The Beekeeper's Lament (26 page)

The best honey plants aren’t always the best plants for other human purposes. Miller’s favorite honey of all time comes from the yellow star thistle plant. The star thistle is a “terrible, noxious, invasive, nasty weed,” he says, which proliferates along roadsides and is toxic to horses. It is so hated by farmers that in California, state agriculture officials have released a wasp that lays eggs that kill the bloom, so star thistle honey guys just don’t get the production they used to. Botanists suspect that the weed hitchhiked to the New World with alfalfa seeds from Spain, and it can now be found all over the West; the stuff Miller likes comes from a specific microclimate in northern California right along Interstate 5. It is really good; I can attest. Its honey tastes the way flowers smell, like violets, like honeysuckle, like, Miller says, a “wall of sunshine.” Good star thistle honey just about never granulates: “I have a jar of 2001; a real vintage year . . . and it has about twelve granules in it . . . five years old!!! amazing.” In the South, they swear by orange and tupelo honey; in Alaska and Washington state, they covet northwestern fireweed, gathered from the magenta blossoms of lance-shaped plants that flourish in the open clearings of the Cascades, the Olympics, and the Coast ranges in the wake of forest fires. It is mild and clear, and the light dances through the jar. Langstroth liked wild red raspberry honey from the “hill country” of New England. “When it is in blossom, bees hold even the white clover in light esteem,” he wrote.

Not everything a bee gathers provides such pleasant experiences; honey produced from rhododendrons, mountain laurel, sheep laurel, and azaleas may cause a condition in humans called “honey intoxication.” Symptoms include excessive perspiration, dizziness, weakness, vomiting, and in rare cases, heart arrhythmia, convulsions, and death. Most honeys produce more beneficial effects, however. Honey is a natural antibacterial agent, used for centuries to treat burns and wounds. There are hundreds of studies exploring its benefits: it has been suggested that it can help control diabetes, Alzheimer’s, osteoporosis, stress, skin conditions, sexual problems, and scores of other maladies. Back in 1707, the English writer Sir J. More listed a few other benefits he believed honey to provide: it

openeth obstructions, and cleareth the heart and lights of those humors which fall from the head; it purgeth the foulness of the body[,] cureth phlegmatick matter, and sharpeneth the stomach; it purgeth those things which hurt the clearness of the eyes, breedeth good blood, stirreth up natural heat, and prolengeth life; it keepeth all things uncorrupt which are put into it, and is a sovereign medicament, both for outward and inward maladies; it helpeth the greif
[sic]
of the jaws, the kernels growing within the mouth, and the squinancy; it is drank against the biting of a serpent or a mad dog; it is good for such as have eaten mushrooms, for the falling sickness, and against the surfeit.

Its boosters make fabulous claims, yes, but honey is a fabulous thing. Though sometimes, sadly, what purports to be honey is no such thing. There is currently no legal, federally regulated “standard of identity” for honey, and “funny honey”—products sold as honey but that may have been “stretched” with water or corn syrup or sucrose or glucose or worse—is widely sold across the United States. Corn syrup, which once sold for less than a third the price of the same amount of honey, is particularly difficult to detect because it is structurally similar to honey. Some products labeled as pure honey contain up to 80 percent corn syrup. Thus labels claiming “100% Pure” are only that—labels—because the government has asserted only a minimal role in grading honey or setting and enforcing standards. A coalition of beekeepers and honey packers have for years been requesting that the FDA institute stricter rules governing the definition of honey, but the agency has so far resisted, classifying honey purity as low on its list of food-safety priorities. In 2009 the state of Florida passed a law prohibiting chemicals or additives, including corn syrup, in products labeled as honey. American honey producers—or most of them, anyhow—are desperate for a similar federal law.

One day, Miller took me with him to the gym he uses when he’s in Modesto. He cranked some classic rock on his iPod, ran the treadmill for a while, then hit the weights while I entertained myself on the elliptical trainer. There was a dollar store next to the gym, and afterward he rambled up and down its aisles looking for the honey shelf. The honey was placed much too high for his liking—because honey never spoils, there’s little incentive to push it off the shelves—and there wasn’t enough of it, and what was there was of dubious provenance. The label said it was honey, and it looked like honey—a plastic bear full of misleading amber liquid. But if you turned it upside down, bubbles rose rapidly to the top—the faster the bubble, the wetter the honey; the wetter the honey, the larger the chance it is adulterated. Good honey—dry honey—has a glacial bubble. You could wait days—multiple seconds, anyhow—for the bubble in Gene Brandi’s sage honey to rise to the top; ditto for Kevin Ward’s star thistle and John Haefeli’s high-altitude clover. Not the funny stuff. The bubbles in the dollar store veritably raced upward. Miller was irate—
heartbroken
—to find such inferior products in the aisles of America’s bargain stores. But he was not surprised. As long as the laws remain as they are, there isn’t a penny of incentive for him to sell pure honey, “versus whatever they scraped off the floor in a dog kennel in Florida.” Nonetheless, he does—which is why he needs almonds.

