Miller left once. In 1974, when he was twenty, he departed Gackle after an arduous summer and drove to Idaho in twelve hours flat—a record that held until 1999, the first year he owned the Corvette, when he made the drive in 11:45. As with the Corvette, it was another time of mutiny. “Gackle had emptied out as fall came,” he wrote, “and I just quit.” He wanted a normal life: “Friends. Independence. Irresponsibility.” He went to work in an Albertson’s supermarket and then did a semester at Ricks College, a Mormon school in Rexburg, Idaho, but was asked to leave because of “unacceptable behavior involving cigarettes and alcohol.” He transferred to Boise State University for a year, joined the student council, threw a bunch of parties, nearly got arrested, was dismissed from the student council, then did get arrested and spent a weekend in Ada County Jail. It was, he says, an education. “I learned that I did not want to be in jail. Ever.” Another semester, this time at Brigham Young University, cured him of college for good: “I damned near suffocated,” he said. He went back to bees. He didn’t know how to get along in the world, but he did know, even then, that bees provided “never-ending intrigue.” Better than jail; better than booze; better than college; better, ultimately, than any other future Miller could imagine.
It is too easy to compare bees to their keepers, but I will do it once more. “I once furnished a candy-shop, in the vicinity of my Apiary, with gauze-wire windows and doors, after the bees had commenced their depredations,” wrote Langstroth.
On finding themselves excluded, they alighted on the wire by thousands, fairly squealing with vexation as they vainly tried to force a passage through the meshes. Baffled in every effort, they attempted to descend the chimney, reeking with sweet odors, even although most who entered it fell with scorched wings into the fire, and it became necessary to put wire-gauze over the top of the chimney also. . . . As I have seen thousands of bees destroyed in such places, thousands more hopelessly struggling in the deluding sweets, and yet increasing thousands, all unmindful of their danger, blindly hovering over and alighting on them, how often they have reminded me of the infatuation of those who abandon themselves to the intoxicating cup. Even although such persons see the miserable victims of this degrading vice falling all around them into premature graves, they still press madly on, trampling, as it were, over their dead bodies, that they too may sink into the same abyss, and their sun also go down in hopeless gloom.
As with Langstroth’s candy-addled charges, beekeepers see the “hopeless gloom” that lies on their chosen path, and follow it anyway. Miller likes to say that there are two things in life: greed and fear. But he knows as well as any that there’s also passion. “A bee,” Kahlil Gibran wrote, “is a messenger of love,” of the evolutionary dance between stamen and stigma, flower and flower. Bees will do anything for nectar; beekeepers will do anything for bees. Like bees plunging headlong into the deluding sweets, like drunks in quest of their next fix, the beekeeper obliges, instinctively, whatever the cost. Unlike bees, though, beekeepers are human—they have a choice. We should be grateful, then, that they have chosen to do something so imprudent, so daft. The world would not function without them.
But for all his folly, the beekeeper has had to make some concessions to reality. The toll of pathogens and chemicals and rapid-fire migration has forced bees to evolve far more rapidly than they would have in a state of nature. And beekeepers have had to evolve along with them—to become survivor stock, or else to become something other than beekeepers. Beekeepers are more difficult to influence than bees, since they reproduce at a rate of one generation every twenty-five years or so, not one generation per year. They too have the problem of resistance, though it is mainly having too much of it, not too little; they are resistant to messing with what’s always worked for them. Some beekeeping experts—mostly the kind who don’t keep thousands of hives—would like people like John Miller to stay home with their bees and keep them away from the disease-vectoring almonds, to banish all chemicals from the hive, even to shun mass production altogether. That’s not likely to happen, so long as we want to keep our supermarkets teeming with produce. There simply isn’t another way to feed the multitudes who want to eat such foods. Big agriculture requires big beekeepers. “John and I are trying to make a living and keep twenty people making house and car payments,” says Pat Heitkam. It’s not so easy to “live on roots and seeds” when you’ve got a real business to run.
