone pool will improve and it will take longer for resistant traits to be diluted through open breeding.
Bee researchers and desperate beekeepers like John Miller hope that these efforts will get a boost from recent advances in the understanding of bee genetics. In 2006, a team of scientists from the USDA’s Beltsville, Maryland, bee lab oversaw a collaboration to decode the honey bee genome. To create the genetic “essence” of honey bee, researchers pulverized a collection of drones from a single colony—all of whom had the same DNA, because drones, which are created from the queen’s unfertilized eggs, are always genetically fatherless. The drones were frozen, mashed into a big soup, and spun in a series of centrifuges that pulled off proteins, fats, legs, wings, and other miscellaneous body parts. What remained were solid crystals of bee salt. These were then ground in pestles, mashed into little plastic tubes, spun again, and washed with various solvents, until all that was left were small pellets of DNA. Those were suspended in water and placed in a thermal cycler, which somehow, inconceivably, provided graphs of each gene and pathogen found in the pellet. When read by someone who understands these things—not, in all likelihood, a beekeeper or someone who writes about beekeepers—the graphs provide all sorts of information about what those bees are like: what they can and can’t do, are good at and bad at.
The lab’s genome group is led by Jay Evans, a lanky, soft-spoken social-insect specialist—his graduate work involved high-alpine ants. Evans and his team use the genome information to compare variations among bees, looking, for instance, at differences between European and Africanized bees and between healthy bees and those sickened by nosema or any of the dozens of ailments that have lately afflicted America’s bee herd. The lab, a brick building set on a labyrinthine complex on the outskirts of Washington, D.C., looks more like an old insane asylum than a cutting-edge genetics facility. It hosts only a few test hives in its backyard; other than that, there’s not much evidence of bugs in the building, just denatured remains. Still, the work that goes on there is anything but antiquated: Evans and his team are also decoding the varroa genome, dissecting varroa brains and extracting DNA samples to understand and, they hope, disrupt the genes that dictate their reproduction, or to find pathogens to which the mites could be vulnerable. Lately, though, they’ve spent most of their time chasing a genetic explanation for CCD: “The main things we have found is that a number of things can kill off honey bees—viruses, pesticides, nutrition,” Evans says. “It’s amazing that they survive as much as they do.”
Someday, it is devoutly hoped, bee genomics—beenomics—will trickle down to the queen-rearing community. Easy tests might someday let any beekeeper create his or her own pest- and plague-resistant local hybrids. For now, however, new breeds of bees tend to be created at universities and in bee labs, not out in the field, and the resistant traits developed in those labs are all too quickly diluted when they enter the promiscuous open-mated world. But even if those lab-created traits were to become dominant, some wonder whether it would be a good thing. After all, “better” bees tend to create their own monoculture, as Italian bees did in the nineteenth century. The queen-rearing industry then reinforces that monoculture by requeening each year with the same uniform matrons from the same swath of land in California or Florida or Georgia. Productive, gentle, perhaps even mite-resistant, but nonetheless standardized, they may be especially vulnerable to new scourges as destructive as the varroa mite or CCD.
Human selection often has unintended consequences. Before the Langstroth hive came along, beekeepers used to destroy their heaviest colonies to extract honey, thus inadvertently selecting for less productive bees. Thanks to the queen-rearing industry, bees that adapt to their local microclimates are replaced each year with bees from somewhere else. Still, the greatest damage to the national herd’s genetic diversity has been wreaked not by breeders like Pat Heitkam and the Koehnens, but by the varroa mite, which wiped out almost every feral colony in the country. Feral bees had broadened the gene pool by mating with managed queens. Now the vast majority of the nation’s beekeepers rely almost completely on mail-order commercial queens to supply new blood.