The United States produces around 165 million pounds of honey a year. Americans consume 400 million pounds a year, and the balance comes from places like Argentina and China, which can, thanks to lower labor and capital costs, dramatically undercut U.S. honey prices. For years the nation’s biggest supplier of honey was China, whose product cost about a third of what homegrown honey goes for. While U.S. beekeepers need to earn more than a dollar a pound just to break even, Chinese honey has at various times in the last decade sold for as low as thirty-five cents a pound.

But in 1997, a nasty epidemic of foulbrood blew through Chinese apiaries, slashing honey production by more than half. In response, Chinese beekeepers turned to a drug called chloramphenicol—the cheapest and most effective antibiotic they could find—to cleanse their hives. Chloramphenicol is a highly toxic drug used as a last-ditch treatment for life-threatening infections in humans, but it is banned by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration for use in livestock, including bees, both because of its toxicity—even small exposures have been linked to a deadly blood disorder called aplastic anemia among a small percentage of those who take it—and because residues of the drug remain in hives for years after its use. More than ten years after the epidemic in Chinese apiaries, detectable levels of chloramphenicol can still be found in honey from hives exposed to the drug. Two other powerful antibiotics—ciprofloxacin and enrofloxacin, which were also used to treat foulbrood in China and can cause deadly reactions in humans exposed to even small amounts—have also been found in Chinese honey imports.

In 2002, after European and Canadian food safety agents detected and confiscated dozens of shipments of chloramphenicol-tainted honey, the FDA banned the importation of all Chinese honey. But then an odd—if not entirely surprising—thing happened. Shortly after the ban was enacted, millions of pounds of honey began entering the United States from countries that had no record of producing surplus honey for export. Australia, for instance, imported little honey and exported negligible amounts to the United States in 2000. But after the ban, the level of honey imports to Australia rose by more than twentyfold—to nearly 4.5 million pounds in 2002. All of that honey is thought to have originated in China—and most was then shipped to the United States labeled as Australian honey.

Australia wasn’t the only country with suspiciously high levels of newfound honey exports. Vietnam, which was a nonproducing, nonexporting country prior to the ban, became the number-two honey exporter to the United States after Canada. Singapore—an entirely urban island-city which has no beekeeping industry—exported 2.9 million pounds of honey the year after the ban was imposed, becoming the fourth largest exporter of honey in the world in a matter of months. Of the top twelve honey-exporting countries in recent years, seven—Vietnam, India, Malaysia, Thailand, Russia, Indonesia, and Taiwan—export more honey than their domestic bees produce. Even after the ban on Chinese honey was lifted, those shady practices continued because steep “antidumping” tariffs were imposed against Chinese honey in 2008.

There was, for a time, very little risk involved in laundering honey. In the last few years, however, the U.S. Customs and Border Protection service has begun stepping up enforcement, testing barrels of incoming honey for antibiotic residue and even analyzing pollen and soil residue to determine the honey’s origin. (There’s a name for the study of pollen in honey—melissopalynology—and very few practitioners.) But there are limited personnel to pursue honey-laundering cases and there are bigger fish to fry, so large amounts of adulterated or contaminated honey still make it through the customs gauntlet. Suppliers suspect that 50 percent or more of all imported honey has been transshipped from China through another country.

