The Beekeeper's Lament (24 page)

Wessel’s brother Conroy, who was quiet and pleasant and a hard worker who had done nothing wrong, would have to go with him. They came together; they would leave together. Miller knows what it’s like when brothers differ. He often revisits the lessons of Jacob and Esau, Ephraim and Manasseh. His brother Jay is four years younger. For most of their adult lives, they worked as partners in the family beekeeping business. Jay ran operations in Idaho; John oversaw the California and North Dakota operations. This geographical separation was not an accident: the two men disagreed on most everything, but especially beekeeping. In 2008 their disputes proved particularly costly. Every fall, once the hives are stripped, Miller feeds the bees medicated syrup containing an ingredient called fumagillin, which helps prevent nosema. He must do so after the honey has been harvested, so as not to contaminate product intended for human consumption, but before the weather turns. If it’s too cold, bees lose their appetites and won’t eat the syrup. Early that fall, as it became clear that
Nosema ceranae
, the deadly new nosema strain, was spreading quickly through U.S. hives, the brothers disagreed about when to cut off the honey harvest to medicate the bees. John wanted to stop the harvest early and get the colonies “fat, heavy, and strong” for the coming winter so they could serve as pollinating units for the following year, not honey production units for the current one. Jay wanted to make honey. “The Idaho operation almost did a good job,” Miller says bitterly. “Thus, the bees almost picked up the syrup. Thus, they were almost inoculated against nosema. Thus, they almost survived winter in good shape.”

But of course they did not. A spring nosema epidemic cost the Millers three thousand hives and in early 2008, Miller and his brother decided to part ways. It was, says Miller, a “slow train wreck,” long in coming. Jay kept some hives, and a real estate and cattle business he’d started on the side that John never approved of. John kept the majority of the colonies. He’s fairly certain he’s getting the poor end of the bargain. More bees, more headaches. So instead of going on vacation, instead of heading to the beach or the mountains, as normal Americans do, Miller spends much of the month of August pulling honey and counting red dots in his Frankenstein yard, the apiary where he tests various miticides. Each day in August, without fail, he visits the roadside semicircle of hives, monitoring the incursions of the varroa mite.

A
FTER LUNCH, WE HOPPED BACK IN HIS TRUCK FOR A VISIT TO
the Frankenstein yard. We pulled up under the shade of an old poplar a reasonable distance from the hives and put on our coveralls and veils. As we sat in the safe confines of the truck, a dark cloud spun past us. A swarm had departed from one of Miller’s hives, leaving its safe rectangular shelter and heading into the unknown to find a new home. The churning brown eddy—tens of thousands of bees—smudged across the bee yard and came to rest on a cornstalk to reconnoiter. The plant bent with the weight of the insects. Miller was pissed, perplexed. Some swarms you can anticipate. If the hive is crowded and you spot peanut-shaped queen cells among the brood, there’s a good chance that half the colony is fixing to pick up and leave. But it’s awfully hard, when you have ten thousand hives, to open every brood chamber frequently enough to catch each developing swarm. Even smaller-scale beekeepers are often flummoxed by the onset of a swarm. “For years,” wrote Langstroth, “I spent much time in the vain attempt to discover some infallible indications of first swarming; until facts convinced me that there can be no such indications.”

Most often, swarms occur when a hive has outgrown its space in the height of summer. When this happens, when a queen is so prolific and her worker bees so industrious that the hive produces more bees than it can contain, the hive, in prosperity mode, begins raising a new batch of queens. Then, after the new queen cells are capped but before the new queen hatches, the old queen departs with a group of robust pioneers to find a new place to establish a hive. Most bees swarm at midday, so they have time to find shelter before night’s coolness falls in. On the day that is “fixed for departure,” writes Langstroth, the queen grows restless, roaming the combs instead of laying eggs, communicating her agitation to the bees, who gorge themselves on honey in preparation for their journey. “At length,” he writes, “a violent agitation commences in the hive; the bees appear almost frantic, whirling around in circles continually enlarging, like those made by a stone thrown into still water, until, at last, the whole hive is in a state of the greatest ferment, and the bees, rushing impetuously to the entrance, pour forth in one steady stream. Not a bee looks behind, but each pushes straight ahead. . . .” As the swarm travels, it stops to rest on nearby trees, bushes, and walls, while the scouts look for a hollow tree, a rock crevice, or a chink in a building’s siding to call home. Swarms look frightening, but they are in fact surprisingly docile. With no hive to protect and with stomachs full of honey for the long journey to their new home, they are less inclined to sting. Many beekeepers handle them without gloves or veil.