ALMOST COMPLETELY, BUT NOT ENTIRELY. BECAUSE THE NATION’S bee herd has also acquired an infusion of new genes from another
source: Africanized “killer” bees, whose marauding swarms so panicked the nation when news of their depredations first hit the media in the 1970s and ’80s. The Africanized bee is a hybrid between several subspecies of Apis mellifera. It was created inadvertently in 1956 after Brazilian biologist Warwick Kerr imported forty-seven queens from Tanzania to Brazil in hopes of combining the best traits of the European honey bee—gentleness and prolific breeding—with those of the scrappy African bee (Apis mellifera adansonii), which produced more honey in warm environments than did northern-adapted bees. But before Kerr had a chance to create his superior breed, twenty-six swarms of the Tanzanian bees escaped and mated with local European drones, creating a feral hybrid whose descendants produced ample honey and worked hard, even in the rain and the dark, but were also defensive and easily riled, and thus extremely difficult to manage. The new bees were indeed well suited to life in the tropics—spectacularly so: they mated fast, usurped other bees’ hives, interbred with European bees, and passed all sorts of bad habits on to their spawn. They attacked keepers and family pets and hapless passersby in large numbers and for long distances. They robbed other hives of honey. They abandoned their colonies at the slightest provocation.
They spread quickly, too, moving north through South America at a rate of almost a mile a day, blasting through Central America and Mexico, and arriving in Hidalgo, Texas, in October 1990. The bees then swarmed from the Texas border through southern New Mexico and Arizona and into Southern California. They have also been found in Louisiana, Arkansas, southern Utah, Florida, and Georgia, and wherever they go, they easily outcompete and outbreed managed bees. They are almost impossible to tell apart from their European cousins. They have slightly shorter wings, but not enough to be visible to the naked eye or even with the help of a microscope—the subspecies can only be definitively identified through mitochondrial DNA analysis. Thus a beekeeper may not realize his formerly gentle bees have been infiltrated by the Africans until one day they set upon him or his dog or kids or wife or newspaper boy.
There have always been nasty bees—those “improvident or unfortunate” insects that are filled “with the bitterest hate against any one daring to meddle with them,” Langstroth wrote. “If a whole colony on sallying forth possessed such a ferocious spirit, no one could hive them unless clad in a coat of mail, bee-proof; and not even then, until all the windows of his house were closed, his domestic animals bestowed in some place of safety, and sentinels posted at suitable stations to warn all comers to keep at a safe distance.” Langstroth’s hypothetical breed would be far more malicious than today’s Africanized hybrid; even the German black bees that he worked with in his day were considerably nastier than almost any bee you’d encounter today. Nor are Africanized bees any more venomous than your standard European bee—their stings, in fact, deliver slightly less venom. Their victims to date have died not from the bees’ venom but because of underlying heart conditions or allergic reactions. Still, Africanized bees are far more defensive and will, if disturbed—by lawn mowers, power tools, or unsuspecting beekeepers—come boiling out of a colony en masse and pursue the offender. They’ll attack eyes, mouths, and ears, anything, stinging in greater numbers than European bees, for greater distances, with greater persistence.
That’s what John Miller learned back in 2005—in the same fateful span of time when his brother Lane crashed his truck and the varroa mite crashed his operation. That year the family decided to expand the empire into Rockville, Texas. They did so on the advice of a Texas honey impresario who told Miller’s brother Jay that Rockville offered plenty of winter territory for the taking. John was against the move, arguing that all prime bee turf in this country was spoken for thirty years ago: “I said to them, ‘If it’s so good, why isn’t anybody else there?’ ” But away they went. They dropped the bees off in the spring, splitting their hives and allowing the virgins to soar off on mating flights with local drones. By summertime, the bees were “so damn mean you could barely work them.” A forklift would touch a pallet of bees, and hundreds of guards would explode to the attack from all four hives. The pallet next to it would do the same and the one next to that one. They’d set each other off like a stadium wave, surge after surge of belligerent bees. They’d do it any time of day, even in the coolest part of the morning. Within weeks, Miller’s formerly gentle and industrious citadels had transformed into cantankerous mobs that attacked with little provocation. He got out of there, fast: cantankerous honey bees aren’t for him. He doesn’t like to describe them as “Africanized,” though. He prefers to be politically correct about it. He calls them “behavior challenged honey bees,” or BCHs for short:
For 400 years, the scourge of the planet, the European White Guy
selected nice, big, gentle honey bees.
