The worst of these losses can be easily prevented if a beekeeper knows a day ahead of time when insecticides are going to be used. The night before, he can tape shut any holes in the hives and screen the entrances to keep the bees from flying out. If he is able to confine his bees to their hives for twenty-four hours after spraying, the worst of the insecticide residue will have broken down and bee deaths will be kept to a minimum.
Farmers and agricultural pesticide applicators are not evil men. They do not deliberately try to kill bees, but they forget that bees are insects and insecticides that kill “bad” insects will also kill “good” ones like honeybees, ladybugs and butterflies. So they need to be made aware of any colonies of bees kept in an area likely to be sprayed. Since aerial sprayers seldom think about us, it is up to beekeepers to find out what the schedule is on any farm near their bees. Here in the Ozarks, even without the extensive use of agricultural chemicals, beekeepers lose bees during fruit bloom, when orchardists are spraying their trees, during spring alfalfa bloom, when fanners hire aerial insecticide sprayers to treat for alfalfa weevils, in summer when the same alfalfa is sprayed for grasshoppers and later still for armyworms.
After I lost forty hives of bees to fall armyworm spraying, I worked through the beekeeping organization to see what we could do to prevent such losses in the future. We invited the extension agent to speak to our beekeepers’ group about local spray schedules. He was helpful, and was also surprised and impressed that there was a large and responsible group of people in the area, a group that had every reason to be concerned about the use of insecticides. We became a part of his constituency, as it were, and he began including a warning about the danger of pesticides to bees in his press releases and spray recommendations. I also wrote news releases to help increase awareness about bees and insecticides from a beekeeper’s point of view, and the local newspapers and radio stations were glad to run them. The extension agent gave me the names and addresses of all the commercial pesticide applicators active in the area, and I wrote asking them to call me before they applied insecticides aerially so that I could notify the beekeepers within the area. The beekeepers and I mapped the location of every beekeeper we knew within a five-county area and made a file of their telephone numbers, so that I could call them if I heard about spraying. Unfortunately there was no cooperation from the commercial aerial applicators even though they are legally liable for any damage they do—which includes colonies of bees killed—but I did end up with friendly help from the foremen at the big ranches who hired them. These are local men, neighbors, as the aerial sprayers are not, and a jar of honey made them remember me. Now they call me the day before the aerial sprayer is due to treat their alfalfa, and I notify any of the beekeepers who have hives located within two miles of the spray area. The beekeepers then can take steps to protect or move their hives.
The system is not perfect. We all still lose some hives to insecticide poisoning, especially when people spray their home gardens, but we lose fewer than we did before we were working together, and in these days of chemical agriculture that is no small success.
To hear people talk down at the café you’d think we were being invaded by hostile aliens from a Grade B science-fiction movie. A new brood of thirteen-year cicadas, estimated to be in the millions, has crawled up out of the ground here in Missouri, as well as in portions of Illinois, Arkansas, Oklahoma and Kansas. Its members are trying their wings, singing like crazy and mating in a very public way. In a few weeks they will die off and be gone, but for now they are quite the topic of conversation.
There are annual cicadas here and all over the United States, and their buzzy song is a part of the sound of late summer in the country, like those of katydids and whippoorwills, but in the eastern half of the country, at long intervals, periodic in early summer, cicadas emerge from the ground where in their juvenile form they have been feeding on the sap of tree roots. In the northern part of their range they appear every seventeen years; in the southern part, it takes thirteen years for a new brood to emerge.
These periodic cicadas are not so big as the annual variety but they are large as bugs go, broad, sturdy and two inches long. They have midnight blue, almost black, bodies and huge showy wings that are delicately veined and edged in brilliant orange, and look as if they are made of isinglass. Their legs are orange, too. Their big, bulging eyes are deep red, and each is centered with a meaningful-looking dark-brown dot. They are beautiful, spectacular bugs, and their appearance is exuberant and exciting, a marvel, a celebration. Their presence is a reminder that there are other life cycles than ours, other rhythms of living than the human one.
