The Beekeeper's Lament (10 page)

Instead, many beekeepers have turned to an off-label pesticide called amitraz, also known as Taktic, which is used to kill ticks on sheep, cows, and swine. Amitraz is said to work as well as coumaphos once did, with fewer toxic side effects. It is illegal to use on bees. But as long as beekeepers are careful that there are no residues on their colonies when their hives are producing honey for sale to the public, most agriculture inspectors won’t ask too many questions. Critics of the practice argue that insecticides seep into honeycombs as water absorbs into a sponge, infiltrating the honey that is stored in it. But this was already the case with coumaphos and fluvalinate. And regardless, it is only a matter of time until the amitraz stops working. In the meantime, scientists are racing to find a more sustainable solution.

Research in the world’s “few lonely bee labs,” as Miller describes them, tends to follow two tracks: developing a better miticide, or breeding a stronger, more disease-resistant bee. So far, however, these efforts have been more successful at breeding a better mite through pesticide use than at breeding a better bee. Indeed, the varroa mite has proven far more adaptable than either the honey bee or its human protectors—every effort to control the mites has ultimately succeeded only in producing a more powerful and resistant creature. “Eventually,” says Miller, “we could breed a mite that was resistant to a hammer.” This dynamic isn’t helped by the fact that the process of developing miticides for approval by the EPA takes at least three years, often longer, and that the research requires considerable time and money. There’s rarely sufficient profit motive for a chemical company to do the research needed to get a new varroacide approved—in case it’s not abundantly clear by now, there’s not a lot of money in beekeeping. Were several effective miticides on the market at a time, beekeepers could engage in a rotational scheme of “integrated pest management,” using materials for limited periods, switching before the mites developed resistance. As it is, by the time a new miticide is approved, the old ones have failed. So beekeepers either follow the rules and risk losing everything or try nonsanctioned home remedies to keep their hives alive.

There are other, more palatable options on the horizon. Mites live in what Denis Anderson, the Australian entomologist, describes as a “chemical world.” They don’t have eyes; they have hairs and sensory organs that respond to chemical signals that tell them where they are. “It’s quite a complicated world, a huge city of bees, and they’ve got to get around that city and get to a particular spot in that city where they are able to reproduce and then spread out into the bigger world,” he says. “A bat sees with sound. A varroa mite sees with chemicals.” Scientists studying the varroa mite are looking into the possibility of developing traps that mimic the chemical smells that attract mites and tell them when to reproduce. Genetic research has also yielded incremental progress. The Asian bees did, after all, learn grooming and hygienic behavior to detect and expel varroa mites from their midst. Researchers have, with limited success, sought to breed European bees with similar survival mechanisms. Others are designing hives with holes in the bottom that the mites fall through when they leave their hosts for a new brood cell. Some beekeepers claim that mite loads disappear when bees are placed in “top-bar” hives that mimic a natural hive environment, though that does not explain the disappearance of every feral hive in the country. Top-bar hives also are difficult to move and work with, for all the reasons that led the world’s beekeepers to adopt the Langstroth box hive in the first place.

So beekeepers have had to learn to live with losses that, twenty years ago, were unthinkable. If a 10 percent loss was considered horrible then, a 20 percent loss isn’t so bad today. Beekeepers now realize they had it easy before the varroa mite. Their bees still suffered from bacterial invasions, fungal infections, moths, mice, skunks, and bears—it was still difficult to make a profit—but really, beekeeping provided a pleasant lifestyle. You could leave your hives in a meadow and do other things—go on long vacations, run a marathon, go fishing, hunting, watch TV. The honey bee would take care of itself. It would forage, build, swarm, run wild, go feral, survive. Today, thanks to the varroa mite, the European honey bee is, in most of the world, a purely domesticated creature, and one on life support, at that. Without beekeepers, Western honey bees would not survive.

“It used to be pretty simple,” Miller wrote.

American foulbrood.

European foulbrood.

Chalkbrood.

Ants, predating ants that could be sent to ant heaven with a shovel, and a tablespoon of Cyanogas dust deep into the nest . . . great stuff; very lethal.

Then came this tracheal mite thing . . . and hard on its heels, came Ms.

