The Beekeeper's Lament (4 page)

Motionless around the doors outside,

With crossed and tangled feet; or still inside,

Listless with hunger and shrunken from the cold.

And then you can hear a mournful long drawn-out

Whispering rustling sound like the sound of the cold

South Wind as it murmurs in the woods, or like

The agitated hissing of the sea

As the waves draw back, or the seething noise of a fire

Eating its way as it burns inside a furnace.

Virgil wrote this, not John Miller. Bees have been dying since bees have been living. Miller has labored to keep his bees healthy in the face of various parasites and pathogens for years. But in that fateful February of 2005, he realized that the job description of a beekeeper had changed inalterably. He was no longer a mere keeper of bees. He was steward and shepherd of a species teetering on the edge of survival. Not even a Corvette can make you feel better about that.

Chapter Two
Beekeepers’ Roulette

I
F YOU SPEND ANY TIME WITH
J
OHN
M
ILLER, YOU WILL SPEND
much of it in cars. Or rather, trucks—big trucks: two-ton Fords, and 515-horsepower Freightliner Cascadias, and lately, against his every inclination, an un-American Toyota Tacoma (the “yoda,” he calls it), which he bought with patriotic reluctance but calls “the finest pickup I have ever owned.” When he backs into a ditch to catch a swarm, he knows that if he’s driving his Toyota, his “little black mamba,” he’ll get out. It can also do airport pickups. In January 2009, Miller picked me up at the Sacramento airport in his black Toyota, a stash of almonds, mandarins, and Honey Stinger bars tucked in the console to keep us going. We sped due west, heading to the annual American Beekeeping Federation conference in Reno. There, Miller told me, “twelve hundred of the least competent people in America” would gather to discuss their role as gatekeepers of America’s food supply and contemplate why their bees are dying. We climbed through steep snow-clogged river valleys, topping out among the genteel granite crags of the high Sierras, then raced down through towering conifers and the foothills’ stunted shrubs to a russet desert and a boxy city. We pulled off the highway straight into the parking lot of John Ascuaga’s Nugget, a monstrous casino and convention center that covers an entire city block. The parking lot was full of other beekeeping outfits; Miller could identify each owner by his rig. “There’s Krause’s truck!” he said. We parked right beside Miller’s good friend and headed to the conference.

Inside, we rode an escalator away from the slot machines, music, flashing lights and bells and beeps, emerging into a cavernous conference hall with movable walls and a bold-patterned carpet. The beekeepers sat on folding chairs, wearing plaid shirts and baseball caps, looking alternately bored and befuddled as one skinny scientist after another spoke of mitochondria and morphology, single nucleotide polymorphisms and marker-assisted selection. Miller wore a bee-striped polo shirt and rarely managed to sit through more than one presentation at a time, disappearing into the hallway and reappearing five or twenty minutes later. Others lasted longer, staring bleary-eyed at the PowerPoints, listening politely to a diminutive Croatian who spoke of bee “dee-arrhea.”

In the hallway, beekeepers hovered, chatting. Zoologist Karl von Frisch discovered some fifty years ago that bees return to the hive to perform a “waggle dance” communicating the location of nearby flowers. Beekeepers go to conferences for similar reasons—to share essential information about the bounty that might be expected from the blooms. They don’t often dance, at least not well; but they talk. Incessantly. “We swap canning tips and recipes,” Miller jokes, though they don’t. What they do is trade gossip, debate the merits of orange or red hive tools, and compare balance sheets, hive losses, pollination fees, and honey prices. They pay too much for honey at the silent auction. They buy raffle tickets from the wholesome, if less than glamorous, “honey princesses” who wander the halls in skirt suits and shoulder sashes. Both the princesses and the bee guys looked terribly out of place at the Nugget, a monument to artifice and quick cash—quick cash has never been a defining characteristic of the beekeeping profession. And beekeepers work outside. In the enormous Nugget you could spend the entire convention without once exiting the climate-controlled interior.

