The Beekeeper's Lament (27 page)

Once the team determined the factors a beekeeper considers in placing his bees, they set up experimental apiaries in various landscapes and asked Zac Browning, the team’s guinea pig, to place some of his hives in three “good” locations and three “bad” ones, then follow those bees through the pollination season to see how they fared. By cross-referencing Browning’s bees and Miller’s scrolls with USGS and USDA data on nearby horticultural patterns, the scientists hoped, in essence, to determine the secret of a good apiary—to replace a beekeeper’s “gut feeling” about a bee yard with more quantitative measures. “The secretion of honey in plants,” wrote Langstroth, “ . . . depends on a variety of causes, many of which elude our closest scrutiny. In some seasons the saccharine juices abound, while in others they are so deficient that bees can obtain scarcely any food from fields all white with clover.” In more quantifiable terms, asks Jeff Pettis of the USDA Beltsville Bee Research Laboratory, another member of the research team, “What makes a bad location bad? Soil moisture? Forage? Pollen protein content?” Through their study, the team hoped to discover that elusive formula.

There was a big problem with Miller’s contribution to the historical side of the study, however. Miller, it turns out, is too compulsive a beekeeper. Scientists need control groups—bee yards that haven’t thrived—and if Miller found that a bee yard wasn’t thriving, he got rid of it. So all he had, over time, was a record of good apiaries. “He ruined the experiment,” joked Spivak. Nonetheless, the team hopes to break new ground, especially as they move forward with Browning’s bees, in determining how weather and forage affect a hive’s nutritional health going into the “national season” of winter and spring pollination, and how that in turn affects its health coming out.

This is important because more and more scientists have come to believe that, in addition to all the other hypotheses—nosema, varroa, pesticides, exotic viruses—nutrition may play an important role in the inexplicable and intolerable hive losses of the last five years. Entomologists have come to believe that bees require a more varied diet than monoculture can provide. In 2006, for instance, when CCD first appeared, there were devastating dry spells across much of the country; 2007, when beekeepers lost another third of their hives, was another difficult year. Some researchers are suggesting that adverse weather could not only limit forage, it could also affect nutrition in ways both obvious and subtle, such as producing tiny changes in pollen grains that render them less nutritious.

Most large-scale beekeepers had, in the years leading up to the crisis, come to rely on low-cost corn syrup to help bees survive the lean times before the pollination flows. They’d pumped syrup into the hives from three-hundred-gallon tanks with gasoline nozzles, as you would at a filling station. More and more research, however, has suggested that bees may be suffering from the same kind of malnutrition afflicting humans who eat processed junk food. The problem is compounded by the lack of natural forage. Sprawl, monocrops, flawless lawns, weedless gardens, and a general decline in pastureland have made it hard for bees to find a suitable diversity of nectar and pollen sources.

Bees, it turns out, need natural places. “Nature deficit disorder,” as Dennis vanEngelsdorp coins the larger nutritional problems facing bees, is easy to cure: “Make meadows, not lawns.” Lawns are “green deserts,” plied with pesticides and devoid of flowers. Monocrops flower only briefly and leave bees equally bereft, nutritionally speaking. But in meadows—wild meadows, untamed, unsprayed meadows, meadows where flowers flourish all summer in ever-replenishing weedy bloom—there lies the future. In meadows lies the salvation of the bee.

Bees need meadows. They need nectar, pollen, honey. They need the things that bees were meant to eat. This is not a new revelation: “Few things in practical beekeeping are more important than the feeding of bees; yet none have been more grossly mismanaged or neglected,” Langstroth wrote more than 150 years ago. “In the Spring, the prudent beekeeper will no more neglect to feed his destitute colonies, than to provide for his own table.”

