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

by Hannah Nordhaus

  To monitor the incursions of the varroa mites, Miller places stickyboards—white cardboard rectangles coated with Crisco—under each hive. Each day he counts the number of mites that have fallen to the board and enters it in a spreadsheet; the more red specks on the board, the heavier the mite load. He counts the mites in control hives where no medicines have been applied, counts them in hives in which he has inserted approved pesticides, counts them in hives treated with unapproved and off-label medications. None of the honey in these hives is intended for consumption—the Frankenstein yard is purely for mad-scientist bee-medicine experiments and observation.

  I joined Miller to count the sinister red dots in batches of five, trying not to lose count through the netting of my veil, the glare of the stickyboard, and the insistent humming of bees whizzing past my ears, crawling on my arms, landing occasionally on my veil. There was something oddly meditative about this process—the sweat dripping down my face, the buzzing maelstrom of bees. The challenge of not scratching an itch and still keeping count took on nearly existential dimensions. Most of the stickyboards had only a few dots—40, 60, 150. Under hive 402, however, the board was covered in mites. I was charged with counting that one, but sometime after five hundred, when I had still covered only one corner of the board, I gave up. There comes a point, in beekeeping, when even a spreadsheet is unnecessary to capture the magnitude of a loss. “In the dictionary under the word collapse,” Miller said, “there’s a stickyboard with two thousand mites on it.” In rural North Dakota, they don’t need a dictionary to understand the concept of collapse: living off the land is always a gamble. Crops fail, colonies implode, people leave, houses fall in on themselves, but somehow the dwindling but still surviving residents find the proper balance of hope and fatalism that allows them to keep going.

  ON SUNDAY, I JOINED MY HOSTS, HARRY AND BRENDA KRAUSE, to attend services at the First United Church of Christ, a simple, sturdy, and unadorned church with white walls, white clapboard siding, and a broad wood-beamed nave. Miller, who typically attends Mormon services forty miles away in Jamestown, joined me, and we sat next to the Krauses and another local farmer. “I seen the cop coming out of your place of business,” Harry Krause prodded Miller. Miller rolled his eyes. Brenda mentioned that the postmistress had asked if something was wrong with Steve Kleingartner, because he was getting lots of cards and it wasn’t his birthday. Nobody knew the answer. After the service was over, they would surely find out.

  There was a guest speaker before the service—Fred Kirschenmann, a local organic farmer and a longtime proponent of sustainable agriculture, who was to talk on the future of farming. He began with a statement of the obvious: the family farm in America’s heartland is in decline. “There are seventy thousand farmers producing sixty percent of the nation’s crops,” he said. Only 6 percent are under age thirty-five. Almost 80 percent are fifty-five and older. “A century ago,” he noted, “it was the opposite.” Looking around me at the service, I had no doubt that what he said was true. There were a hundred or so people in attendance; only one or two appeared to be under fifty; there was one teenager, and not one younger child. The previous year’s confirmation class was the last the church would have; there was no one left to confirm.

  People are getting by in the heartland, Kirschenmann explained, either with help from their nonfarm income—a day job, a spouse’s salary—or by creating economies of scale and pesticide-and-fertilizer scorched-earth strategies that are ultimately unsustainable. Few Americans live on their farms anymore. Instead they rent them out to larger operations, because the equipment is so expensive and fuel costs so high. Rural communities, like inner cities, have ceded membership in the nation’s ownership society. The farmers around me nodded in agreement. Kirschenmann, who owns one of the first, largest, and most successful organic farms in the state, argued that only a return to smaller, more varied and labor-intensive agriculture, like his own farm, could bring the people back and revitalize rural communities like Gackle and countless others in North Dakota. But the trends are heading the other way.

