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

by Hannah Nordhaus

  If crops didn’t blow away, they baked in the fields, and as the lean years continued, farmers mortgaged their homes, their fields, their tractors, and even their old, wretched cows, in the hopes of staying afloat. Most didn’t succeed: more than forty-three thousand farmers in North Dakota lost their land to foreclosure between 1920 and 1934, and tens of thousands more simply abandoned their homes, farms, and businesses. The Dust Bowl eroded not only the land, but also the expectations that North Dakota’s dogged settlers had brought with them when they settled there. Historian Elwyn Robinson called this surfeit of optimism the “too-much mistake”—“North Dakota had too much of too many things too soon,” he wrote in the 1960s. “The pioneers created too many farms, too many towns, too many schools, churches, and colleges, too many counties and too much government, too much railroad mileage, too many banks, and too much debt.”

  The population drain continued through the twentieth century. Profitable farms required more and more sophisticated machinery and bigger and bigger spreads. (Today the average North Dakota farm is 3,000 acres, nearly twenty times the size of the traditional 160-acre homestead.) Farmers daunted by the inefficiencies of small-scale farming or discouraged by the difficulties of making ends meet sold out to larger operations and moved to town or to Fargo or Bismarck or out of state. First, a handful of farmers would leave with their families, then a few more. Six would leave one year, three the next, seven the following. As they did, schools like the one in Gackle consolidated, teachers departed, and one by one, then in batches and bunches, counties began to revert to historic “frontier” conditions—a status defined by demographers as fewer than six people per square mile. Today large areas of North Dakota contain fewer than two people per square mile.

  Only two states—Wyoming and Vermont—are home to fewer people than North Dakota; only Alaska, Wyoming, and Montana have lower population densities. Between 1930 and 2008, the nation’s population grew two-and-a-half-fold. In that same time period, North Dakota lost 45,000 residents, declining from its 1930 peak of 680,000 to just shy of 637,000 in 2009. And while the population has stabilized and even begun growing again recently thanks to an oil boom in the western part of the state, the farm population has continued to bleed. In 1950, Gackle had 600 residents. At the end of the twentieth century, the number had dropped below 300. Despite the town’s obvious (to me, anyway) rural charms, it’s no mystery why such places continue to lose people: in 2000 the average per capita income was just under $16,000; the median age was sixty-one. More than 45 percent of the people who lived in Gackle in 2000 were sixty-five or older. Just 9 percent were under eighteen. “It used to be a hopping, be-bopping town,” says Miller, but “now there are no kids. They leave for college and you never see them again.”

  WHILE MOST OF HUMANITY SWARMS TOWARD THE CITIES, Miller makes camp in the places they leave behind. This is an ideal setup for bees, but it poses a problem for their keepers, because although the bees do most of the work, their commercial keepers still need other humans to help them move the hives and harvest and process the honey, and there simply aren’t enough. In the northern plains, humans, especially those of an age amenable to lifting fifty-pound hives, are in short supply. “I’ll hire any schoolkid who will walk in the door,” Miller says. “The problem is there aren’t any schoolkids.” Miller introduced me to his friend LeRoy Brant, who keeps his bees in Towner, North Dakota, in the summertime. Brant told me that he advertised for help in North Dakota a few years ago, offering a wage of twelve to fifteen dollars an hour. “I didn’t get one phone call for six months.” Hispanic laborers, so plentiful and controversial in urban areas today, have also proven difficult to keep around—many find it hard to leave their support network for the isolation of North Dakota.

  So instead, Brant, Miller, and many other northern plains beekeeping outfits rely on labor brokers who arrange temporary visas for South African workers—mostly white Afrikaaner farmers and twentysomethings looking for adventure and relief from their country’s erratic economy. Bee guys like to hire them because they speak English and have driver’s licenses, and they also blend in well with the industrious German and Russian farmers who populate rural North Dakota. Most years, Miller imports around fifteen South Africans to tend his bees and process his honey. Some come back for successive summers and require little supervision. The green ones start in the honey house, “stapling together their fingers and boxes for bees,” says Miller. Later they graduate to processing honey, then to handling the bees. They live with two or three others in six houses that Miller bought in Gackle as the original owners decamped for less arduous pastures.