Miller has reached a similar conclusion. He used to use tankersful of corn syrup to keep his bees going between blooms, but after his varroa debacle of 2005, he figured he should rethink his approach to nutrition. Many commercial beekeepers sell most of their honey and feed their bees high-fructose corn syrup in its place. Miller used to, but he doesn’t anymore; anecdotal evidence suggests that beekeepers who have left honey in the hive rather than pumping in corn syrup, and have provided pollen supplements to their bees during lean times, have seen fewer losses. So now he uses only sugar syrup and leaves plenty of honey in the hives for the lean season. “Once winter begins and the hive is dormant, no amount of fairy dust can make it prosper through the winter,” Miller explains. So in late summer he must decide how much honey to harvest and sell and how much to leave in the hive to sustain the bees over the winter. He will feed them some sugar syrup in spring as they wait for the almonds to bloom, but in winter they will eat honey.

As Miller contemplates the approach of winter, so do his bees: as the days shorten and nectar and pollen sources begin to fail, the colony contracts. First, the hive makes a judgment whether the queen is strong enough to survive the winter, and if she is, cuts back on drones, which consume lots of honey but contribute little—besides sperm—to the well-being of the hive. By early October, the hive’s nurse bees dispense with the drones altogether, stinging them or gnawing at the roots of their wings and legs to drive them from the hive, then opening the developing drone cells and dumping the remaining drone pupae out the front door. “If not ejected in either of these summary ways,” writes Langstroth, “they are so persecuted and starved, that they soon perish.” That’s just the way it is this time of year. “Nature is unforgiving,” Miller writes.

Now, the scarcity model prevails.

Days shorten.

Height of sun-angle is lower.

Temperatures drop.

Soon, with autumn fast approaching, the queen stops laying eggs altogether. The last eggs she lays hatch into “winter bees,” which must live for four to six months, long enough to raise the spring brood that will replenish the hive when the flowers blossom again. Now the colony organizes for winter in earnest. Foragers gather propolis, the resinous material that they use to seal and caulk cracks and holes in the hive, shoring up the structure for winter. Pollen gatherers seek goldenrod and gumweed to sustain the developing brood. Nectar gatherers find their task increasingly futile. Finally, as the cold hits and the nectar flow ceases entirely, the remaining bees and brood contract in a cluster close to the bottom of the hive, where it is easiest to stay warm and safe. They fill the space once used to rear young bees with stores of honey and pollen.

It is from this stockpile that beekeepers take their own sustenance, and each fall, like Miller, they must make a calculation as to how much they can safely steal. Leave too little honey, and the bees emerge from winter in a weakened state, easy prey for varroa mites and the multiplicity of viruses that spread through the almonds each spring. Or they starve, each bee consuming less and less until the honey is gone and the colony dies. Miller likes his hives to weigh 130 pounds going into winter—75 pounds of honey (most beekeepers aim for 55–60 pounds); 55 pounds of bees, wood, and hardware.

This weight is considered “heavy” by many fellow beekeepers.

Some beekeepers will actually strip honey from wall frames in brood chambers,

expecting to replace that weight with syrup.

Others, particularly my good friend Larry Krause of Riverton, WY maintains there

is no better feed than honey for bees.

He also takes his hives into winter “heavy.”

I know, I offload the semi he sends down to Placer County each winter.

In normal summers, Miller can achieve the weight he wants and still have plenty of honey left over to sell, but in a summer of oppressive heat and drought, or one of too much cold and rain, he pulls his harvest boxes early so that his bees can stockpile the season’s remaining bounty inside the brood chamber, the hive box where the colony spends the winter. It means another disappointing year for honey sales, but when the summer forage disappoints, that is the choice a beekeeper must make. Good forage—good honey—is everything for a beekeeper. It is the difference between prosperity and bankruptcy, between the industrious hum of hardworking foragers and the melancholy stillness of a dying bee yard.

