The Beekeeper's Lament (22 page)

They spread quickly, too, moving north through South America at a rate of almost a mile a day, blasting through Central America and Mexico, and arriving in Hidalgo, Texas, in October 1990. The bees then swarmed from the Texas border through southern New Mexico and Arizona and into Southern California. They have also been found in Louisiana, Arkansas, southern Utah, Florida, and Georgia, and wherever they go, they easily outcompete and outbreed managed bees. They are almost impossible to tell apart from their European cousins. They have slightly shorter wings, but not enough to be visible to the naked eye or even with the help of a microscope—the subspecies can only be definitively identified through mitochondrial DNA analysis. Thus a beekeeper may not realize his formerly gentle bees have been infiltrated by the Africans until one day they set upon him or his dog or kids or wife or newspaper boy.

There have always been nasty bees—those “improvident or unfortunate” insects that are filled “with the bitterest hate against any one daring to meddle with them,” Langstroth wrote. “If a whole colony on sallying forth possessed such a ferocious spirit, no one could hive them unless clad in a coat of mail, bee-proof; and not even then, until all the windows of his house were closed, his domestic animals bestowed in some place of safety, and sentinels posted at suitable stations to warn all comers to keep at a safe distance.” Langstroth’s hypothetical breed would be far more malicious than today’s Africanized hybrid; even the German black bees that he worked with in his day were considerably nastier than almost any bee you’d encounter today. Nor are Africanized bees any more venomous than your standard European bee—their stings, in fact, deliver slightly less venom. Their victims to date have died not from the bees’ venom but because of underlying heart conditions or allergic reactions. Still, Africanized bees are far more defensive and will, if disturbed—by lawn mowers, power tools, or unsuspecting beekeepers—come boiling out of a colony en masse and pursue the offender. They’ll attack eyes, mouths, and ears, anything, stinging in greater numbers than European bees, for greater distances, with greater persistence.

That’s what John Miller learned back in 2005—in the same fateful span of time when his brother Lane crashed his truck and the varroa mite crashed his operation. That year the family decided to expand the empire into Rockville, Texas. They did so on the advice of a Texas honey impresario who told Miller’s brother Jay that Rockville offered plenty of winter territory for the taking. John was against the move, arguing that all prime bee turf in this country was spoken for thirty years ago: “I said to them, ‘If it’s so good, why isn’t anybody else there?’ ” But away they went. They dropped the bees off in the spring, splitting their hives and allowing the virgins to soar off on mating flights with local drones. By summertime, the bees were “so damn mean you could barely work them.” A forklift would touch a pallet of bees, and hundreds of guards would explode to the attack from all four hives. The pallet next to it would do the same and the one next to that one. They’d set each other off like a stadium wave, surge after surge of belligerent bees. They’d do it any time of day, even in the coolest part of the morning. Within weeks, Miller’s formerly gentle and industrious citadels had transformed into cantankerous mobs that attacked with little provocation. He got out of there, fast: cantankerous honey bees aren’t for him. He doesn’t like to describe them as “Africanized,” though. He prefers to be politically correct about it. He calls them “behavior challenged honey bees,” or BCHs for short:

For 400 years, the scourge of the planet, the European White Guy

selected nice, big, gentle honey bees.

Italians, Carniolans.

Over the past 400 years, while we were selecting for meaty, beaty, big and bouncy bees,

and parenthetically, their equally robust drones;

the Behavior Challenged Honey bee has fought its way through the jungle, taking on all foes,

mating with the wily virgin, and staying light on their collective feet. . . .

It Appears To Me

that the BCH drone is slightly more nimble than the European drone.

[I have heard the Euros have better cigarettes, however.]

When our bees left CA after the almonds, they were just fine, normal behavior.

When I delivered the same hives to honey-production bee yards in North Dakota

three months later;

They Had Changed.

Pissed Off All The Time.

Not Very Good Honey Producers . . .

Now, what was the question?

The European queens get hooked up with the African drone.