  On Friday nights, most of Miller’s South Africans are at the bar, and after I settled in at the Krauses that August evening, Miller and I walked downtown to meet them. From all appearances, Dani’s Place, the town’s only watering hole, saw far less activity than the senior center next door. Shafts of late-day light streamed through the door and small windows, illuminating the dust and the beer-stained woodwork. There were five people inside. One was Dani, the bartender, who was tall, bald, and robust, with a puffy walrus mustache. The other four were Miller’s Afrikaaner employees, Willie, Wessel, Conroy, and Jacobus—“Jaco” for short. Willie, in his fifties, was the father figure of the bunch, a solid, round-cheeked farmer from the southern Cape region who was struggling to keep his land and spent ten months of the year hauling American bees to make ends meet. Jaco, in his mid-twenties, was young, blond, affable, and soft-spoken. Conroy was still a teenager: tall and sandy-haired, he didn’t say much. His half brother Wessel was twenty-one, the city boy of the group, with spiky dark hair and an edgy sociability. They had been drinking for a while, and as they ordered another round, Miller—as he is wont to do—disappeared, leaving me alone with them.

  After a few awkward hellos all around, Wessel invited me to sit with him at a peeling two-top near the bar. He had just downed four shots of Jägermeister—a syrupy German liqueur reputed to contain elk’s blood (it doesn’t), and known to make people do stupid things (it does). He stacked his shot glasses as he informed me, with booming good cheer, that Miller had gone out back to talk to Barry, another South African migrant who had been coming to Gackle for years with his girlfriend Linda. Barry worked for Tommy Wagner, who farmed just down the road from Miller’s honey house. Linda worked in the honey house, and the couple lived together in one of Miller’s spare homes. Wessel lowered his voice and leaned in. This week, he told me, Linda had asked Barry to move out. Then Wessel raised his voice and leaned back and told me—out of nowhere—that he hated black people. I looked around furtively, expecting barbed stares from bystanders. But this was North Dakota. There were no bystanders, and furthermore, there were no black people—in 2000, Gackle was 99.4 percent white, and if that’s not homogenous enough, it’s also 75 percent German. Such fading prairie outposts are, for men—boys—like Wessel, imaginative reconstructions of South Africa as the creators of apartheid had wished it to be—an agrarian society of hardy northern Europeans, and not a black person for miles around. “I hate them,” he told me again, and ordered four more shots. It seemed wise to depart, so I did, extracting promises that Wessel and Willie would take me along the next day to tour some of the bee yards.

  I arrived at Miller’s honey house the next morning dressed for beekeeping, but nobody else was there, unless you counted the usual straggler bees who came in with the honey and were in their death throes, wobbling across the floors and walls, clambering dizzily onto my ankles. I watched them wander the dirt parking area until Miller and Willie arrived with Jaco in tow. Wessel, they told me, had overdone it last night and was sleeping in. We gathered suits, smokers, and gloves, but as we climbed into trucks to head to the fields, the sheriff drove up, looking officious. The previous night, sometime after I left, sometime after more shots and more beers, sometime after Dani had kicked Wessel and Barry out of the bar, the two men had driven to Linda’s house. Linda had called the police, Barry had broken a phone, an
d then Barry and Wessel had headed back to Main Street, where they trashed a bench that had been donated to the city of Gackle by the Future Farmers of America. They’d spent the night in jail.

  This was not typical behavior in Gackle, and the sheriff was not pleased, so Miller spent some time reassuring him that the Wessel problem would be taken care of. Then Miller and I headed out in his big red pickup, followed by Willie and Jaco in a huge flatbed carrying a forklift and a pile of pallets. We visited a few bee yards and as morning bled into noon, Miller and I headed into town for lunch. The usual coterie of regulars was gathered at the Gackle Community Café, and they looked eagerly toward Miller as he opened the door. Seven or eight elderly men and women were holding court at a round table near the front. Miller said his hellos, shook hands all around, and beelined to a table in the back. He sat far from the others. “It’s a seething pit of vipers over there,” he said affectionately, nodding at the group. They didn’t look very dangerous—geriatric farmers and their wives, flannel shirts and work boots and blue-rinsed curls and cooling coffee—but they appeared to have lots of free time. In this respect, Miller’s boys had made the café society’s day. It had only been a couple of hours since the sheriff stopped by the honey house, but by now the whole town knew that Wessel and Barry had gotten into trouble.