It is, perhaps, what makes beekeepers such lonely figures. Beekeepers don’t share locations. They can’t—there aren’t enough flowers to go around. That’s why Mona, the woman who once worked in Miller’s honey house, no longer does. Mona was a friendly enough woman, square-shaped, with a deep but somehow unconvincing belly laugh. But soon after my first visit to Gackle, she approached some of Miller’s neighbors there and asked if they’d allow their fields to be plied by “local” bees owned by Mona and her husband Ernie, instead of by Miller’s traveling bees. About ten landowners agreed, and Miller felt beyond betrayed. For months, maybe years, he preferred to call Mona “Satan” rather than to speak her given name, though he now sort of regrets being so childish. Ironically, the locations had been underperforming for several years. Still, it was a battle that Miller hadn’t asked to fight, a bitter lesson he didn’t need to learn. Sometimes it hardly seems worth it.

But then there is honey—the still-astonishing sweetness, such pleasure on the tongue. We sometimes forget to mention, when discussing the problems of modern bees, that they produce a wondrous thing, the sweetest natural substance on earth, as varied as the flowers that bloom. And that skunks, bears, other bees—and humans—will go to remarkable lengths to share in the bounty.

Toast, any bread is merely a means to an end.

The end is transporting as much honey as gravity and theory enables from jar to mouth; without actually putting a lip lock on that one-pound jar.

It’s just physics.

If no one is looking, snorking from a honeybear is perfectly legal.

Miller loves honey; he pours jugs of it over his food. He often loses money with each barrel he produces. But ultimately he participates in the creation of something unquestionably good. He makes honey.

Chapter Ten
Next Year, Right?

T
HE SUMMER OF 2009
LOOKED TO BE A FECUND ONE IN
Gackle. The previous fall had been wet, the winter snowy. Miller was building a new honey house, but by December drifts had covered the building’s exoskeleton, and work ceased. In spring the prairies were sodden. It rained through April, then May, then June. The yard surrounding the honey house, where the backhoe had harrowed in the fall, melded into a frightful ooze. But the moisture was good for flowers, so Miller didn’t mind. “Lots of water in North Dakota,” he wrote.

Huge puddles, close together.

Several of the houses have water in the basement. Not unusual, but

still a pain.

These conditions are, of course, a precursor to a three Cadillac Crop!

I’m thinking Kelly Green El Dorado, Floptop, White Ostrich Leather

interior, just because I can.

These conditions also pre-curse world-class mosquito populations, and

deer ticks by the trillion.

Stuck trucks, and broken equipment are also promised.

Deer ticks and stuck trucks, he got. It kept raining. Miller was getting excited.

the sweet clover will be mirror high on 4th of July

truck mirror, that is

Yellow Gold, Dakota Tea

why pretty soon ol’ John’s a millionaire

But July was less searing than usual. “Beautiful, temperate, five degrees below average,” he wrote. This began to be a problem. It seemed warm enough for the clover to bloom, but the clover, apparently, disagreed. “Our moisture is adequate,” he wrote, but his clover was not.

This season is not a sweet clover year, and I have no clue why not.

Last September, we had three well-timed rains. A sweet clover plant germinates in the fall, setting a tap-root for fall. Next year, walla! Sweet Clover.

Not so this year.

With so much bad weather, the delays in completing the honey house didn’t really matter, because there was no crop to run through it when it was finished. Miller took to calling it his “Lost Summer,” and contemplated commissioning a batch of hoodies with the epithet written across the back. As the delightfully cool summer wore into a prematurely cold fall, the season’s disastrous repercussions in the northern half of the country grew clear.

Our crop sucks.

Krause’s crop sucks.

Krause’s neighbor is 2⁄3 cleaned up; and has not extracted one barrel of honey. . . .

Bees are going to go through another bad wreck in 2010.

As read first here; shitty crops = shitty bees . . . it’s a six-month-long slow-motion wreck.

Careening down the slippery slope to ruin; I am.