The African drone is a hot-headed devil,

and her children become more like their dad,

than their mom.

It took seven or eight generations—two or three years, countless stings, and lots of packages from Pat Heitkam and the Koehnens—to restore Miller’s bloodlines to something close to their original benevolent state. For Miller the Africanized bee was a thorough inconvenience. But for those who seek to build a better bee, the nasty interloper may provide some guidance for navigating our brave new mite- and disease-ridden world of beekeeping. In Brazil, where the Africanized bee originated, honey production has skyrocketed, going from 6,500 tons a year before the arrival of African bees to 36,000 tons in 2008. During the half century in which they’ve coexisted, Brazilian beekeepers have learned how to interact with the bees; during the three decades that the varroa mite has been present in the Western Hemisphere, the bees also appear to have learned to interact with it. They recover far more quickly from its incursions than do bees of pure European descent. The same is true in the United States. Frank Eischen, an entomologist with the USDA’s Agricultural Research Service in Weslaco, Texas, works extensively with Africanized bees. He told me a few years ago that some colonies in his lab had survived for seven or eight years without any varroa treatment. Perhaps Warwick Kerr’s mad experiment wasn’t so disastrous after all. The suspicion is that because Africanized bees swarm more quickly, they also abandon a hive and its infected brood more quickly when confronted with collapse. Their mobility, the very aspect of their behavior that is so frightening, appears to provide a useful tool in fighting the varroa mite. European bee colonies collapse; Africanized ones abscond.

They are, in short, “survivor stock,” and there is very little of that to be found these days. Beekeepers are harnessed by their own survival instinct to the treadmill of medication, resistance, carnage, and requeening—and honey bees are harnessed to those beekeepers. But until entomologists can pinpoint and target the exact mechanism of resistance and create a magic bee that fights off modern pests and still does all the other things a modern bee must do, there is only one surefire way to create a better bee: “You just choose survivors and breed those,” says Eischen. Let the rest die. It would be best, says the Beltsville lab’s Jay Evans, if they passed a law that prohibited the application of chemicals for varroa mites. Were American honey bees left to their own devices, some very small percentage of them would surely evolve a defense against the varroa mite, as
Apis cerana
did in Asia with its grooming behavior and as the Africanized bee appears to have done with its tendency to abscond. If that were to happen, the bee population would drop by 80 to 90 percent for a while, and it would be an economic disaster for people like John Miller, and all the farmers who depend on people like John Miller to pollinate their crops, and all of us who like to eat almonds and cherries and apples and lettuce and such. But eventually, resistant bees would develop, and from those bees would come a stronger national herd. Still, adds Evans, “I could never tell someone to let their bees die.”

John Miller doesn’t want his bees to die. But he’s also got a healthy respect—awe, really—for bees that survive on their own. On a back road near his house in Newcastle, tucked in between the trophy estates that have overrun the place like so many behavior-challenged honey bees, there’s a house with a tattered blue roof and degrading siding in a raucously untended meadow dotted with sheep and California poppies. There’s a swarm in the roof there, Miller says, that has survived for a half century—through foulbrood and nosema, tracheal mites and varroa mites and perhaps even CCD. Miller’s own property houses boxes and vats of antibiotics, miticides, and fungicides, but he’s not so hardened that he can’t admire the spectacle of nature taking its course. “I like to think they’re survivor stock,” he says: hardened bees with an infinite capacity to endure and regenerate, bees with mysterious properties of survival that have eluded the entomologists and the breeders and the queen-rearers, and especially the straight-up beekeepers.

But come to think of it, he hasn’t seen that swarm for a while.