  Small towns like Gackle are like beehives. They rely on a fine-tuned social balance that is, if not fragile, then at least fixed, yielding little. It was obvious that Wessel would have to go. There was simply no room for troublemakers who destroyed FFA benches and vectored unhappiness. So just as nurse bees escort sick or injured workers to the hive entrance, banishing misfits, Miller would have to devise an exit strategy for Wessel. At lunch, over grilled cheese and iced tea, Miller made up his mind. He would ship Wessel off to a beef guy he knew in Iowa—beef guys can get by with a heavier touch—to see if he could make a fresh start in a town where all the FFA benches were intact.

  Wessel’s brother Conroy, who was quiet and pleasant and a hard worker who had done nothing wrong, would have to go with him. They came together; they would leave together. Miller knows what it’s like when brothers differ. He often revisits the lessons of Jacob and Esau, Ephraim and Manasseh. His brother Jay is four years younger. For most of their adult lives, they worked as partners in the family beekeeping business. Jay ran operations in Idaho; John oversaw the California and North Dakota operations. This geographical separation was not an accident: the two men disagreed on most everything, but especially beekeeping. In 2008 their disputes proved particularly costly. Every fall, once the hives are stripped, Miller feeds the bees medicated syrup containing an ingredient called fumagillin, which helps prevent nosema. He must do so after the honey has been harvested, so as not to contaminate product intended for human consumption, but before the weather turns. If it’s too cold, bees lose their appetites and won’t eat the syrup. Early that fall, as it became clear that Nosema ceranae, the deadly new nosema strain, was spreading quickly through U.S. hives, the brothers disagreed about when to cut off the honey harvest to medicate the bees. John wanted to stop the harvest early and get the colonies “fat, heavy, and strong” for the coming winter so they could serve as pollinating units for the following year, not honey production units for the current one. Jay wanted to make honey. “The Idaho operation almost did a good job,” Miller says bitterly. “Thus, the bees almost picked up the syrup. Thus, they were almost inoculated against nosema. Thus, they almost survived winter in good shape.”

  But of course they did not. A spring nosema epidemic cost the Millers three thousand hives and in early 2008, Miller and his brother decided to part ways. It was, says Miller, a “slow train wreck,” long in coming. Jay kept some hives, and a real estate and cattle business he’d started on the side that John never approved of. John kept the majority of the colonies. He’s fairly certain he’s getting the poor end of the bargain. More bees, more headaches. So instead of going on vacation, instead of heading to the beach or the mountains, as normal Americans do, Miller spends much of the month of August pulling honey and counting red dots in his Frankenstein yard, the apiary where he tests various miticides. Each day in August, without fail, he visits the roadside semicircle of hives, monitoring the incursions of the varroa mite.

  AFTER LUNCH, WE HOPPED BACK IN HIS TRUCK FOR A VISIT TO the Frankenstein yard. We pulled up under the shade of an old poplar a reasonable distance from the hives and put on our coveralls and veils. As we sat in the safe confines of the truck, a dark cloud spun past us. A swarm had departed from one of Miller’s hives, leaving its safe rectangular shelter and heading into the unknown to find a new home. The churning brown eddy—tens of thousands of bees—smudged across the bee yard and came to rest on a cornstalk to reconnoiter. The plant bent with the weight of the insects. Miller was pissed, perplexed. Some swarms you can anticipate. If the hive is crowded and you spot peanut-shaped queen cells among the brood, there’s a good chance that half the colony is fixing to pick up and leave. But it’s awfully hard, when you have ten thousand hives, to open every brood chamber frequently enough to catch each developing swarm. Even smaller-scale beekeepers are often flummoxed by the onset of a swarm. “For years,” wrote Langstroth, “I spent much time in the vain attempt to discover some infallible indications of first swarming; until facts convinced me that there can be no such indications.”

