The Beekeeper's Lament (16 page)

The California citrus belt, the very place where N. E. Miller first wintered his bees, was no longer a friendly place for beekeepers. Paramount began pushing a “Seedless Mandarin Protection Act” in the state legislature, seeking to establish “no-fly zones” of two miles for hives around designated orchards. Rowdy public meetings ensued. Beekeeping advocates began speaking of a twenty-first-century range war. Finally, when Paramount’s legislative efforts sputtered and it became clear their legal efforts would do the same, the company backed down. They began netting their trees to keep bees from pollinating the blossoms. But the beekeepers who had already relocated from their “homeland,” as Traynor calls it, are unlikely to reclaim their prime citrus yards, because mandarin demand continues to grow and “additional mandarin settlements have been planted in the occupied territory.” In large swaths of California citrus country, the orange varieties that bees once visited are now forbidden fruit. It is an uneasy peace.

John Miller actually grows mandarins on his property. They are, besides the bees and his trucks and his grandchildren, his pride and joy. They are called Owari Satsuma mandarins, and they are delicious.

What you buy at Whole Foods is a rank amateur; a rotting, half-globe-trotted waste.

Gassed, and waxed, it’s a sad excuse for Mandarins!

I know!

The mandarin crop coincides with Miller’s quiet time of year. The oranges are ready to pick just before the bees go into the cellars. That gives him plenty of time to “help” with the harvest.

The bald fat guy eats his way across the orchard.

You can spend a splendid afternoon, with your gimpy knees, and broad butt towards the sun; oblivious; completely oblivious to everything. . . .

You are set beyond what a normal mortal should expect of life.

It is ironic that Miller has chosen to grow a fruit that doesn’t need bees at the epicenter of his California operation, but he considers himself a savvy businessman, and sterile mandarins are a savvy investment. Other citrus growers have reached the same conclusion: in recent years, they have rearranged some Murcott chromosomes to create a sterile hybrid called the Tango, which is identical to the original but averages only one seed in five fruits regardless of how many bees hover nearby. Millions of the new trees have been planted. But for those who made early investments in trees that can’t tolerate bees, the new hybrids arrived too late. It is easier to interdict bees than replace trees.

Unless, of course, you are a beekeeper. Unless you need billions of flowers to feed billions of insects that you can’t truly possess, that you can’t control, that can’t read no trespassing signs or understand the concepts of no-fly zones or hybridization or changing consumer preference. Unless you love something that can’t love you back, that is just as happy to hurt you, that lives without concern for its keeper or his profit margins or his pride, and that dies with astonishing indiscretion—that simply does what it was born to do.

Chapter Six
Charismatic Mini-Fauna

W
HEN THE ALMOND BLOOM
APPROACHED IN LATE 2006, BEEKEEPERS
hoped—as they always do—for a better year than the previous ones, when varroa mite had wreaked havoc across the industry. But then Colony Collapse Disorder came along, and people’s bees went missing, and Miller began getting lots of phone calls from journalists on the hunt for loquacious beekeepers. Before CCD, Miller received calls once or twice every year or two from some eager apiary neophyte—like me, or a food writer for the
New York Times
, or a reporter from
North Dakota Horizons
magazine—and he’d invite us along on his native migrant tour and make us a T-shirt and wow us with his quick wit and endless enthusiasm for the wonders of bee-assisted modern agriculture.

By the spring of 2007, though, as the CCD toll mounted, Miller began getting calls more frequently, from daily newspapers and German magazines and British filmmakers and California food writers seeking to explain this new contemporary woe. Mass die-offs, apian or human, are always intriguing to those in the line of work that involves informing the public—especially when they may presage the end of the world or at the very least one third of our food supply, including the really good stuff like blueberries and cranberries and melons and almonds. This particular die-off was sexier yet for its inexplicability, and so the calls began coming fast and furious. A few weeks into the CCD hubbub, Miller sent me an email: “Hey!” he began:

Tomorrow, NBC will be shooting and interviewing

Gene Brandi on this whole damn thing. . . .

it was supposed to be me . . .

but NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO;

I’m on a plane to Bismarck.

America’s Loss.

Stock market collapsed upon the news that my 15 min. were now yet to come another time. . . .

Gene will do extremely well.

It’s his 15 minutes, he has to.