Chapter Eight
The Human Swarm

S
OON AFTER
M
ILLER’S
NEW QUEENS COMMENCE THEIR
reigns, he trucks his bees to North Dakota. It takes a month or so, but by mid-June all have hitched a crowded semi from a withering bee yard in America’s populated, ever-replenishing West to the nation’s empty interior. Miller arrives for the summer in June. He used to drive the Corvette; now he takes his Toyota at a more leisurely pace. He stops in Wyoming for dinner with Larry Krause, then pushes on to Greater Metro Gackle, where he places bees and waits to see what the summer’s harvest will hold. June brings the flowering of the sweet clover, then alfalfa. July is more fickle.

I first visited Miller in Gackle the summer before CCD arrived. It had been a particularly cruel July. The temperature had hovered well above 100 for much of the previous weeks. Mid-month, a weather station on the state’s southern border recorded a high of 120 degrees. Corn drooped knee-high, earless in the fields, the stalks edged a frayed yellow. Alfalfa florets withered in the meadows; locals wore expressions of stoic exasperation. But the day before I got there in early August, it finally rained, and the long-awaited moisture left the landscape a deep, heartbreaking emerald. After a long, hot month, the sloughs filled with runoff, waterfowl, and sudden, immeasurable hope.

I met up with Miller at the Bismarck airport, and we drove together to Gackle. In its subtle, windswept way, the land was breathtaking. The hills rolled to the horizon; the sky shone opalescent; great, billowing clouds built like temples to the ionosphere. The slopes that surged across the prairie looked like tallgrass snowdrifts, and in a geological sense, they are—the product of glacial ebb and flow, millennia of wind and water and ice marching across unbroken plains and then retreating.

North Dakota is, these days, a place of near-constant retreat. First the glaciers withdrew, pursued by the weather. Then the Plains Indians dispersed and the bison disappeared, run from the land. Then went the trappers, run out of quarry; the homesteaders and farmers who ran out of luck; the cattle who ran out of forage; the banks that ran out of money. After generations of defeat, this battered territory is, as Miller explains, “a place of modest expectations,” where the aging farmer’s boldest dream is to pay off the farm, move to town, and own a Buick. That is to say, it is John Miller’s kind of place. Many flowers, few people.

Not even his family joins him now. When his kids were younger, they traveled with him; now they are off on their own and Jan prefers to stay in California, so Miller leads a bachelor life during the summer. If the winters weren’t too harsh for honey bees and modern families, he’d stay here year-round. His life in California is dictated by global markets, eight-lane highways, and the springtime pollination dance of supply and demand. In North Dakota he and his honey bees stay put. The bees spend the summer feasting on a smorgasbord of flowering crops and wildflowers that burgeon on the borders and margins between fields; Miller spends the summer tending them and his vegetable garden. “I see more traffic on a trip from the airport to my house in California than I do in an entire summer in North Dakota,” he told me before I arrived. “I don’t need to use my turn signals here. Everybody knows where I’m going.”

As we drove down the highway, it was clear that blinkers were beside the point. The hundred miles of highway running east from Bismarck to Gackle are straight, the homes along the road infrequent. Almost every field along the way hosts a haphazard-looking aggregation of white bee boxes. Year after year, the state vies with California as the nation’s top honey producer, and Miller’s outfit ranks as one of the largest in North Dakota, harvesting more than a million pounds a year. Still, not every hive we saw belonged to him. Around Gackle, most do. In nearby Jamestown they are likely to bear Zac Browning’s brand; in Medina they belong to Miller’s local nemesis, a part-time bee sharecropper who rents colonies from Florida for the summer and who, according to Miller, dilutes his honey and lets his hives go “rotten with hive beetle.” Unlike bees, which can forget as quickly as they enrage, a beekeeper knows how to hold a grudge.