  After Kirschenmann finished speaking, Miller and his neighbors chatted. “How many of my kids went into bees?” Miller asked Harry Krause and the men around him. “Exactly zero. How many of your kids went into agriculture?” The farmers felt no need to answer. “Did you want them to go into agriculture?” They shook their heads. Miller would like his business to survive him. He would also like to retire. “I’d like to do something else with my life by the time I’m sixty,” he says. “I’d like to be able to see the exit door in five years and launch the next generation.” But he needs someone to launch. His children don’t appear interested; South Africans provide timely help but not, unfortunately, a long-term solution. That lies, he hopes, in his trusted manager, Ryan Elison, who came to work for him in Idaho ten years ago and fell in love with bees. Poor soul! Elison now runs much of the day-to-day operations for Miller, who hopes to sell the business to him soon and then move on to a second career “using my brain. I might want to be a paralegal,” he says, only half in jest.

  Big agriculture has not been kind to Gackle, which has lost its kids, and thus its future, in a rural economy that is as unforgiving as the weather. The message was bleak, and after a more traditional sermon and a few hymns, we filed soberly out of the church. On the way home, we drove to Linda’s house to see if she needed anything after the weekend’s drama. But as we approached, Miller clucked and kept driving. Barry’s car was parked outside. He had come back to Linda, and Linda had allowed him back, and Wessel would soon be heading to Iowa, to another unfamiliar home in another fading agricultural redoubt where people seek to endure in a world that is no longer so hospitable for them.

  Barry wouldn’t stay; Linda wouldn’t keep him. But on that luminous and bittersweet August weekend, it was, perhaps, hard to let go just yet. We cleave to the way things are, not only to hold back a chaotic future, and not only because that is what we know. Gackle is a testament to the value of sheer persistence. There is value in returning to the one who loves you, in keeping the family farm going, in living where you grew up, in keeping bees when no amount of common sense and economic self-preservation can justify it. The colony may be collapsing in North Dakota, but not everyone is flying off. There is value, yes, and there is dogged romance in persistence. And John Miller is nothing if not a romantic.

  I left Gackle that afternoon after church as menacing blue-black storm clouds boiled on the western horizon. A week later, Miller wrote me an email:

  Upon your departure,

  the skies erupted.

  Remember how queer the sky appeared?

  After your safe departure,

  we received 2.80” of rain.

  Zow!

  Two days later, we clocked in another 1.30”.

  Zow!

  Two days later, that being this very evening,

  we received .65 in a violent temper tantrum.

  Thus; a total.

  January 1 through August 1, 7.21 inches precipitation.

  August 2 through August 25, 8.25 inches precipitation.

  The semi-arid region of the northern plains is a raucous place.

  Unpredictability is predictable.

  Soon, a frost.

  No one knows, but you may bet around September 21.

  By December 21, average daytime highs will be 21.

  Average nighttime lows will be 2.

  Tonight we hid the trucks in the buildings, anticipating violence.

  It came, without hail.

  Other areas were not so fortunate; receiving baseball sized hail.

  No bowling ball hail, no watermelon hail.

  But driven by wind, baseball sized hail will kill cattle,

  and any human too damned dumb to get out of the weather.

  Chapter Nine

  Bittersweet Bounty

  BUT IN THE END, THERE IS HONEY.

  Before the thunderstorm, before the sermon, before the Jägermeister-fueled the
atrics, Miller consulted a map dotted with red thumbtacks. Each tack represented a flowering meadow where he kept a couple dozen hives, and we planned to take the honey from one of those meadows. He promised a good meadow, one close by and wildly overgrown. In Miller’s ideal world, the entire North Dakota prairie would be wildly overgrown. It would be overrun with impulsive, flowering weeds. It would belong only to alcoholic farmers who never get their haying done on time. The meticulous farmers, the corporate farmers, the uptight ones who cut their alfalfa before it blooms are no help to him. Neither are the ones who plow under their clover and alfalfa and plant in its stead acres upon acres of corn that brooks no weeds and carries no nectar and pollinates on the wind and provides little sustenance for a foraging bee. No, Miller prefers the sloppy guys, the ones who cut their hay late and thus let their fields explode in a riot of bloom.

