The Beekeeper's Lament (25 page)

Barry wouldn’t stay; Linda wouldn’t keep him. But on that luminous and bittersweet August weekend, it was, perhaps, hard to let go just yet. We cleave to the way things are, not only to hold back a chaotic future, and not only because that is what we know. Gackle is a testament to the value of sheer persistence. There is value in returning to the one who loves you, in keeping the family farm going, in living where you grew up, in keeping bees when no amount of common sense and economic self-preservation can justify it. The colony may be collapsing in North Dakota, but not everyone is flying off. There is value, yes, and there is dogged romance in persistence. And John Miller is nothing if not a romantic.

I left Gackle that afternoon after church as menacing blue-black storm clouds boiled on the western horizon. A week later, Miller wrote me an email:

Upon your departure,

the skies erupted.

Remember how queer the sky appeared?

After your safe departure,

we received 2.80” of rain.

Zow!

Two days later, we clocked in another 1.30”.

Zow!

Two days later, that being this very evening,

we received .65 in a violent temper tantrum.

Thus; a total.

January 1 through August 1, 7.21 inches precipitation.

August 2 through August 25, 8.25 inches precipitation.

The semi-arid region of the northern plains is a raucous place.

Unpredictability is predictable.

Soon, a frost.

No one knows, but you may bet around September 21.

By December 21, average daytime highs will be 21.

Average nighttime lows will be 2.

Tonight we hid the trucks in the buildings, anticipating violence.

It came, without hail.

Other areas were not so fortunate; receiving baseball sized hail.

No bowling ball hail, no watermelon hail.

But driven by wind, baseball sized hail will kill cattle,

and any human too damned dumb to get out of the weather.

Chapter Nine
Bittersweet Bounty

B
UT IN THE END, THERE IS HONEY
.

Before the thunderstorm, before the sermon, before the Jägermeister-fueled theatrics, Miller consulted a map dotted with red thumbtacks. Each tack represented a flowering meadow where he kept a couple dozen hives, and we planned to take the honey from one of those meadows. He promised a good meadow, one close by and wildly overgrown. In Miller’s ideal world, the entire North Dakota prairie would be wildly overgrown. It would be overrun with impulsive, flowering weeds. It would belong only to alcoholic farmers who never get their haying done on time. The meticulous farmers, the corporate farmers, the uptight ones who cut their alfalfa before it blooms are no help to him. Neither are the ones who plow under their clover and alfalfa and plant in its stead acres upon acres of corn that brooks no weeds and carries no nectar and pollinates on the wind and provides little sustenance for a foraging bee. No, Miller prefers the sloppy guys, the ones who cut their hay late and thus let their fields explode in a riot of bloom.

But that year in Gackle, even the most neglected meadows were disappointing. As we headed east out of town, Miller pulled over and picked a violet alfalfa floret. The flowers looked healthy enough—in deep purple bloom. Miller put the flower in his mouth. I followed suit. The blossoms should have been sweet on the tongue, but they tasted like nothing, like dust. He squeezed the stem. If a plant is well hydrated, a tear of water should emerge. There were no tears. We hopped back in the truck for another mile, Willie and Jaco following in a flatbed truck, then took a right on a dirt road that led us to an overgrown swale on the far reaches of a nearby farm.

It was a perfect day to pull honey—calm, sunny, and warm. We stopped the trucks near a congregation of hives bunched haphazardly in a field of budding buckwheat and fading alfalfa, pulled veils over our faces, and lighted smokers to calm the bees. The hives were stacked four boxes high by that point in the summer—the bottom box housed the double-deep brood chamber with the queen; the three shallower supers on top contained the honey for human consumption. An excluder screen kept the queen from moving up to and laying eggs in the supers, ensuring that the upper boxes contained only honey, no queen or brood. The smaller worker bees, however, could travel easily between the hive and the honey boxes to build comb and deposit nectar and pollen—and as long as the flowers were blooming, that is what they did. But around this time of summer, as the light and blossoms faded, the bees shifted into survival mode, preparing to hunker down for a long winter with their honey provisions.