If bees swarm too early in the spring or too late in the summer, however, they tend to do so not because they are doing well, but because they are doing poorly, “driven to desperation,” says Langstroth. It occurred to me, as we sat in the safety of Miller’s truck watching the swarm spin away from us, that these bees, pushed from their home and desperate for a new place to lay down some comb, weren’t all that different from Wessel and his compatriots. Wessel had explained to me, over his four shots of Jägermeister, that after the fall of apartheid the blacks had renamed the streets in his South African hometown with African names. Wessel’s ancestors, of course, had performed similar acts of displacement. I couldn’t help but think of Africanized honey bees—like Wessel, African-European hybrids, peripatetic, prone to swarming, and not above usurping the hives of others. Wessel was, like the Africanized bee, aggressive and not terribly well socialized, although we can blame genes, not alcohol, for the bees’ behavior. And now both have been transplanted to the New World, where they have aroused no shortage of consternation.

Swarming—migration, in human terms—is part of the deal in human history, and while it serves as a natural means of regeneration, it is also a powerful force of destabilization. European settlers swarmed to North Dakota; years later they trickled away, leaving behind disused homes and underpeopled villages. In their place came Wessel, who had found his own home less hospitable than he liked and who came and went in a few short months, leaving North Dakota one FFA bench the fewer. It’s not clear exactly why he derived pleasure from sowing such discord, but he had caused similar trouble, in smaller increments, all summer. Miller is certain that he erred in keeping Wessel around for as long as he did. Miller has never pretended to understand humans, though, so he’ll excuse himself for those mistakes. The ones he makes with his bees are less forgivable.

The Frankenstein yard is where Miller seeks to foresee and forestall his mistakes, testing miticides, acids, and tick killers. It is where, in 2004, Miller came to realize that none of his previous go-to materials were working anymore, and where, in subsequent summers, he has tested new materials to control the mites. Late summer and early fall, when bee populations drop and mite populations rise, is the beekeeper’s only window to kill mites on winter bees. By applying medicine at the right time, as the queen lays her last generation of eggs, a beekeeper can prevent varroa mites from multiplying within the brood combs and overwhelming the winter bee population.

So Miller starts, on the first of August, assiduously monitoring his Frankenstein yard, testing different mite-fighting preparations on different hives and entering the results of his tests on spreadsheets on an almost twenty-four-hour basis. Each of the test hives is numbered and placed in a semicircle. On the day I joined him, Miller pulled the top off each hive as we worked our way around. Most hives were healthy, the frames teeming with bees and dripping with honey. A few were in trouble. Those were bleak places to visit—dirty, bare, with few bees and little honey, like tenements with broken windows and graffitied hallways. Hive 411 was infected with chalkbrood, desiccated white larvae scattered below it. Hive 402 showed the telltale signs of varroa infestation: at the hive’s entrance, a number of “ants”—sickly bees without wings—wriggled in desultory circles. Under the lid the mites crawled freely across the backs of the bees, and the brood cells that we pierced with a knife all hosted telltale red dots on the developing white pupae.

To monitor the incursions of the varroa mites, Miller places stickyboards—white cardboard rectangles coated with Crisco—under each hive. Each day he counts the number of mites that have fallen to the board and enters it in a spreadsheet; the more red specks on the board, the heavier the mite load. He counts the mites in control hives where no medicines have been applied, counts them in hives in which he has inserted approved pesticides, counts them in hives treated with unapproved and off-label medications. None of the honey in these hives is intended for consumption—the Frankenstein yard is purely for mad-scientist bee-medicine experiments and observation.