  But that year in Gackle, even the most neglected meadows were disappointing. As we headed east out of town, Miller pulled over and picked a violet alfalfa floret. The flowers looked healthy enough—in deep purple bloom. Miller put the flower in his mouth. I followed suit. The blossoms should have been sweet on the tongue, but they tasted like nothing, like dust. He squeezed the stem. If a plant is well hydrated, a tear of water should emerge. There were no tears. We hopped back in the truck for another mile, Willie and Jaco following in a flatbed truck, then took a right on a dirt road that led us to an overgrown swale on the far reaches of a nearby farm.

  It was a perfect day to pull honey—calm, sunny, and warm. We stopped the trucks near a congregation of hives bunched haphazardly in a field of budding buckwheat and fading alfalfa, pulled veils over our faces, and lighted smokers to calm the bees. The hives were stacked four boxes high by that point in the summer—the bottom box housed the double-deep brood chamber with the queen; the three shallower supers on top contained the honey for human consumption. An excluder screen kept the queen from moving up to and laying eggs in the supers, ensuring that the upper boxes contained only honey, no queen or brood. The smaller worker bees, however, could travel easily between the hive and the honey boxes to build comb and deposit nectar and pollen—and as long as the flowers were blooming, that is what they did. But around this time of summer, as the light and blossoms faded, the bees shifted into survival mode, preparing to hunker down for a long winter with their honey provisions.

  Miller had steeled himself for a disappointing harvest. August is never a fecund time, but this year, drought had accelerated the schedule. In early July, when the temperatures hit 105 degrees, the sweet clover went “poof.” The alfalfa followed in short order. We were now harvesting the last of the season’s bounty. Miller pried the top off a hive and placed a fume board on top of the uppermost honey super. The board had been doused with an acrid substance called Bee-Go, whose battery-acid stench defies description, though Miller kindly took a stab for me: “noxious, revolting, nauseating, eye-transplant; no anesthesia, chunk-blowing,” he suggested. Suffice it to say, it stinks, and drives the bees down from the upper honey boxes into the brood chamber at the bottom, where they hunker down with the queen waiting for the malodorous moment to pass. Bee-Go deployed, he could then pull honey without depleting the hive of too many of its workers. The supers were dripping with honey, heaped with beeswax. Replacing the top, he hoisted the box onto the pallet. “This is beautiful,” he said. “I mean heavy.” Heavy is good in the world of beekeeping. Heft augurs prosperity. A light hive may be easier to lift, but it means that something is wrong, and so, if you are a beekeeper, it is the hardest labor that is the most rewarding.

  Despite Miller’s gentlemanly imprecations, I hefted one of the supers. It weighed around fifty pounds, dense with calories, and I waddled slowly to the pallet and let it down. Miller had already beat me there with another box, and after lifting one more—just to prove that I could—I happily stood by and watched as Miller and the South Africans did the hard work of robbing the hives. They stole the two uppermost supers from each stack, hoisted the boxes onto a pallet, loaded the pallet onto a forklift and onto Willie’s large truck, then took the load to the honey house to see what sort of payoff they had reaped.

  A honey house is a small processing plant where honey is extracted and placed in barrels or bottles for sale to the public. It usually has a concrete floor, a metal roof, and a sickly-sweet smell. The floors are littered with expiring bees, the air thick with honey and despair. Returning from the bee yards, Miller’s crews hoist the supers from the flatbed to the “hot room,” where the boxes stay for three days, heated to 90 to 95 degrees to liquefy the honey. They then remove the frames from the supers and put them through a machine that takes the caps off the cells. They place them in a centrifugal extractor, which spins for eight to twelve minutes, freeing the honey and also some flakes of wax. The honey and wax mixture is then pumped into a collecting tank. The honey is separated from the wax in yet another spinning contraption and piped into another large settling tank, from which it is emptied into fifty-gallon food-grade steel barrels. The air resounds with the noises of whirring machines, the shotgun crack of barrels expanding. Miller can produce as many as eighty barrels a day, each of which holds 660 pounds of honey. In a bad year, Miller produces around a thousand barrels; in his best years, he has produced upward of two thousand—nearly 1.4 million pounds of honey. Before varroa mite, he typically produced 120 pounds per hive; the average now is more like 100. That’s good by American standards, but an Australian beekeeper is reputed to have extracted 629 pounds per hive during a particularly enthusiastic eucalyptus flow.