Miller had a yarn to tell about every bee yard and farm we passed. Those bees over there belong to Zac Browning: “I commingle my hives with him all the time.” Look at that farmhouse: a young couple with ten children who have single-handedly brought the population slide in southern Kidder County to a temporary standstill. “They go through gallons of honey.” That field full of cars? “Those are Kevin Klevin’s. I haven’t seen him for a while.” Kevin Klevin is the nephew of Jim Klevin. Kevin used to let Miller keep bees on his farm, but another beekeeper—one of Miller’s ex-employees, in fact—stole him away. That small red home hidden behind a hillock, perhaps a horizon’s length away from the road? A bachelor farmer named Duane Trautman lives there. A few years ago, a Canada goose showed up at the back door, bonded with the cat, and didn’t bother, when the cold came, to fly south for the winter. “Maybe,” Miller surmises, “the damned thing liked cat food.” The goose stayed for a few years, and then one day gazed skyward—hearing, perhaps, the distant gabble of former companions—and flapped his wings and flew off without saying goodbye. Now Duane Trautman and his cat are alone again.

Loneliness is epidemic on the northern prairies. We turned off the empty four-lane highway onto a narrow and even emptier two-lane road. Each mile, exactly, the road intersected another thoroughfare—a paved street leading to a small town or a graded gravel road extending to a home, but most often a rutted, grassy two-track slowly returning to nature. This methodical network of roads runs throughout the northern plains, a vestige of the railroad surveys at the turn of the twentieth century and a reminder that there was a time when North Dakota’s population could support such orderly and optimistic dissection of the landscape. Every so often, we flew past a small town with flaking clapboard churches, rusting railroad tracks, and careworn houses; some still had occupants, while others appeared to have succumbed to slow neglect or even hurried abandonment, like a hive left empty after the colony has departed. Finally we passed a large and glimmering slough teeming with ducks and egrets and red-winged blackbirds and approached a water tower that peered above a large hillock adorned with red-white-and-blue tires. They were organized to spell the word
Gackle.

In both form and content, Gackle embraces every agricultural cliché that Miller’s wintering grounds in the Central Valley don’t—the lonely dairy silo at the edge of town, the grain elevator, the rolling fields, the clapboard one-room library, the fluttering flags, the sign that informs visitors there are five churches that serve the town of Gackle (although the sign is not technically accurate anymore, because the Assembly of God building fell down, and after St. Anne’s Catholic Church lost its priest the diocese sold the building to a hunter for $1000—leaving only the Church of Christ and the Lutheran and Baptist churches). We drove past a dusty grocery, and, in quick succession, the Gackle Community Café, the Gackle Senior Center, and Dani’s Place, Gackle’s only bar. Then the Krieger movie theater, which shows first-release films to weekend audiences that number in the single digits; a bedraggled Ford and farm implements dealership; a Tastee-Freez; a dairy-turned-firehouse; and a guy named Paul trimming a lovingly tended shrub. It was like a sepia, soft-focus campaign ad: morning in an America most Americans have never had the privilege to know.

We turned off the main drag. (No blinker, no need.) We drove up a gentle hill, past a remarkable procession of camouflage trucks—Gackle, with its generous sloughs, calls itself the “duck hunting capital of the world,” or in more modest moments, the duck hunting capital of North Dakota. The mayor ran a camo-painting business on the side. Miller pointed to each dwelling on our route. We drove past a well-maintained home on our left: “I lent that guy two grain bins and he collapsed them. I sent him a bill and he never paid.” A few houses down, another tale of woe: “A horse fell on that guy two years ago. He broke his ankle.” On our right was a large house; I think it was made of brick: “That’s a family from Washington, they’re not from here, they have lots of kids and we don’t trust them.” Then a slightly unkempt dwelling: “This guy is a drinker.” We passed a gray pickup truck: “I gave that truck away and I regret it to this day. It was a good truck.” And then we approached Miller’s place. Miller once claimed in an email that he didn’t know his house number.

I am sure it has a street address . . .

ask anyone,

I live directly east, across the street from Melvin Muller, that’s all you really need to know, unless you need further detail as in, he lives just north of Denning’s house

so there.