Italians, Carniolans.
Over the past 400 years, while we were selecting for meaty, beaty, big and bouncy bees,
and parenthetically, their equally robust drones;
the Behavior Challenged Honey bee has fought its way through the jungle, taking on all foes,
mating with the wily virgin, and staying light on their collective feet. . . .
It Appears To Me
that the BCH drone is slightly more nimble than the European drone.
[I have heard the Euros have better cigarettes, however.]
When our bees left CA after the almonds, they were just fine, normal behavior.
When I delivered the same hives to honey-production bee yards in North Dakota
three months later;
They Had Changed.
Pissed Off All The Time.
Not Very Good Honey Producers . . .
Now, what was the question?
The European queens get hooked up with the African drone.
The African drone is a hot-headed devil,
and her children become more like their dad,
than their mom.
It took seven or eight generations—two or three years, countless stings, and lots of packages from Pat Heitkam and the Koehnens—to restore Miller’s bloodlines to something close to their original benevolent state. For Miller the Africanized bee was a thorough inconvenience. But for those who seek to build a better bee, the nasty interloper may provide some guidance for navigating our brave new mite- and disease-ridden world of beekeeping. In Brazil, where the Africanized bee originated, honey production has skyrocketed, going from 6,500 tons a year before the arrival of African bees to 36,000 tons in 2008. During the half century in which they’ve coexisted, Brazilian beekeepers have learned how to interact with the bees; during the three decades that the varroa mite has been present in the Western Hemisphere, the bees also appear to have learned to interact with it. They recover far more quickly from its incursions than do bees of pure European descent. The same is true in the United States. Frank Eischen, an entomologist with the USDA’s Agricultural Research Service in Weslaco, Texas, works extensively with Africanized bees. He told me a few years ago that some colonies in his lab had survived for seven or eight years without any varroa treatment. Perhaps Warwick Kerr’s mad experiment wasn’t so disastrous after all. The suspicion is that because Africanized bees swarm more quickly, they also abandon a hive and its infected brood more quickly when confronted with collapse. Their mobility, the very aspect of their behavior that is so frightening, appears to provide a useful tool in fighting the varroa mite. European bee colonies collapse; Africanized ones abscond.
They are, in short, “survivor stock,” and there is very little of that to be found these days. Beekeepers are harnessed by their own survival instinct to the treadmill of medication, resistance, carnage, and requeening—and honey bees are harnessed to those beekeepers. But until entomologists can pinpoint and target the exact mechanism of resistance and create a magic bee that fights off modern pests and still does all the other things a modern bee must do, there is only one surefire way to create a better bee: “You just choose survivors and breed those,” says Eischen. Let the
rest die. It would be best, says the Beltsville lab’s Jay Evans, if they passed a law that prohibited the application of chemicals for varroa mites. Were American honey bees left to their own devices, some very small percentage of them would surely evolve a defense against the varroa mite, as Apis cerana did in Asia with its grooming behavior and as the Africanized bee appears to have done with its tendency to abscond. If that were to happen, the bee population would drop by 80 to 90 percent for a while, and it would be an economic disaster for people like John Miller, and all the farmers who depend on people like John Miller to pollinate their crops, and all of us who like to eat almonds and cherries and apples and lettuce and such. But eventually, resistant bees would develop, and from those bees would come a stronger national herd. Still, adds Evans, “I could never tell someone to let their bees die.”
The Beekeeper's Lament: How One Man and Half a Billion Honey Bees Help Feed America Page 18