B
EING TERRIBLY OUT OF PLACE IS NOT A NEW EXPERIENCE
for beekeepers in this country. Honey bees are not, after all, native to North America, and neither are beekeepers. The nation’s first bees and beekeepers came from England around 1620 on the same boats that brought the nation’s first colonists and their crops, as much a tool of European conquest as the muskets, microorganisms, and ambitions that also debarked from the settlers’ ships. The insects did fine—did great—in their new environment, taking to the wooded eastern forests with aplomb. Escaped swarms spread quickly across the frontier, working their way westward toward the Great Plains at a rate of forty or so miles a year. “The bees have generally extended themselves into the country a little in advance of the settlers,” Thomas Jefferson wrote in 1788. “The Indians, therefore, call them the ‘white man’s fly,’ and consider their approach as indicating the approach of the settlement of the whites.” Domesticated since before the Egyptians built their first pyramid, bees have traveled the paths of human migration over the millennia from Africa to Europe and Asia, then to North America, thriving wherever they went. No surprise then, that the New World proved an entirely agreeable place for the European honey bee.

The European beekeeper, on the other hand, found the going rougher. The first recorded professional apiarist on American shores was a man named John Eales. He was induced to move from Hingham, Massachusetts, north to Newbury in 1644, according to local court papers, to run a communal apiary, “with ye expectation of his doing service which the Towne was not acquainted with.” By 1645, he was also among the town’s first recorded paupers. “Being found unable to get his living,” he was remanded to the town’s constable “until this Courte sh’ld determine the waye to dispose of him.” After some deliberation, a judge determined that Eales “should be placed in some convenient place where he may be implied in his trade of beehive making, etc.; and ye Towne of Newbury to make up what his work wanteth of defraying ye charge of his livelyhoode.” Eales was the first known American beekeeper to lose his shirt; he certainly wasn’t the last. “It takes longer to go broke keeping bees than in any other business,” John Miller says—he stole that maxim from another California beekeeper. Yet it didn’t take Eales long at all.

Miller’s banker once told him that a beekeeper should be prepared to fail two out of every seven years. That’s today, with all of our modern technologies and economies of scale. It was even easier to go broke a couple of centuries ago. Beekeeping had been, in its first two and a half centuries on the American continent, a cottage industry and a sideline. Farmers bartered crops for bees and traded or sold what little surplus honey they couldn’t use. They didn’t dream of making a living from it. That changed, however, after a talented but melancholic minister from Andover, Massachusetts, got into the business. Lorenzo Lorraine Langstroth was born in 1810. Dignified, with a broad, open face and a shock of thick hair, he developed a love of insects early, studying the movements of ants on the ground until, he wrote, he wore out the knees of his pants. In 1833 he took up beekeeping, in part to help with his “head troubles,” serious jags of depression and “hysterical muteness”—most likely bipolar disorder—from which he suffered his entire life. He acquired a colony in a log hive, and then another, and another, and soon had hundreds and was spending every spare moment caring for and observing his bees.

It was not a propitious time to take up beekeeping. The nation’s hives had been besieged by a mottled grayish brown pest called the wax moth, whose larvae fed on wax comb and hive debris and left behind a sticky white web of discarded cocoon shells and a sickly-sweet smell of rot. The bees were also increasingly at the mercy of a deadly new bacterial disease called American foulbrood, which killed young larvae and was highly infectious in hives. There was, moreover, no easy way to rid colonies of such pests and pathogens, because at the time, even the typical activities of beekeeping exacted a dismal toll. Most beekeepers still used traditional round straw skep baskets or hollowed-out log “gums,” and they could not open their hives to examine the colonies without destroying vast sections of comb. The only way for a beekeeper to collect honey was to cut the comb out of the hive and in the process kill its bees. The only way to increase his colony count was to build a strong colony with lots of healthy workers, and then capture a natural swarm of bees as it departed the hive to find a less crowded home. By the time Langstroth came along, scores of observers, from Aristotle to Columella to Virgil, had described the life of the honey bee. Still, Langstroth wrote, “the interior of a hive was to common observers a profound mystery,” and this ignorance compounded beekeepers’ problems.