Varroa.

All of a sudden, the world changed.

It was, and remains: Ms. Varroa, her children,

And

Everything else.

There are, however, some advantages to losing half the nation’s bee herd in less than two decades. Miller likes to say that bee guys always knew they were important, but nobody else did. Now that bees are dying, almond guys—and cherry guys, apple guys, watermelon guys, canola guys, blueberry guys, cantaloupe guys, and all the other pollination-dependent farm guys—have also come to realize that bee guys are important.

Chapter Four
Faustian Bargains

V
ARROA MITES
ARE TERRIBLE FOR BEES.
S
O ARE ANY NUMBER
of other pests and diseases. The first European honey bees arrived in America in the 1620s; the first widespread European bee losses were reported in 1670—around the time that honey bees themselves became widespread. Historians now suspect that this early North American die-off was caused by American foulbrood, the same pestilence that afflicted Miller’s dad and Miller’s granddad and at one time seemed like just about the worst thing that could happen to a beekeeper. Foulbrood is a bacterial contagion that grows like a mold within brood cells and gives the normally pearlescent white bee larvae a stringy yellow hue. The larvae turn a macabre brownish black tint as they die, emitting what Lorenzo Langstroth described as a sour, “noisome stench.” Langstroth believed the disease could be regarded “as the greatest possible calamity to beekeeping.” Even today it is, if left untreated, a calamity. When worker bees discover contaminated larvae and clean out a hive, they spread the disease spores throughout it. The spores can remain inactive for as long as forty years and emerge to spark another epidemic. In Langstroth’s day, the only way to control the disease was to burn an infected hive with all of its inhabitants. This scorched-hive strategy offered only temporary respite: outbreaks in the 1930s and ’40s brought losses as large as anything wrought by varroa mites or CCD. Until the advent of sulfa-based antibiotics during World War II, foulbrood’s mass carnage was a regular feature of the beekeeping life.

Foulbrood wasn’t beekeeping’s only problem. It was an invasion of wax moths that prompted Langstroth to declare the years before he invented his hive in 1851 “some of the worst seasons ever known for bees.” The moth, a dreary-looking creature about the size of a nickel, thrived in “discouraged populations” and seemed particularly well adapted to life in the confinements of the hive. It could “crawl backwards or forwards, and as well one way as another”; it could “twist round on itself, curl up almost into a knot, and flatten itself out like a pancake.” It could employ, in short, all manner of “stratagems and cunning devices” to make a beekeeper’s life miserable. The wax moth was nothing new in Europe: Langstroth recalled that Virgil, Columella, and other “ancient authors” described the insect as a “plague of their Apiaries”; Swammerdam dubbed it the “bee-wolf.” The “ravages of the bee-moth” halved the number of colonies in the “Northern and Middle States” in the 1830s and ’40s, Langstroth wrote, and as for beekeepers, “multitudes have abandoned the pursuit in disgust.”

In his 1853 treatise, Langstroth also described nosema, a diarrheal disease associated with muddy black excrement on hive entrances and floors. It had an “intolerably offensive smell” and tended to occur during winter, when northern bees were confined in poorly ventilated environments: “Is it not under precisely such circumstances that cholera and dysentery prove most fatal to human beings? The filthy, damp, and unventilated abodes of the abject poor, becoming perfect lazar-houses to their wretched inmates.” He also lamented the incursions of mice, wasps, ants, spiders, “gallinaceous birds,” even amphibians: “The toad,” he noted, “is a well-known devourer of bees.”

Langstroth’s new hive helped detect and destroy many of these pathogens and predators by allowing beekeepers to examine their colonies. But even with improved hive technology, the world’s apiarists remained subject to recurrent losses. In 1904, nine years after Langstroth’s death, a mysterious ailment devastated hives on the Isle of Wight, a British island in the middle of the English Channel. The disease wiped out nearly all the hives on the island, then jumped to the British mainland, where it also wreaked havoc. Not until 1921 did a Dr. J. Rennie identify the tracheal mite as the culprit responsible for the losses. It was the world’s first known mite infestation—though not the last. In 1922, the United States prohibited the importation of honey bees, managing to forestall the arrival of the mite for more than sixty years—but also isolating the gene pool of American bees and making them more vulnerable to those pathogens that inevitably did arrive.