  Once the honey is packed, an employee of Miller’s—when I visited, a woman named Mona did the work—classifies each barrel for sale, measuring the water content and assigning numbers depending on how dark the honey is. The lowest numbers denote the whitest honeys, such as those produced from clover and alfalfa, which are the most valuable because they tend to have milder flavors, and honey packers can mix them with darker varieties to achieve a consistent, supermarket-friendly color. After marking the number, color, and moisture on the barrels, Miller stores them, thus classified, for loading into the trucks the packer sends each fall. It is then that the bee’s life’s work translates into dollars—though not, unfortunately, into enough of them. Honey prices have fluctuated wildly over the years and Miller says it typically runs five years from trough to peak: $0.10 a pound in 1970; $0.50 in 1975. In the five years between 2005 and 2010, prices went as high as $1.45 a pound and as low as $0.95. At the bottom of the trough, Miller loses money on every barrel of honey he produces. But no matter; to him, making honey is about more than annual profit. It is an annual miracle.

  HERE’S WHY, LEST WE FORGET: HONEY IS THE DISTILLED NECTAR of blooming flowers. It is collected by bees, lots and lots of bees. To make a pound of it, the 50,000 or 80,000 bees who live together in a hive at the height of summer will travel a collective fifty-five thousand miles and visit more than two million flowers. A hive can collect more than thirty pounds in a single day when the stars align and the nectar gushes. One worker bee will visit fifty to one hundred flowers on each trip from the hive, in the process collecting and dispersing pollen from flower to flower, allowing the plants it touches to reproduce. In that sense, bees carry the future from tree to tree, and honey is the reward for their labors, nectar distilled by desire and duty into something more. Floral perpetuity is the transaction; bees are the middlemen; those who take care of the bees are also its beneficiaries. Vegans struggle with the question of whether they are allowed to eat honey: is it an animal product? Way back when, the Jews struggled with the same question; the rabbis resolved it in favor of the sweet tooth. “That honey is a vegetable product, was known to the ancient Jews,” wrote Langstroth, “one of whose Rabbins asks: ‘Since we may not eat bees, which are unclean, why are we allowed to eat honey?’ and replies: ‘Because bees do not make honey, but only gather it from plants and flowers.’” Could they have followed any other logic?

  Honey is composed of glucose, f
ructose, and water, in addition to at least twenty-two other complex sugars, such as maltose, sucrose, kojibiose, turanose, isomaltose, and maltulose. That combination of sugars is what makes honey honey; the acids, pigments, proteins, and minerals found in smaller amounts are what make clover honey taste so very different from, say, onion honey. The average honey bee will produce about one-twelfth of a teaspoon of the stuff in her lifetime, returning home from each trip laden with half her weight in nectar and pollen, then transforming that raw nectar into honey through a unique digestive alchemy in which she ingests and regurgitates it a number of times. As she does so, she adds enzymes that help break down the complex sugars in the nectar into simple sugars. She then places the processed nectar in unsealed honeycomb cells, which other worker bees fan with their wings until much of the water evaporates. The water content of fresh nectar may be as high as 55 percent, but within an hour it reduces to 40 percent. Once the “ripe” honey is sealed, the moisture content falls below 18.6 percent. Ripe honey will not ferment and, if properly sealed, can be stored for years, decades, even centuries, without spoiling. The typical moisture content of unadulterated honey, which is 36 percent denser than water, is between 15 and 18 percent; Miller’s North Dakota honey typically comes in between 16.4 and 17.4 percent. If the water content is much higher than 18 percent, chances are it’s been diluted with other substances or taken from the hive before it is ripe. Good honey, like good wine, gets better with time. “Old honey is more wholesome than that freshly fathered by the bees,” Lorenzo Langstroth explained.