Still, beekeepers have evolved. They’ve moved from skeps to top-bar hives to the Langstroth hive, where they’ve roosted, for the most part, because who wants to mess with something so simple and elegant? They’ve moved from black bees to Italian bees, Carniolans, and Buckfasts, and on to Minnesota Hygienics. They’ve moved to trains, then highways, then into almonds and cherries and cranberries and blueberries. They’ve moved from honey to sugar syrup to corn syrup and back to honey. They are looking askance at chemical mite medications and searching for more sustainable options for fighting mites, such as breeding for resistance and using natural materials. They are avoiding certain crops that are associated with a high degree of loss and hassle. John Miller yanked his bees from the California oranges in 2008; Dave Hackenberg followed suit in Florida in 2010. He now takes them to Georgia, where he places them in the woods, well away from industrial crop pesticides. There they feast on titi shrubs, gallberries, and raspberries, on the wild things that bloom throughout a southern springtime. “They’re the best bees we’ve had in we don’t know how long,” says Hackenberg. “We’re going gangbusters, just big colonies of bees.”
Beekeepers are also learning to be less reticent about their contribution to the world, and to work together better, starting advocacy organizations like Project Apis mellifera, on whose board Miller sits, to push for better research and to educate Americans about the importance of bees and bee habitats. Miller fears they have learned too late—that they have squandered their fifteen minutes of fame.
Folks have moved on.
We are so yesterday.
So last century. . . .
He worries that beekeepers have evolved too slowly, “a room full of old men”—senescent, like worker bees that have outlived their usefulness. When bees get old—after they hatch and then labor as nurse bees inside the hive and then venture out to serve as foragers—after they have lived a full life, they begin, through natural exertion and time, to lose their vigor. They get shiny and raw. The fuzzy filaments of youth fall out and their supple skin grows tight and hard. Their wings get notched and ragged. They wear out. “They appear to die rather suddenly,” writes Langstroth, “and often spend their last days, and sometimes even their last hours, in useful labors.” That is the way a bee should die. But the way they have gone lately—wingless, or mummified, or quivering in a paralytic seizure, or simply gone, unmoored and disappeared—it’s just not right.
Losing so many bees isn’t financially viable, and it isn’t fun. John’s father, Neil, is philosophical about the continuing losses: “If I was young I would probably do the same thing over again,” he told me. “I guess I’ve been around long enough to know that if you get one problem solved another one will come along.” He had his struggles with pesticides and mechanized mowers in the 1960s; his boys now struggle with mites and disease. When that’s in hand, they’ll be “waiting for the next problem,” Neil says. In the summer of 2009, John thought he had his bee problems licked. “I thought it would be a good season,” he says. “I had those three Cadillacs ready to go.” And then it kept raining. What to do? Like a bee to nectar, the only thing is to move forward. “We’ll do better next year,” he says. “Next year, it will be different.”
He is being ironic. Because then on comes next year—this year, now, which has started off well enough, with enough rain but not too much, enough warmth but not too much. It could be a good year, as long as the predicted midwestern grasshoppers don’t materialize—grasshoppers that rain down like green confetti, eating flowers and larvae, devouring every scrap of vegetation,
every leaf, stem, and flower, carpeting highways and fence posts, eating cotton shirts right off clotheslines. Grasshopper counts increased more than tenfold last year, leaving conditions ripe for the worst outbreak in nearly three decades. So if this year isn’t better, perhaps, then, next year will be. “Next year, for sure, right?” Miller writes.
Because he knows: beekeeping has its rewards. In the almonds one February day, in a brief season of reprieve between die-offs, Miller checked his bees. There had been a dreadful killing frost the night before, and early in the afternoon the temperature finally climbed to 42 degrees, the threshold above which the first scouts might venture out to look for pollen. It continued ascending to 54 degrees, when the first foragers emerged. Then, when the mercury hit 65, every food gatherer in the hive poured forth, spreading out among the almonds, dancing from blossom to blossom. The year before, the bees had been so sick that you could walk through the hives without a bee suit. But this year—this year was different. You could see it; you could hear it; there was life.