When they first come out of the ground they are still wearing their golden-brown nymphal skins. After crawling out of these wingless skins, which split neatly down the back, the handsome adults sit quietly and visibly on tree trunks, tentatively trying their new wings. Then they enjoy a few weeks of courtship and mating. During those weeks the males sing, the paired couple reproduce and then they both die.
Entomologists speculate that the periodic cicada’s infrequent but abundant aboveground appearance is a survival strategy. Predators cannot thrive on a dinner that shows up so seldom, and the cicadas’ sheer numbers guarantee that even though individuals are easy to catch many will survive. Some also claim that the cicadas’ peculiar, burning, raspy song, produced by a pair of ribbed membranes at the sides of the male’s abdomen, is irritating to predators. That seems fanciful, but perhaps it is true; people are uncommonly cross about cicadas and complain their song is nerve-racking. Here it is certainly constant and pervasive. The cicadas have three things to say: one is a steady, insistent, buzzy trill: zs-zs-zs-zs-zs. It is a background to a more varied kee-o-keeeee-o-kee-o that punctuates the steady drone. When picked up and held, the cicadas emit a sharp bzz-t-byzzt that sounds troubled and probably is.
Once the insects have paired, they mate openly on tree trunks and branches without regard for the fact they can easily be picked off and eaten by predators or squashed and dusted with poison by humans. But most survive, and the female is able to lay upward of five hundred eggs in slits she makes in twigs. The lives of the adults are short, but in eight weeks the cicada nymphs hatch and burrow down into the ground to reach the tree roots on which they will feed and grow slowly for the next thirteen years.
The periodic cicadas do not kill trees in their feeding, and at no point do they hurt garden vegetables or healthy flowering plants. They are bugs of such innocence and beauty and specialness that their appearance, one would think, should be regarded with interest and appreciation like that of a comet or a rare bird. But it is not.
Down at the post office, the talk among people waiting with me for the mail was of how bad the cicadas are and how much worse they will get as they become more numerous. Over at the café the morning coffee crowd was discussing how to do them in. Squashing them between thumb and forefinger was held to be effective but unaesthetic. A stick was recommended for bashing them. Since the adult cicadas do not chew leaves, only contact poisons will kill them, and the effectiveness of various kinds was being hotly debated. Some of the official types have been recommending dusting them with serious insecticides, but one of the coffee drinkers remembered the local state forester had said that this could cause increased levels of pesticides in the groundwater supply. The coffee cups were drained without reaching an agreement on methods, but the general opinion was that these bugs are annoying, lascivious, untidy, unruly—in short, a nuisance.
Back in my woods, where I have begun cutting the winter’s firewood early each morning, the cicadas’ song filled my head, seemed to reverberate inside it. Cicadas, the sun catching their wings and reflecting rainbows, lined every tree trunk, every branch. One lighted on my shoulder. His broad face with its big red eyes was inches from mine.
Kee-o-keeeee-o-kee-o he sang zestfully, right into my ear. He sounded pleased with himself; I know I was mightily pleased with him.
Farmers began their
first cutting of hay weeks ago. I should have taken my brush cutter and trimmed around the beehives then, too: the grass and brush has grown tall around them, making it hard for me to work the hives, and it has also made it difficult for the bees to fly in and out. I keep scraps of rolled roofing in front of the entrances to help keep them clear, but the grass has become overgrown and sprawled across the roofing, so some entrances are blocked. However, I have been out on the road making my June honey sales trips. I’ve been to Boston, New York, St. Louis, Kansas City, Tulsa, Oklahoma City and Dallas. Over the years my bees must have become more skilled, for I have more honey to sell, and with the competition from foreign honey there are more of us scrambling for a smaller slice of the market. I should be setting up accounts in other cities as well. But I’m already spending more of my time peddling honey than I am keeping bees, and I should prefer it the other way around. Just taking care of my established accounts throws off my schedule of bee work. Out on the interstates, I was seized with guilt about the bees, so this past week after I have finished cutting wood each morning I’ve been working hard in the beeyards. I have been trimming, and taking more supers to the hives. They are needed.