And so another bee metaphor: honey sellers, like bees, are borderless. Bees fly all over the meadow to supply a hive with nectar; crooked importers ship their honey around the world to avoid tariffs and fines. It is hard, without sophisticated laboratory instruments, to ascertain that honey from Thailand is not honey from China; it is equally difficult to ensure that late-season alfalfa honey doesn’t also have a touch of buckwheat in it. For the same reasons, it’s well-nigh impossible to ensure that honey is truly “organic.” You can refrain from using Terramycin to keep the foulbrood at bay; you can refrain from using fumagillin to keep the nosema under control; you can refrain from using Apistan or coumaphos or amitraz to kill varroa mites; but unless your apiary is secluded on an island free of agricultural chemicals there’s no way you can ensure that your bees haven’t visited a hayfield sprayed with trifluralin, or a neighbor’s rose garden treated with Roundup, or even—God forbid—an abandoned Coke can on the side of the road. Honey bees are, in the words of Florida apiary inspector Jerry Hayes, “flying dust mops.” Bees forage where they will, bring home what they encounter.

B
EES ARE OPPORTUNISTS—THEY GO WHERE IT’S EASY.
A
BEEKEEPER’S
job is to locate the bees in a place where they can do their job well. Lorenzo Langstroth understood this. He noticed that in some localities, bees accumulated large stores of honey, while in others only a mile or two distant, an apiary would yield “but a small profit.” “Every bee-keeper,” he opined, “should carefully acquaint himself with the honey-resources of his own neighborhood.” N. E. Miller also understood this. One of his gifts, his daughter-in-law Rita wrote, was “an instinctive understanding of bee territory”—the flowering plants, the length of the blooming season, the topography. Location was everything: it determined whether a hive would starve, or produce merely enough to survive, or produce a surplus that a beekeeper could sell. A bee yard had to be close to water and roads, be sheltered from the wind, and get early morning sun—but none of that mattered if there wasn’t a sufficient supply and variety of nectar-producing plants.

Earl Miller, and Neil Miller, and John Miller, too, understood the importance of location to the production of honey and the prosperity of their bees, and thus their operation. From 1976 on, Neil and John kept track of the performance of each bee yard in their bee book, a hinged board with enormous cardboard pages that turned like a collection of hanging carpets in a rug shop. (These days, the tablets have been replaced with spreadsheets.) Each page represented an individual apiary and was marked with a series of data points, such as the location name (for instance, the Wilbur Hauff yard); origin (where they were before they arrived in Gackle—the apples in Washington? cherries in Stockton? a nuc yard in Newcastle?); and the dates they were placed in and removed from the yard. At the end of the season, Neil and John Miller would scrutinize each graph to see how the bees had fared and to make sure the crews didn’t leave any hives behind when packing up for Idaho. Then they would roll the graphs up and throw them in an attic above their office. This decidedly musty and mouse-turd-laden archive—John Miller calls it his “Dead Sea Scrolls”—provided a remarkably detailed record of the land around the family bees.

In 2008, he dug those scrolls out at the behest of Marla Spivak, the entomologist who developed the Minnesota Hygienic bee, and Chip Euliss, a U.S. Geological Survey biologist and hobby beekeeper based in Jamestown, about forty miles away from Gackle. In the name of science and spring cleaning, Miller unloaded the scrolls into the back of Euliss’s Chevrolet Suburban. Euliss’s specialty is integrated landscape monitoring, which involves examining how land use changes affect the broader ecosystem—for instance, how extensive crop cultivation or floodwater storage projects might affect wildlife habitats. By accessing thirty years of climate and land-use records down to the smallest parcels, the team hoped to determine what type of landscape produces healthy bees. This is not necessarily earth-shattering information—just as Langstroth and N. E. Miller had their own formulas for bee-yard success, so do most serious apiarists—but remarkably, no one had actually conducted a controlled, long-term study on the subject.

So Euliss and Spivak consulted with Zac Browning, John Miller’s sometime collaborator, who was based near Euliss in Jamestown, to compile a recipe for an “idealized bee neighborhood” that could support a hundred hives. This included flowering plants from spring through late summer, water, shelter, and proximity to roads. In North Dakota, it is also beneficial to locate one’s bees close to Conservation Reserve Program (CRP) land that the government pays farmers to set aside to prevent oversupply and keep commodity prices from plunging. CRP lands are typically either fallow farmland sown with native seeds to restore soil, or wildlife refuges or restored prairies—places where flowering plants abound and bees can find easy nourishment. It also behooves the beekeeper to steer clear of large fields of corn, soy, and short-season grains—crops that provide little, besides the occasional hedgerow or crop border, for bees to eat, and lots of pesticide hazards. The invention of short-season corn and soybean varieties has made these crops viable in places like North Dakota that were once too cold to sustain them, and the world’s hunger for animal feed and biofuels has made them more valuable. Good for the farmer; bad for the beekeeper.