I joined Miller to count the sinister red dots in batches of five, trying not to lose count through the netting of my veil, the glare of the stickyboard, and the insistent humming of bees whizzing past my ears, crawling on my arms, landing occasionally on my veil. There was something oddly meditative about this process—the sweat dripping down my face, the buzzing maelstrom of bees. The challenge of not scratching an itch and still keeping count took on nearly existential dimensions. Most of the stickyboards had only a few dots—40, 60, 150. Under hive 402, however, the board was covered in mites. I was charged with counting that one, but sometime after five hundred, when I had still covered only one corner of the board, I gave up. There comes a point, in beekeeping, when even a spreadsheet is unnecessary to capture the magnitude of a loss. “In the dictionary under the word
collapse
,” Miller said, “there’s a stickyboard with two thousand mites on it.” In rural North Dakota, they don’t need a dictionary to understand the concept of collapse: living off the land is always a gamble. Crops fail, colonies implode, people leave, houses fall in on themselves, but somehow the dwindling but still surviving residents find the proper balance of hope and fatalism that allows them to keep going.

O
N
S
UNDAY,
I
JOINED MY HOSTS
, H
ARRY AND
B
RENDA
K
RAUSE
, to attend services at the First United Church of Christ, a simple, sturdy, and unadorned church with white walls, white clapboard siding, and a broad wood-beamed nave. Miller, who typically attends Mormon services forty miles away in Jamestown, joined me, and we sat next to the Krauses and another local farmer. “I seen the cop coming out of your place of business,” Harry Krause prodded Miller. Miller rolled his eyes. Brenda mentioned that the postmistress had asked if something was wrong with Steve Kleingartner, because he was getting lots of cards and it wasn’t his birthday. Nobody knew the answer. After the service was over, they would surely find out.

There was a guest speaker before the service—Fred Kirschenmann, a local organic farmer and a longtime proponent of sustainable agriculture, who was to talk on the future of farming. He began with a statement of the obvious: the family farm in America’s heartland is in decline. “There are seventy thousand farmers producing sixty percent of the nation’s crops,” he said. Only 6 percent are under age thirty-five. Almost 80 percent are fifty-five and older. “A century ago,” he noted, “it was the opposite.” Looking around me at the service, I had no doubt that what he said was true. There were a hundred or so people in attendance; only one or two appeared to be under fifty; there was one teenager, and not one younger child. The previous year’s confirmation class was the last the church would have; there was no one left to confirm.

People are getting by in the heartland, Kirschenmann explained, either with help from their nonfarm income—a day job, a spouse’s salary—or by creating economies of scale and pesticide-and-fertilizer scorched-earth strategies that are ultimately unsustainable. Few Americans live on their farms anymore. Instead they rent them out to larger operations, because the equipment is so expensive and fuel costs so high. Rural communities, like inner cities, have ceded membership in the nation’s ownership society. The farmers around me nodded in agreement. Kirschenmann, who owns one of the first, largest, and most successful organic farms in the state, argued that only a return to smaller, more varied and labor-intensive agriculture, like his own farm, could bring the people back and revitalize rural communities like Gackle and countless others in North Dakota. But the trends are heading the other way.

After Kirschenmann finished speaking, Miller and his neighbors chatted. “How many of my kids went into bees?” Miller asked Harry Krause and the men around him. “Exactly zero. How many of your kids went into agriculture?” The farmers felt no need to answer. “Did you want them to go into agriculture?” They shook their heads. Miller would like his business to survive him. He would also like to retire. “I’d like to do something else with my life by the time I’m sixty,” he says. “I’d like to be able to see the exit door in five years and launch the next generation.” But he needs someone to launch. His children don’t appear interested; South Africans provide timely help but not, unfortunately, a long-term solution. That lies, he hopes, in his trusted manager, Ryan Elison, who came to work for him in Idaho ten years ago and fell in love with bees. Poor soul! Elison now runs much of the day-to-day operations for Miller, who hopes to sell the business to him soon and then move on to a second career “using my brain. I might want to be a paralegal,” he says, only half in jest.

Big agriculture has not been kind to Gackle, which has lost its kids, and thus its future, in a rural economy that is as unforgiving as the weather. The message was bleak, and after a more traditional sermon and a few hymns, we filed soberly out of the church. On the way home, we drove to Linda’s house to see if she needed anything after the weekend’s drama. But as we approached, Miller clucked and kept driving. Barry’s car was parked outside. He had come back to Linda, and Linda had allowed him back, and Wessel would soon be heading to Iowa, to another unfamiliar home in another fading agricultural redoubt where people seek to endure in a world that is no longer so hospitable for them.