Miller drove his truck along a dirt road and stopped between two endless rows of almond trees. He shut off the engine to listen to the humming sound of thousands of honey bees at work in the blossoms. “Hoo hoo! You guys go!” he shouted. “Look at ’em buzz.”
Acknowledgments
First and foremost I must thank John Miller again and again, and yet again, for agreeing to star in my book. His generosity with his story and his life, with his bee suits and veils and jokes and insights and star thistle honey and sweet mandarins and baggies of almonds and Honey Stinger chews—it has all been astonishing and humbling.
Thanks also to Pat Heitkam for sharing his queen secrets, for his edits and wise words, and for hooking me up with that Benadryl; and to Marla Spivak for the patient explanation and the liquid-nitrogen ice cream. Larry Krause is every bit as nice as John Miller says he is. Linda Stander was a fun and informative road trip companion and an excellent photographer, and is really good at pulling out stingers. Jan Miller has shared her home with the legions of bee tourists who pass through and has put up with us with grace and good humor. Harry and Brenda Krause took such good care of me in North Dakota that I didn’t want to leave; my daughter naps daily under the flannel frog blanket Brenda sewed for her.
Thanks also to Denis Anderson, Dennis vanEngelsdorp, Justin Schmidt, Jeff Pettis, Jay Evans, David Miksa, Dave Hackenberg, Joe Traynor, Neil Miller, Richard Adee, Frank Swiggart, Roy Tighe, and John Thoming for sharing their stories, work, and time with me.
Tammy Horn’s Bees in America was an invaluable resource on the history of American beekeeping. Singeli Agnew’s “The Almond and the Bee,” which appeared in the San Francisco Chronicle Magazine, offers a perceptive overview of the symbiotic relationship between bee guys and almond guys. Ron Miksha’s Bad Beekeeping also provided a wealth of gritty detail about the life of a modern-day beekeeper.
Jean Nordhaus, my mother, has been my first and best reader from the time I could spell my name—I couldn’t have a more exacting or engaged audience, and every word I write bears her rigorous and graceful influence. I thank my dad, Bob Nordhaus, for his keen eye and his unswerving support and encouragement; and my brother Ted for his insight and guidance—for keeping it deep. Carol Byerly is a good friend and her passion for history is contagious; her engagement with my first draft was nothing short of heroic. Hilary Reyl’s friendship, literary companionship, and far-flung fondue dates over the years have been a cherished gift to me.
This book grew from a magazine piece that ran in High Country News in March 2007. Greg Hanscom originally commissioned the article and John Mecklin did a masterful job of developing and editing it—I am grateful to them and the HCN staff for supporting this project in its infancy. And thanks to Jean Weiss and Delicious Living magazine for introducing me to John Miller in the first place.
I am so grateful to Sarah Burnes for her steady encouragement, and to Dan Baum, whose enthusiasm for the original pitch egged me on to aim big. Florence Williams, Lisa Jones, and Hillary Rosner provided a rousing lunchtime support group. And a big huzzah to Becca Heaton and Shaun McGrath, for letting me lounge on their couch while I wrote.
My agent, Stephanie Cabot, championed the book even as the global economy collapsed around us; Michael Signorelli shepherded the manuscript with enthusiasm and a steady, respectful hand. Meg Knox’s editorial eagle eye helped me produce a far more elegant and cohesive text.
My husband, Brent Barkett, is as miraculous and conscientious as any honey bee—no shiftless drone, he. During the time I wrote this book, we also moved out of our house, renovated it, moved back in, had a baby, and said goodbye to our dear dog of fourteen years. Brent was his usual tranquilo self through all of it, the eye of our personal hurricane. And I thank Delia and Milo, our own little brood, for making me laugh every single day.
Credits
Cover design by Robin Bilardello
Cover photograph © Éric Tourneret
About the Publisher
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The Beekeeper's Lament: How One Man and Half a Billion Honey Bees Help Feed America Page 24