Hoping to do better with his own bees, Langstroth began reading. He quickly concluded that there were no American beekeeping manuals worth examining and so turned to the Europeans. He read Charles Butler, England’s “father of beekeeping,” whose
Feminine Monarchie
was the first full-length beekeeping guide written in the English language, and who was among the first to posit that the large bee that controlled the hive was female. He read the seventeenth-century Dutch biologist Jan Swammerdam, who spent every daylight hour for five years examining his bees, “all the while exposed in the open air to the scorching heat of the sun, bareheaded, for fear of intercepting his sight.” Swammerdam’s exhaustive treatise
Historia Insectorum Generalis
featured the first near-perfect drawings of bee anatomy and “proved so fatiguing a performance, that Swammerdam never afterwards recovered even the appearance of his former health and vigor.” The book was published posthumously in 1737.

Langstroth then turned to more contemporary musings. He learned about François Huber, a blind French scientist who, with the help of devoted servant François Burnens, carried out a number of experiments to divine the mysteries of the bee. In 1789 Huber designed a “leaf hive” with frames that opened like the pages of a book, the first beehive that allowed observation of the interior of a colony without requiring its total destruction. He read the Englishman Edward Bevan, whose classic 1827 text described a hive with multiple honey boxes stacked atop it. He read Johann Dzierzon, a Silesian pastor who, in the 1840s, contrived a hive design that featured removable honeycombs supported by grooves in the hive’s side walls. With increased command over his combs, Dzierzon was able to increase his stock to 360 hives and produce six thousand pounds of honey in one season, despite “frequent reverses”—theft, fire, flood, and a fatal attack of foulbrood.

Dzierzon’s and Huber’s and Bevan’s leaf and top-bar designs were vast improvements on the traditional skeps and gums. But they still required significant mangling of comb in order to break the frames apart. Without a better hive, Langstroth believed, beekeepers would be “unable to remedy many of the perplexing casualties to which bee-keeping is liable.” A better hive would minimize damage to combs when beekeepers inspected the bees and harvested honey, improving bees’ survival and beekeepers’ economic viability. “In short, I felt satisfied that bee-keeping could be made highly profitable, and as much a matter of certainty, as most branches of rural economy.” Langstroth decided to design his own hive.

To allow access to a colony without destroying honeycomb, Langstroth needed to prevent the bees from attaching comb to the hive’s sides, top, and bottom. Bees, he had come to understand, were exacting creatures: they left a specific gap—three-eighths of an inch, to be precise—for flying and maneuvering between combs. If the space was narrower than a fifth of an inch, they would fill it with propolis—a sticky, resinous substance collected from tree buds and sap, which bees use to fill small gaps and seal and reinforce their hives. If the space was wider, they would bridge it with additional honeycomb. He termed that ideal gap “bee space,” and mulled how to design a hive that would incorporate it throughout. One afternoon in 1851, he found his answer:

Returning late in the afternoon from the apiary which I had established some two miles from my city home, and pondering, as I have so often done before, how I could get rid of the disagreeable necessity of cutting the attachments of the combs from the walls of the hives . . . the almost self-evident idea of using the same bee-space . . . came into my mind, and in a moment the suspended movable frames, kept at a suitable distance from each other and the case containing them, came into being. Seeing by intuition, as it were, the end from the beginning, I could scarcely refrain from shouting out my “Eureka” in the open streets.

Langstroth promptly filed a patent. His improved hive is little different from the rectangular white box with hanging frames that beekeepers use today. Among the long list of advantages offered by his simple invention, beekeepers could take out and examine the combs “at pleasure” to look for moths and destroy moth larvae, and “permit the surplus honey to be taken away, in the most convenient, beautiful, and salable forms.” They could remove old, tattered combs and furnish empty combs to allow bees to focus their energies on the production of honey rather than wax. They could move their hives more easily to follow pollen flows and protect them against heat and cold. Langstroth’s new hive also made it easy for beekeepers to divide one hive into two or three when the bees were preparing to swarm, increasing their numbers and preventing productive colonies from flying off. And they could do so without angering the bees. “Many persons have been unable to suppress their astonishment,” he boasted, “as they have seen me opening hive after hive, removing the combs covered with bees, and shaking them off in front of the hives; forming new swarms, exhibiting the queen, transferring the bees with all their stores to another hive; and in short, dealing with them as if they were as harmless as flies.”