Miller had steeled himself for a disappointing harvest. August is never a fecund time, but this year, drought had accelerated the schedule. In early July, when the temperatures hit 105 degrees, the sweet clover went “poof.” The alfalfa followed in short order. We were now harvesting the last of the season’s bounty. Miller pried the top off a hive and placed a fume board on top of the uppermost honey super. The board had been doused with an acrid substance called Bee-Go, whose battery-acid stench defies description, though Miller kindly took a stab for me: “noxious, revolting, nauseating, eye-transplant; no anesthesia, chunk-blowing,” he suggested. Suffice it to say, it stinks, and drives the bees down from the upper honey boxes into the brood chamber at the bottom, where they hunker down with the queen waiting for the malodorous moment to pass. Bee-Go deployed, he could then pull honey without depleting the hive of too many of its workers. The supers were dripping with honey, heaped with beeswax. Replacing the top, he hoisted the box onto the pallet. “This is beautiful,” he said. “I mean heavy.” Heavy is good in the world of beekeeping. Heft augurs prosperity. A light hive may be easier to lift, but it means that something is wrong, and so, if you are a beekeeper, it is the hardest labor that is the most rewarding.

Despite Miller’s gentlemanly imprecations, I hefted one of the supers. It weighed around fifty pounds, dense with calories, and I waddled slowly to the pallet and let it down. Miller had already beat me there with another box, and after lifting one more—just to prove that I could—I happily stood by and watched as Miller and the South Africans did the hard work of robbing the hives. They stole the two uppermost supers from each stack, hoisted the boxes onto a pallet, loaded the pallet onto a forklift and onto Willie’s large truck, then took the load to the honey house to see what sort of payoff they had reaped.

A honey house is a small processing plant where honey is extracted and placed in barrels or bottles for sale to the public. It usually has a concrete floor, a metal roof, and a sickly-sweet smell. The floors are littered with expiring bees, the air thick with honey and despair. Returning from the bee yards, Miller’s crews hoist the supers from the flatbed to the “hot room,” where the boxes stay for three days, heated to 90 to 95 degrees to liquefy the honey. They then remove the frames from the supers and put them through a machine that takes the caps off the cells. They place them in a centrifugal extractor, which spins for eight to twelve minutes, freeing the honey and also some flakes of wax. The honey and wax mixture is then pumped into a collecting tank. The honey is separated from the wax in yet another spinning contraption and piped into another large settling tank, from which it is emptied into fifty-gallon food-grade steel barrels. The air resounds with the noises of whirring machines, the shotgun crack of barrels expanding. Miller can produce as many as eighty barrels a day, each of which holds 660 pounds of honey. In a bad year, Miller produces around a thousand barrels; in his best years, he has produced upward of two thousand—nearly 1.4 million pounds of honey. Before varroa mite, he typically produced 120 pounds per hive; the average now is more like 100. That’s good by American standards, but an Australian beekeeper is reputed to have extracted 629 pounds per hive during a particularly enthusiastic eucalyptus flow.

Once the honey is packed, an employee of Miller’s—when I visited, a woman named Mona did the work—classifies each barrel for sale, measuring the water content and assigning numbers depending on how dark the honey is. The lowest numbers denote the whitest honeys, such as those produced from clover and alfalfa, which are the most valuable because they tend to have milder flavors, and honey packers can mix them with darker varieties to achieve a consistent, supermarket-friendly color. After marking the number, color, and moisture on the barrels, Miller stores them, thus classified, for loading into the trucks the packer sends each fall. It is then that the bee’s life’s work translates into dollars—though not, unfortunately, into enough of them. Honey prices have fluctuated wildly over the years and Miller says it typically runs five years from trough to peak: $0.10 a pound in 1970; $0.50 in 1975. In the five years between 2005 and 2010, prices went as high as $1.45 a pound and as low as $0.95. At the bottom of the trough, Miller loses money on every barrel of honey he produces. But no matter; to him, making honey is about more than annual profit. It is an annual miracle.

H
ERE’S WHY, LEST WE FORGET: HONEY IS THE DISTILLED NECTAR
of blooming flowers. It is collected by bees, lots and lots of bees. To make a pound of it, the 50,000 or 80,000 bees who live together in a hive at the height of summer will travel a collective fifty-five thousand miles and visit more than two million flowers. A hive can collect more than thirty pounds in a single day when the stars align and the nectar gushes. One worker bee will visit fifty to one hundred flowers on each trip from the hive, in the process collecting and dispersing pollen from flower to flower, allowing the plants it touches to reproduce. In that sense, bees carry the future from tree to tree, and honey is the reward for their labors, nectar distilled by desire and duty into something more. Floral perpetuity is the transaction; bees are the middlemen; those who take care of the bees are also its beneficiaries. Vegans struggle with the question of whether they are allowed to eat honey: is it an animal product? Way back when, the Jews struggled with the same question; the rabbis resolved it in favor of the sweet tooth. “That honey is a vegetable product, was known to the ancient Jews,” wrote Langstroth, “one of whose Rabbins asks: ‘Since we may not eat bees, which are
unclean
, why are we allowed to eat honey?’ and replies: ‘Because bees do not
make
honey, but only
gather
it from plants and flowers.’” Could they have followed any other logic?