  Most often, swarms occur when a hive has outgrown its space in the height of summer. When this happens, when a queen is so prolific and her worker bees so industrious that the hive produces more bees than it can contain, the hive, in prosperity mode, begins raising a new batch of queens. Then, after the new queen cells are capped but before the new queen hatches, the old queen departs with a group of robust pioneers to find a new place to establish a hive. Most bees swarm at midday, so they have time to find shelter before night’s coolness falls in. On the day that is “fixed for departure,” writes Langstroth, the queen grows restless, roaming the combs instead of laying eggs, communicating her agitation to the bees, who gorge themselves on honey in preparation for their journey. “At length,” he writes, “a violent agitation commences in the hive; the bees appear almost frantic, whirling around in circles continually enlarging, like those made by a stone thrown into still water, until, at last, the whole hive is in a state of the greatest ferment, and the bees, rushing impetuously to the entrance, pour forth in one steady stream. Not a bee looks behind, but each pushes straight ahead. . . .” As the swarm travels, it stops to rest on nearby trees, bushes, and walls, while the scouts look for a hollow tree, a rock crevice, or a chink in a building’s siding to call home. Swarms look frightening, but they are in fact surprisingly docile. With no hive to protect and with stomachs full of honey for the long journey to their new home, they are less inclined to sting. Many beekeepers handle them without gloves or veil.

  If bees swarm too early in the spring or too late in the summer, however, they tend to do so not because they are doing well, but because they are doing poorly, “driven to desperation,” says Langstroth. It occurred to me, as we sat in the safety of Miller’s truck watching the swarm spin away from us, that these bees, pushed from their home and desperate for a new place to lay down some comb, weren’t all that different from Wessel and his compatriots. Wessel had explained to me, over his four shots of Jägermeister, that after the fall of apartheid the blacks had renamed the streets in his South African hometown with African names. Wessel’s ancestors, of course, had performed similar acts of displacement. I couldn’t help but think of Africanized honey bees—like Wessel, African-European hybrids, peripatetic, prone to swarming, and not above usurping the hives of others. Wessel was, like the Africanized bee, aggressive and not terribly well socialized, although we can blame genes, not alcohol, for the bees’ behavior. And now both have been transplanted to the New World, where they have aroused no shortage of consternation.

  Swarming—migration, in human terms—is part of the deal in human history, and while it serves as a n
atural means of regeneration, it is also a powerful force of destabilization. European settlers swarmed to North Dakota; years later they trickled away, leaving behind disused homes and underpeopled villages. In their place came Wessel, who had found his own home less hospitable than he liked and who came and went in a few short months, leaving North Dakota one FFA bench the fewer. It’s not clear exactly why he derived pleasure from sowing such discord, but he had caused similar trouble, in smaller increments, all summer. Miller is certain that he erred in keeping Wessel around for as long as he did. Miller has never pretended to understand humans, though, so he’ll excuse himself for those mistakes. The ones he makes with his bees are less forgivable.

  The Frankenstein yard is where Miller seeks to foresee and forestall his mistakes, testing miticides, acids, and tick killers. It is where, in 2004, Miller came to realize that none of his previous go-to materials were working anymore, and where, in subsequent summers, he has tested new materials to control the mites. Late summer and early fall, when bee populations drop and mite populations rise, is the beekeeper’s only window to kill mites on winter bees. By applying medicine at the right time, as the queen lays her last generation of eggs, a beekeeper can prevent varroa mites from multiplying within the brood combs and overwhelming the winter bee population.

  So Miller starts, on the first of August, assiduously monitoring his Frankenstein yard, testing different mite-fighting preparations on different hives and entering the results of his tests on spreadsheets on an almost twenty-four-hour basis. Each of the test hives is numbered and placed in a semicircle. On the day I joined him, Miller pulled the top off each hive as we worked our way around. Most hives were healthy, the frames teeming with bees and dripping with honey. A few were in trouble. Those were bleak places to visit—dirty, bare, with few bees and little honey, like tenements with broken windows and graffitied hallways. Hive 411 was infected with chalkbrood, desiccated white larvae scattered below it. Hive 402 showed the telltale signs of varroa infestation: at the hive’s entrance, a number of “ants”—sickly bees without wings—wriggled in desultory circles. Under the lid the mites crawled freely across the backs of the bees, and the brood cells that we pierced with a knife all hosted telltale red dots on the developing white pupae.