And arrive they did. They came in trickles; they came in waves; they came in tsunamis; they came and kept coming. There came the imported red fire ants, which are native to South Africa and arrived in Mobile, Alabama, sometime in the 1930s aboard a Brazilian cargo ship. The ants now infest most of the southern and southwestern United States, overrunning colonies, driving bees away, and eating everything in the hive, then moving on to destroy nearby crops. There came chalkbrood, a fungal disease that leapt from Europe to the States in the mid-1960s. Chalkbrood preys on the brood in weakened hives, leaving behind chalky white discarded “mummies” scattered at the entrance. There came tracheal mites and varroa mites, the twin parasitic curses from the 1980s onward. There came Africanized bees, bred in Brazil by accident in 1953. In 1990 they crossed the U.S. border, invading hives, interbreeding with European bees, and creating more aggressive offspring. There came small hive beetles, which aren’t all that small. Little black pellet-like insects, they arrived in the United States from South Africa in 1998. They eat their way through a colony’s larvae, pollen, and honey, defecating every inch of the way, leaving in their wake a foul, gelatinous goo—a “violent ooze,” as one of Miller’s friends once described it.

There came “crazy Rasberry ants,” named after Tom Rasberry, the exterminator who figured out how to kill them—not an easy task because the ants, which eschew typical regimental ant columns, pile the dead over areas where pesticides have been applied and march to safe haven. Crazy Rasberry ants first debarked at a Houston port in 2002 and by 2008 had doubled their range, gumming up fire alarms, sewage pumps, computers, and gas meters and inflicting grave damage on beehives, where the ants dine on larvae and move into the collapsed hives to lay eggs. There came sinister-sounding pathogens like Kashmir bee virus and Israeli acute paralysis virus and black queen cell virus and deformed wing virus and Kakugo virus, which infests bee brains and makes them unusually aggressive. All were identified only recently. Bad things have been invading beehives for a long, long time. But in the last thirty years, they have come faster and faster, in wave after breathless wave. For that, we have the almond to thank.

J
OHN
M
ILLER FIRST TOOK HIS DAD’S BEES TO A
C
ALIFORNIA
almond orchard in 1974. Before then, the family had overwintered its colonies in Idaho, lining the hives up on a gentle south slope, clustering them together six hives per stand, enrobing them in straw, tarpaper, and chicken wire to protect them from north and west winds, and hoping for snow to further bury and insulate the bees. In late March, after winter’s worst months had passed, the Millers would remove the packing, “discover 10,000 mice also enjoy the straw insulation; occasionally discover a skunk,” John Miller wrote. In a normal year, they could expect a 2 to 4 percent loss over the winter; to replace dead colonies, they’d drive their GMC 5500 flatbed through Nevada to Live Oak, California, where they’d pick up five hundred three-pound packages of bees and queens from a guy named Eugene Walker.

John’s grandfather Earl had stopped migrating when he set up his beekeeping operation in Idaho in 1919. He wasn’t peripatetic like his father, N.E., or his brother Woodrow. Earl was, says John, “content to do business, buy property, run bees, be the mayor of little Blackfoot, Idaho, and play cards at the Elks Club.” Rather than lay off his summer beekeepers after the harvest and move the bees to California, he kept employees busy building houses to sell.

Earl handed over the business in 1957 to John’s father, Neil, who would have been content to follow suit, but in the late 1960s he found himself in a predicament. The alfalfa growers whose fields surrounded the Millers’ bees had begun using dieldrin and heptachlor, new insecticides that proved remarkably efficient at killing both alfalfa weevil and bees. Neil’s losses were horrific. In addition, he began to notice that the small farms and dairies in southeastern Idaho were getting bigger and more mechanized. Farmers were now, with the help of modern chemical fertilizers, planting more potatoes and less alfalfa, and when they did plant alfalfa, they were replacing their old ten-foot mowing machines, the kind that hung off the back of a tractor on a three-point hitch, with platoons of freestanding twenty-four-foot, six-mower conditioners that could knock down a field of alfalfa in two hours and empty the valley of hay in three days, before it began to bloom. That was when the hay was most “bovine nutritious,” says John, but not, alas, at all apis nutritious.