Brandi, a longtime fixture on the California beekeeping scene, did just fine. But Brandi’s fifteen minutes, and Miller’s, and those of all the nation’s beekeeper-sages, were nothing compared to the fifteen minutes of David Hackenberg. He’s the Pennsylvania-based beekeeper who in November 2006 visited his hitherto healthy Florida apiaries and discovered them virtually vacant, though still containing a full complement of honey and brood. Hackenberg had been seeing some weird things for a couple of years, but he couldn’t quite put a finger on what was wrong. In 2005 he had lost 40 percent of the bees he had placed in apple orchards in upstate New York: “They swarmed out of the boxes and just flew away,” he says, leaving their honey behind. He’d restocked those hives with new bees, but they’d disappeared, too, and on a couple of occasions, he’d noticed bees hanging on the side of the hives but not occupying the interior. In January 2006 he’d tried again, stacking the honey boxes from the disappeared colonies on top of unaffected hives. Those colonies vanished, too.

And then, in November 2006, he pulled into a bee yard in the late afternoon, around three-thirty or four, and noticed there weren’t many bees flying. He didn’t think much of it at first and went about his business, lighting up smokers to calm the bees and preparing his forklift to move the hives. Then it hit him. “All of a sudden I realized there’s nothing home,” he told me. “I started jerking lids off, and there’s nothing there, like someone took a sweeper and cleaned the hives out.” Nor were there any dead bees on the ground, as there should have been. The surface underfoot was gravel, so it was easy to see that there was nothing to see—“The dead bees wouldn’t have filled the bottom of a five-gallon bucket.” There were some more beehives across the field, and when he sent one of his employees to look at them, he reported seeing good-looking hives with plenty of bees. “Here’s three fifty, four hundred beehives, and those bees aren’t even
attempting
to rob this stuff, they aren’t even sticking a head in,” Hackenberg said. Under normal circumstances, rival hives would have marauded the dead colony’s honey stores, but there was no sign of that. He had seen lots of bees die in lots of ways, but he had never seen this before.

Hackenberg dresses like a ranch hand, with a leather vest and jeans that extend somewhere close to his armpits. Like John Miller, Hackenberg is a talker. The first time I spoke with him, he had two or three phone conversations going on at the same time, and even so, his call-waiting was clicking in every few minutes. He talks loudly, with the wound-up patter of a horse-race announcer; a constant crescendo. So when his bees disappeared, he did what comes naturally to him: he started making phone calls. He called Jerry Hayes, Florida’s assistant chief of apiary inspection, and described the bee yard scene. Hayes told him that a Georgia beekeeper had just lost six hundred of his nine hundred hives in a similarly disconcerting manner. Hackenberg kept calling around and kept hearing about hives collapsing in the same way across the country—in Florida, Georgia, Texas, New York, California, Pennsylvania, and the Dakotas; thirty-six states eventually. All had remarkably similar symptoms: adult bees abruptly vanishing from the hive, leaving few bodies inside or nearby; a queen, a healthy store of brood, a few young adults left behind; and little to none of the typical pillaging that would be expected of a collapsed hive’s honey and pollen stockpiles.

Hackenberg also shared his weird findings with scientists, including Dennis vanEngelsdorp, who was acting state apiarist in Pennsylvania. He and vanEngelsdorp had seen each other only a month before, in early November, at the annual Pennsylvania State Beekeepers Association meeting. Hackenberg spends summers in central Pennsylvania when he’s not on the road pollinating blueberries, apples, cantaloupes, pumpkins, cranberries, and almonds. He had just transported his hives down to his winter base in Florida, and he announced at the meeting that he was pleased with his bees—they were, he told vanEngelsdorp, “fantastic.” Perhaps that should have been the first sign—John Miller can attest that it’s the rare season that ends as it begins. Because sure enough, only a month later, Hackenberg called vanEngelsdorp to describe the woeful scene in his apiaries. VanEngelsdorp immediately assumed the problem was varroa mites—“we blame everything on varroa mite,” he says—but nonetheless asked Hackenberg to send him some dead colonies. When he examined the scattering of corpses that remained, says vanEngelsdorp, “we found the bees didn’t have varroa mite—but they did have every other condition going.”

VanEngelsdorp, who was in his late thirties at the time, was a senior extension associate and Ph.D. candidate in Penn State University’s entomology department. A stocky, vaguely Norse-looking Canadian with a prow-like forehead and a thin covering of blond hair, vanEngelsdorp holds a master’s degree in entomology from Cornell and intends to finish his Ph.D., if ever he escapes the maw of permanent apiarian crisis. His work originally included a combination of research on bee epidemiology and outreach to local beekeepers to help them minimize the spread of disease. But after he autopsied Hackenberg’s bees, his job description changed. Typically, when a bee is sliced open, its viscera appear a creamy white. These bees were different. Their internal organs were blackened, their sting glands and intestinal tracts swollen, discolored, and full of melanized scar tissue, as if their insides had been incendiary-bombed.