The bees weren’t getting out of the hives. It was too cool; it was too rainy. Miller’s “dancing ladies” were “set to starve their keepers and themselves.” And because the bees weren’t foraging in the cold and rainy September, they didn’t pick up their nosema medicine. Nor did they do so in the cold and rainy October that followed. By November, as Miller packed up the hives to return them to the cellars, his spreadsheets told him that things were very bad—not that he needed a spreadsheet to know that his hives were going into winter without enough honey. They were an average of twelve pounds lighter in 2009 than in 2008, and all he had to do was lift one to know its stores were insufficient.

Though many of the factors that determine a beekeeper’s fortunes are utterly beyond calculation, you can predict a few things, and here’s one: a poor summer begets a poor winter. Miller was going to have to prepare for a bad one, as were beekeepers across the northern tier. The cool, wet summer left a poor honey crop throughout the Midwest. The early, cold fall killed off any late forage that might have allowed bee operations to recoup. By the end of 2009, honey production nationwide had dropped by 20 million pounds. It was the worst crop on record, the lousiest anyone could remember.

The result was, by now, not at all surprising—another year of staggering winter losses. An unusually cold winter across most of the nation—temperatures in Florida hovered below freezing for two weeks—stymied winter honey flows in southern climes and killed off brood and young bees everywhere. In northern climes the cold snap further exacerbated the problem of insufficient honey stores, because the colder it is, the more bees have to work to keep the brood warm—and the more they work, the more they need to eat.

Between January and March 2010, Miller lost around half his hives, some to varroa mites and CCD, but most to plain winter starvation. Nationwide, 34 percent of all managed colonies were lost, though beekeepers in North Dakota fared worse because of the cold summer there. Miller was able to meet his pollination contracts only because he’d now factored major losses into his pollination business model, setting aside a large reserve of hives in case of disaster. It had taken him some time to accept that he must plan for disaster year after year: “I had been resistant to that because of pride, self-righteousness, denial, stupidity, not wanting to lose many bees,” he told me. But he’d finally faced the fact that he was going to see a lot more death than he liked, and that he needed to get used to a “low-level grind of hive failure that I think is with North American beekeeping permanently.” Nobody is happy about that. Few in the industry have figured out how to make money when each lost hive costs them sixty dollars extra in labor, feed, and replacement queens and packages. “It’s unsustainable,” says vanEngels-dorp.

But Miller can’t dwell on such thoughts. After the losses of 2010 he cursed the weather, castigated himself, dusted himself off, and went about the business of keeping lots and lots of bees. Because though he lost half of his colonies, the other half survived, and those hives, Miller says, were really good ones. “We sent some dynamite bees up to Washington state for the apples,” he told me. He’s not sure why they did so well. But he’s grateful. It is no fun to lose money, but it is fun to take care of bees. “Which would the bee guy rather have?” wrote Miller.

30% of his outfit dead; or 30% reduction in pollination prices?

Answer: NEITHER!, of course, we are bee guys; we want it both ways.

By now it should be obvious: bee guys are not reasonable people. They love bees. Bees grab them; say “take me.” When their bees are sick, it affects them profoundly. Perhaps the affection is mutual—the Germans believed that when a beekeeper died, the bees must be told or they would fly off. More likely, it is a one-sided passion. But no matter. Nectar seduces bees to pollinate flowers; bees have seduced humans to take good care of them for millennia. Thus Miller loves nothing more than putting on his “full battle gear,” puffing the smoker at the entrance of a hive, and prying the top open, ever so gingerly, with his hive tool. “Let all your motions about your hives be gentle and slow. Accustom your bees to your presence: never crush or injure them, or breathe upon them in any operation,” wrote Langstroth.

Miller can be churlish and immature, a terrible Mormon and a neglectful husband, and, if he is to be believed, an occasionally ghastly businessman of bees. His motions, metaphorically speaking, may not always be as gentle toward humans as he would like. But with bees they are. They are gentle, compassionate, inquisitive. He can’t wait to see what’s going on under the lid of the next hive. Ask any beekeeper: bees are addictive—their purposefulness, their solidarity, their endless complexity. Miller loves nothing better than the sight of a teeming frame of bees, of sealed-up honeycombs and brood ready to hatch: “Ah,” he says, “that’s prosperity right there.”