This did not bode well for a business that needed lots of flowers to feed lots of bees, and Neil began to consider getting out of beekeeping. He just couldn’t see a way to make a good living at it anymore. But in 1968, a guy named James Powers—a mercurial, “hulking brute of a man” who tended not to play well with others but happened to be a good friend of Neil’s—rolled through Blackfoot from his home base three hundred miles west in Parma, Idaho. He was on his way to North Dakota, where the climate was ill-suited to large-scale cultivation of grain and cattle, and clover and alfalfa still reigned. Powers had begun keeping some of his twenty thousand bees there. It had been a year of crop failure in southeast Idaho. Not so in North Dakota. “Jim said, ‘Come up to North Dakota, there are lots of flowers,’ ” Neil Miller, who is now retired, recalls. And then Powers issued an ultimatum. “He said, ‘I’m telling you if you don’t come look at this country I’ll never speak to you again and I mean it.’ ”

Well, Neil liked Jim Powers, and he wanted to stay his friend, and he was also curious and a little bit desperate, so he got in the car and drove north and east to see the flowers that bloomed from horizon to horizon and to witness the tremendous crop those flowers were producing for Jim Powers. Powers mentioned that there was a small town named Gackle about halfway between Oaks, where Powers had his operation, and Bismarck, the state capital, that appeared to have all the necessities for a successful beekeeping operation: decent roads, available land, a small Ford dealership, a hardware and grocery store, and sweet clover as far as the eye could see. When Neil visited Gackle, a patron sat next to him at the local café and said, “You’re new here, aren’t you?” He asked Neil what he needed, and Neil said he was looking for a warehouse building to start a honey production business. By the next morning, the Gackle Improvement Association had offered to purchase a piece of land for Neil on the south side of town and to let him occupy it property-tax-free for five years until he got the business off the ground.

The next year, the Millers moved into Gackle, where the flowers bloomed unmolested, as promised. But the winters there were much tougher than in Idaho. Beekeepers who overwintered in North Dakota could expect annual losses of more than 20 percent. The necessary evil of a northern operation, it seemed, was a southern operation. Neil had to find a place to put his bees in the winter, preferably one where they could make lots of honey. He consulted with Jim Powers, who was wintering his bees in Parker, Arizona, and appeared to be prospering. Neil found a spot just across the Colorado River from Powers in Blythe, California. But it was 1973, and bee turf was hard to find in warm climes: “Like anyone that comes-lately, all the good spots were taken,” says Neil. John, who was a teenager at the time, remembers the experience with little nostalgia.

The Colorado, at the time, replenished willows and scrub brush; and each spring, the desert sang with hardy plants in bloom.

The abundance also blushed large numbers of scorpions, snakes, and spiders, who love to escape the sun beneath a beehive.

As spring wanes and summer waxes, more critters hide below more beehives.

Recall, this was also Before Pallets; so everything was hand-loaded, as in, pick the beehive up; discover what is coiled between your legs; in a bad way . . . and by the way, you have a BEEHIVE in your arms; don’t you DARE drop it!

Blythe was not my best experience.

Nor was it Miller Honey Farms’ best experience. “The bees came up fine, but we were all pretty well insane and sun-damaged by the time Blythe was in the rearview mirror,” John Miller says. Looking for a better place to park his bees in the cold months, Neil conferred with Eugene Walker, the queen-breeder who provided bees to restock the Miller hives each spring. Walker had begun pollinating bees for a Tracy, California, farmer named Ed Thoming, who had, in 1959, gotten sick of the work involved in planting sugar beets and beans every year and instead put in one of the largest blocks of almonds in the Central Valley—about five hundred acres of trees. The recent pesticide kills across the country meant Walker needed more of his hives than usual for breeding queens, and the Thomings needed more bees to pollinate their trees than Walker could supply. The contracts were modest at the time, about eight dollars a hive, which barely covered costs. But they did provide a place to keep and feed bees for six weeks in the dead of winter.