The nectar flow is at its strongest now. Most hives are ready for at least two more supers. Individual variations among the colonies of bees, which a few months ago were exactly equal, are now apparent: there are some hives, with hardworking populations of bees, that have five supers on them and will need more before the end of the nectar flow; there are others with only one super, and the bees may not even fill that one. Hot weather is ahead, and it is kind to help bees ventilate their hives. With those that have four or more supers, I offset the top super slightly, leaving a crack between it and the one underneath. The space allows the bees to set up an air current from the hive entrance to the top, helped on its way by their fanning wings, and so lets them both cool the hive and evaporate the nectar they are storing in the supers. Some beekeepers achieve the same effect by propping open the cover slightly. Either method is satisfactory and helpful to the bees.
Colony populations are at their peak now, and the bees in the best hives are working in a dedicated way, flying out in streams and coming back to their hives heavy with nectar. The Ladino clover, Trifolium repens giganteum, is in heavy bloom in farmers’ pastures and yellow-blossomed sweet clover is almost through blooming along the roadsides, with the white-blossomed variety just coming on. Those tallest of clovers—Melilotus officinalis and M. alba, respectively—grow from five to eight feet high. A hundred years ago, they bloomed thickly from the Rocky Mountains to the Mississippi River, and their deep roots brought nutriments up to the surface of poor but limy soils. Today, beekeepers still think of sweet clover as the best of all possible bee plants, and have been known to carry sacks of the seed to sow broadcast wherever there is a likely spot. Other kinds of farmers like it less well, and seldom plant it. In the first place, sweet clovers are biennial, and with their rangy, weedy growth they do not make as good fodder as do the lower-growing clovers such as Ladino. So sweet clover today grows mostly in waste places such as highway rights-of-way where the bees make use of it until the highway crews come along and mow it, a sight that always makes beekeepers sad.
This week, my bees are also working persimmon flowers. Wild persimmons, Diospyros virginiana, are skinnier trees in the Ozarks than they are in other parts of their range, but they still grow tall here. Their white, bell-shaped flowers—male and female borne on separate trees—are too high for people to see, but bees find them. The flowers are such a good source of nectar that the bees are often out in the persimmon grove by the woodlot before dawn. Some bees even spend the night on the blossoms; they are so reluctant to stop working them at day’s end that darkness catches them there, and they cannot fly home.
All week, as I have worked with the hives trimming grass and adding supers, the bees have been so busy in their foraging flights that they barely noticed me, even when I trimmed directly in front of their hives. In the middle of a sunny day when there is a strong nectar flow it is almost impossible to make bees cross, and easy to work among them without gloves, veil or protective clothing. I have kept my smoker burning as a precaution, but I’ve seldom used it: even in hives that have developed into touchy cross strains, the bees are impossible to provoke to anger under these conditions. Yesterday, however, was different. Even if I had not heard the weather forecast on the radio in the morning, I should have known we were due for a change in the weather by the bees’ behavior. The meteorologists and the bees both told me a front was moving in from the Rockies which would bring rain by evening, and although the day stayed sunny, the air was oppressive and the bees had hair-trigger tempers.