Honey is composed of glucose, fructose, and water, in addition to at least twenty-two other complex sugars, such as maltose, sucrose, kojibiose, turanose, isomaltose, and maltulose. That combination of sugars is what makes honey honey; the acids, pigments, proteins, and minerals found in smaller amounts are what make clover honey taste so very different from, say, onion honey. The average honey bee will produce about one-twelfth of a teaspoon of the stuff in her lifetime, returning home from each trip laden with half her weight in nectar and pollen, then transforming that raw nectar into honey through a unique digestive alchemy in which she ingests and regurgitates it a number of times. As she does so, she adds enzymes that help break down the complex sugars in the nectar into simple sugars. She then places the processed nectar in unsealed honeycomb cells, which other worker bees fan with their wings until much of the water evaporates. The water content of fresh nectar may be as high as 55 percent, but within an hour it reduces to 40 percent. Once the “ripe” honey is sealed, the moisture content falls below 18.6 percent. Ripe honey will not ferment and, if properly sealed, can be stored for years, decades, even centuries, without spoiling. The typical moisture content of unadulterated honey, which is 36 percent denser than water, is between 15 and 18 percent; Miller’s North Dakota honey typically comes in between 16.4 and 17.4 percent. If the water content is much higher than 18 percent, chances are it’s been diluted with other substances or taken from the hive before it is ripe. Good honey, like good wine, gets better with time. “Old honey is more wholesome than that freshly fathered by the bees,” Lorenzo Langstroth explained.

It is easy to tell good honey from bad: good honey flows from the knife in a straight stream, forming a bead as it lands on a surface. Should the cascade break into separate drops, a second stream of honey will temporarily sit on top of the older bead, forming a layer. If the honey has too much water, it will break into droplets as it falls, pooling as it hits bottom without taking form. Good honey never separates in the jar, though many varieties will crystallize into a creamy, granular solid as they age. Tupelo honey never crystallizes; acacia, sage, and star thistle rarely do. There are more than three hundred different types of honey in the United States. The taste and color of a particular variety depends on the flower from which it came. Polyfloral honey—also known as wildflower honey—comes from many types of flowers, too many to be identified. Mass-produced honey is generally blended from a mixture of two or more floral sources. Monofloral honey comes from the nectar of one floral source. If it is called alfalfa honey, for instance, it means that the bees were located near fields of alfalfa at the time they were in bloom, though it is functionally impossible to ensure that every bee in a particular hive has visited only alfalfa plants during the period when the honey was produced—that no rebellious forager snuck away for a nip of, say, buckwheat.

Those in the bee business talk about different honey “varietals” the way oenophiles discuss wine—eyes closed, tongue on the roof of the mouth, appraising “notes” and “nose.” Orange-blossom honey, according to Miller, leaves a floral taste on your back molar, a “citrusy finish” that goes well with food and is never too pushy (the bees, however, get cranky during the orange bloom, because the nectar flows like a fire hose and then, bang, shuts off). Buckwheat honey, favored for some inexplicable reason by Orthodox Jews and Muslims in New York and the Middle East, has a cloying “farm smell”—a “big, sheepy nose,” according to Miller. One of Miller’s employees likened the aroma to that of “mouse pee,” and I tend to agree. It’s good in coffee; too strong on toast. Clover honey is another favorite—light, delicate, pure, the color of late-afternoon air. Some consider creamy clover honey, harvested from the irrigated valleys of Idaho and Wyoming, to be the beluga caviar of honey. It’s the ace in the pocket the smart beekeeper holds to make sure his relationships stay civil.

There are nearly as many honeys as there are blossoms, though not all are coveted by humans, or even by bees. For all the economic value attached to almond pollination, the honey produced from almond blossoms is bitter and unpleasant-tasting to humans and bees alike. Almonds bloom at the same time as apricots in California, and bees much prefer apricots; almond farmers are well advised to keep their plantings far from any neighboring apricots, lest the bees forsake their cash crop for a sweeter flower. Onion honey is “bitter, dark, and nasty”; bees detest pollinating the plants, and a beekeeper must leave ten colonies in every acre of onions to ensure that the bees visit the flowers in sufficient numbers. The hives stink for weeks afterward. Sunflower honey has an unpleasant aftertaste. The canola bloom gives bees a bad temper—no one knows why. The honey has a tenderly aromatic flavor but granulates in about twelve hours.