Hackenberg had also contacted vanEngelsdorp’s colleague Diana Cox-Foster, another Penn State entomologist who specializes in bee viruses and other pathogens. Cox-Foster conducted a molecular analysis on the afflicted bees. The results were mystifying: they had multiple viral, bacterial, parasitic, and fungal infections, but none seemed to suffer from the exact same infection. Some had deformed wing virus; some had sac-brood virus; some had black queen cell virus; some had chalkbrood; some had nosema; some had other viruses that hadn’t yet been identified. None had the same exact combination of pathogens. Nor did they have large loads of mites, as nearly everyone had expected. Had mites been responsible, the scientists would have found large numbers in surviving colonies or sealed up with the brood yet to hatch. They didn’t.

What all this confounding evidence suggested wasn’t entirely clear. The affected bees’ immune systems—fragile under any circumstances—simply weren’t functioning as intended. Much as an AIDS patient suffers from a variety of exotic and typically rare infections, so did Hackenberg’s bee populations. The Penn State entomologists gave it an appropriately apocalyptic yet vague name, Colony Collapse Disorder, and set out to determine what it was.

Among their first moves was to put together a collaborative “working group” representing a variety of disciplines and including USDA Research Service scientists, university entomologists, agricultural extension educators, and geneticists. To understand the distribution of the disorder, they conducted winter loss surveys, contacting bee inspectors who in turn contacted beekeepers across all fifty states, to find out where and how bees had died that year. The team also took samples from both healthy and afflicted hives in Florida, Georgia, California, and Pennsylvania. They put them on dry ice and sent them to various labs for analysis. Wax samples and bee corpses went to the pesticides group at Penn State, whose scientists examined the chemicals found in CCD hives and unaffected hives. Honey and pollen samples went to entomologists at North Carolina State University, who conducted a nutritional analysis of the food in the abandoned hives. The team shipped frozen bees to the Greene Infectious Disease Laboratory at Columbia University. Scientists there typically work with human tissue, but they agreed to employ a recently developed technique for reading short DNA sequences to create quick genetic profiles of the viruses, fungi, and parasites found in the CCD survivors. They sent samples to entomologists at the University of Illinois, who would compare the genomes of the affected bees to those of healthy colonies sequenced a few years earlier. They sent Hackenberg’s empty bee boxes to be irradiated by a company that uses gamma rays to kill bacteria on fruit and medical equipment. Then they repopulated the boxes with new bees to see whether they fared better in the sanitized equipment.

In doing so, the team aimed to answer three fundamental questions. First: Was there a pathogen involved in the disorder—a new or reemerging strain of virus, bacteria, fungus, parasite, or amoeba? Second: Was there some type of nutritional or genetic stress, such as poor forage or a new genetic defect, that was present in CCD-afflicted bees but absent in healthy ones? And finally: Had the bees been exposed to pesticides or other environmental chemicals that might have compromised their immunity or affected their behaviors? The working group believed that those three hypotheses offered the most likely culprits in the mystery.

Out in the general public, however, plenty of other theories floated about. Among the most outlandish were suppositions that the disappearing bees prefigured the coming Judgment Day, and the oft-repeated hypothesis that signals from cell phones led foragers astray. (“You should never let the bees have them,” joked a visitor to a beekeeper chat room. “They get distracted talking and never get any work done.”) Given how frequently beekeepers complained about poor cell signals in their bee yards, however, the argument never gained much traction.

Beekeepers had their own, generally more plausible, ideas. Every so often, I’d get an email from Miller describing the latest theory waggling through the migratory hive. “The suspected pathogen is a new strain of nosema,” he’d write.

Nosema is common in insects; you can inoculate grasshoppers with nosema spores,

and watch them die

A few days later, I’d receive another:

psst.

it’s BT Corn that’s killing the bees.

you got it here,

first.

Hackenberg, for his part, blamed the bloodbath (or rather, the hemolymph-bath) on a class of pesticides called neonicotinoids, which are chemical forms of nicotine used to treat a wide variety of crops. Neonicotinoids are among the world’s best-selling insecticides. They are used on more than 140 different crops and in home gardens and flea collars, and they generate billions of dollars of sales a year. Developed by Bayer CropScience, Inc., they were first approved for use in the United States in the 1990s; fifty other companies have since jumped into the market, selling them under catchy names like Gaucho, Poncho, Flagship, Assail, and Calypso. Neonicotinoids are sprayed on leaves, but also soaked onto seeds before they are planted. Because they are “systemic” pesticides, which are absorbed into every part of the plant, passing from the coated seeds through the plant’s circulatory system to the flowers, they remain in the plant—and its pollen and nectar—longer than many other insecticides. The neonicotinoid theory had a compelling logic, and lots of people in the environmental community quickly leapt to the same conclusion as Hackenberg—but it was, at that point, simply a theory. The CCD working group had a lot of methodical scrutiny—a lot of autopsies and surveys and studies and assays—ahead of them before they could declare the matter resolved.