Miller’s house was as unpretentious as the next, although bee paraphernalia dotted the front lawn where others might have placed plastic deer or lawn jockeys. Inside there were comfortable if not terribly attractive leather chairs, piles of books on the floor, a few dirty remnant rugs, and in the cupboard, far more varieties of honey than spices. Being a proper gentleman bee farmer, Miller thought it best that a strange woman avoid the impropriety of staying in his “man cave,” so he dropped me across the street at the large, comfortable house of Harry and Brenda Krause, who offered to be my hosts for the visit.

The Krauses were kind and unadorned. Harry had a craggy Germanic face and white hair; Brenda had soft brown curls cropped around her face and a sturdy frame. They welcomed me and showed me to the basement room where their grandchildren usually stayed, explaining that they’d built the place four years ago when, discouraged by high fuel, fertilizer, and equipment costs, and with their children all decamped to Minneapolis to make real livings, they’d leased their farm to a larger operation and retired. After I settled in, they offered me fresh-baked bread with honey. There was lots of honey in the cupboard, and all of it—except one tub of creamy honey from Utah produced by Miller’s aunt Shirley Miller, “widow of David, and her slightly loopy daughter Eileen and son David Jr.”—came from John’s bees. Each year before the clover goes into bloom, Miller places his hives on his neighbors’ pastures. To the east, his bee yards range twenty miles—the soil is good in that direction, but farmers tend to plant high-value crops like corn and soy that supply little in the way of nectar for foraging bees. To the west, his yards range forty-five miles. The soil in that direction is rockier and harder to till, thus better suited to raising clover and alfalfa for pasture, grazing, and haying. Thus better suited to bees.

Just as the first geese start rolling south—usually during the third week of October—Miller delivers a portion of last summer’s crop to far-flung houses around Logan, La Moure, Stutsman, and Kidder counties. He pays his rent in honey and gourds from his garden. (“Brilliant gourds, exuberantly diverse. The old ladies love them.”) Typically, he can do four honey drops an hour, far fewer if the farmers are lonely and want to talk. Most do. They talk of cattle prices and corn prices and sunflower prices and implement prices, and the loss of a grandchild or a husband or a dog, and “my God, how things are changing.” Many now live in skilled care facilities—more every year. The old grow older.

I’ll visit Tillie Dewald who used to bring sheets of honey cookies to the honey house.

And once I’ve left her room, smiling, I’ll cry

Sometimes he can’t bear it, watching lives wind down, and he deliberately delivers his rent honey on days he knows people won’t be home. Sauerkraut Day in Wishek, when they serve German food and offer free blood pressure screenings, is always a good bet. It’s been going on since 1925, and on the third Wednesday of October each year, farms empty out all over central Logan County. If nobody’s home, Miller can blast through thirty properties in six hours.

Thirty years ago, Miller would have provided his neighbors with five-gallon buckets, but these days they’re usually happy with five-pound jugs, or even small honey bears. That’s because families in Gackle aren’t what they used to be. There are bigger farms and fewer farmers, who have fewer kids, and the kids tend to leave for college and never come back. Since the middle of the twentieth century, the town, which was first surveyed in 1902 when the Northern Pacific Railway built a spur line nearby, has lost more than half of its residents. Today it is home to 275 senior-citizen farmers. Vacant lots grow wild; homes stand empty—if you’re inclined to move to Gackle, you can buy a house for as little as ten thousand dollars. The school is the only public K–12 within forty miles. A few years ago it consolidated with the school in nearby Streeter, and Miller commandeered the bird’s-eye maple flooring from the decaying Streeter schoolhouse to give away as a finisher’s prize for the Streeter Centennial 5K “Strut-N-Skedaddle,” a race celebrating the town’s hundredth anniversary. No one objected to the loss of the school’s floor. By the time I visited, the combined school for both towns educated a total of 110 students. Twelve had graduated from high school the previous spring; only four would enter kindergarten that fall. Ultimately, if the trend continues—and there’s no reason it shouldn’t—the school will end up consolidating with the one in Napoleon, the county seat thirty-eight miles away, which already shares a football team with the Gackle-Streeter school. When that happens, there will be one public school serving an eighty-mile stretch of the state.