I use a heavy-duty gasoline-powered brush cutter to trim around the hives. It is fast, and the bees, of course, do not mind its noise, though I do. To me it sounds like an outboard engine on a small boat. With it, I can trim near the hive entrances, but I must finish the job on hands and knees with a pair of clippers. It was my position at their entrances, not the noisy brush cutter, that irritated the bees the most. Earlier in the week, when the weather promised fair, they had ignored me, flown around me, when I trimmed at their entrances with the clippers. But yesterday when I crouched there, the guard bees bristled. They are older workers with full venom sacs, ready to sting, and they recruited helpers among their sisters to come out and try to drive me away as I inched along the front of the rows of hives. I smoked them heavily to quiet them. If I had not and if they had stung, every bee who left her stinger in my bee suit would have hung a chemical label on me: “enemy” her pheromone tag would have said. That message would have been read by bees from hives I had not yet come to, and made the bees attack before I approached them. Within a few hours, even with my dull human senses, I should have been able to smell the acrid alarm pheromone, the scent of angry bees.
I did not have any real trouble with the bees yesterday, because I used smoke to gentle them and because I have worked with bees so often that I am used to them and their moods. But I knew they were touchy, and if I had jarred the hives accidentally or disturbed them severely their anger would have erupted. I don’t like working with them when they are so clearly out of sorts. I can’t think it is kind to them to do so. If I had fewer hives and a looser schedule I should have put off working with them entirely yesterday. One of the luxuries of keeping just a few hives of bees is that one can work with them on fine days only—reason enough, sales trips to Dallas aside, to own three or thirty, not three hundred hives of bees.
I do not like to irritate bees, and by day’s end yesterday I was cross, too. Perhaps the change in barometric pressure and the threat of the storm affected my mood as much as it did the bees’. A magnificent electric storm and heavy rains are keeping both the bees and me in our respective houses today. The storm is clearing the air of oppressive heaviness, and tomorrow the bees’ mood will be better. So will mine.
It is the Fourth of July, and the local VFW roasted a pig at the park in town today before the evening’s fireworks. My friends among the veterans invited me to come, but I was too busy. I have been working out in the beeyards, putting on the last supers of the season. It has become my own private holiday tradition over the years to get the final super on the hives before the fireworks go off.
The dates of the honey season are different in different parts of the country. They depend on local weather conditions and flower bloom, but here in the Ozarks the nectar flow is usually over by mid-July. Hot and dry weather in July worries farmers who graze cattle, because their pastures dry up; if it rains, pastures will green but the sumac nectar flow will cease, so I am the one local farmer who prefers midsummer droughts. Heat and dry weather in early July make sumac blossoms secrete nectar, which the bees transform into a wonderfully rich-tasting dark-red honey. There is no part of the country in which some species of sumac, all members of the genus Rhus, does not grow, and wherever the weedy trees are tolerated bees make honey from their flowers. It
is one of the most important honey sources in New England.
R. glabra (left) and R. copallina (right) (smooth sumac and shining sumac)
Here in the Ozarks, one of the first plants bees work in the springtime is Rhus aromatica—fragrant sumac. The last significant nectar flow of summer comes from its cousins, R. glabra (smooth sumac) and R. copallina (shining sumac). Smooth sumac is the first of the pair to bloom. It is a small shrubby tree seldom over ten feet high and is one of the first invaders of abandoned fields. Its leaves, alternate, borne compound, turn brilliant red early in the autumn, and its creamy-white blossoms are borne in clusters followed by the crimson globe-shaped berries that eastern bluebirds find tasty and sustaining in winter. In the hot dry weather, which stimulates nectar secretion, the white blossoms drip nectar and are covered with bees, who lap it up. Later, if the weather holds, the bees will transfer their attention to R. copallina, a sumac similar in growth, flowers and fruit. It can be easily distinguished from R. glabra, however, because the leafstalk is edged with small green wings, which give it another common name, winged sumac. Together, the two species provide weeks of bloom, and during a hot droughty summer, sumac is the important source of a delicious honey that I will harvest to blend with the rest of the crop. But, like other beekeepers, I have learned that customers are alarmed to learn that bees make honey from sumac flowers.
“Sumac!” says one, screwing up her face to indicate her distaste. “Isn’t that poisonous?” I had heard the question a number of times.
A Book of Bees Page 13