But beekeeping, as an industry, has not prospered. Just as mites and disease have ravaged the profession, so have demographics. In 1946 Americans, whose sugar had been rationed during World War II, kept nearly 5.8 million managed bee colonies. By 1970 that number had dropped to around 4 million. That was B.V., before varroa—well before—and it was a confident time for the industry, which had finally found a cure to the longtime scourge of American foulbrood. It was as easy then as it would ever be to keep bees. Still, people left the profession in droves. They left because they moved to cities. They left because there were suddenly so many better ways to make a living. They left because cheap sugar and corn syrup and saccharine and supermarket honey provided easier ways to sweeten tea and toast. They left because keeping bees was something difficult in an age of convenience. There was no logical reason for modern Americans to keep bees as a profession. Those who remained did so only because they really, really wanted to.

Miller left once. In 1974, when he was twenty, he departed Gackle after an arduous summer and drove to Idaho in twelve hours flat—a record that held until 1999, the first year he owned the Corvette, when he made the drive in 11:45. As with the Corvette, it was another time of mutiny. “Gackle had emptied out as fall came,” he wrote, “and I just quit.” He wanted a normal life: “Friends. Independence. Irresponsibility.” He went to work in an Albertson’s supermarket and then did a semester at Ricks College, a Mormon school in Rexburg, Idaho, but was asked to leave because of “unacceptable behavior involving cigarettes and alcohol.” He transferred to Boise State University for a year, joined the student council, threw a bunch of parties, nearly got arrested, was dismissed from the student council, then did get arrested and spent a weekend in Ada County Jail. It was, he says, an education. “I learned that I did not want to be in jail. Ever.” Another semester, this time at Brigham Young University, cured him of college for good: “I damned near suffocated,” he said. He went back to bees. He didn’t know how to get along in the world, but he did know, even then, that bees provided “never-ending intrigue.” Better than jail; better than booze; better than college; better, ultimately, than any other future Miller could imagine.

It is too easy to compare bees to their keepers, but I will do it once more. “I once furnished a candy-shop, in the vicinity of my Apiary, with gauze-wire windows and doors, after the bees had commenced their depredations,” wrote Langstroth.

On finding themselves excluded, they alighted on the wire by thousands, fairly squealing with vexation as they vainly tried to force a passage through the meshes. Baffled in every effort, they attempted to descend the chimney, reeking with sweet odors, even although most who entered it fell with scorched wings into the fire, and it became necessary to put wire-gauze over the top of the chimney also. . . . As I have seen thousands of bees destroyed in such places, thousands more hopelessly struggling in the deluding sweets, and yet increasing thousands, all unmindful of their danger, blindly hovering over and alighting on them, how often they have reminded me of the infatuation of those who abandon themselves to the intoxicating cup. Even although such persons see the miserable victims of this degrading vice falling all around them into premature graves, they still press madly on, trampling, as it were, over their dead bodies, that they too may sink into the same abyss, and their sun also go down in hopeless gloom.

As with Langstroth’s candy-addled charges, beekeepers see the “hopeless gloom” that lies on their chosen path, and follow it anyway. Miller likes to say that there are two things in life: greed and fear. But he knows as well as any that there’s also passion. “A bee,” Kahlil Gibran wrote, “is a messenger of love,” of the evolutionary dance between stamen and stigma, flower and flower. Bees will do anything for nectar; beekeepers will do anything for bees. Like bees plunging headlong into the deluding sweets, like drunks in quest of their next fix, the beekeeper obliges, instinctively, whatever the cost. Unlike bees, though, beekeepers are human—they have a choice. We should be grateful, then, that they have chosen to do something so imprudent, so daft. The world would not function without them.

But for all his folly, the beekeeper has had to make some concessions to reality. The toll of pathogens and chemicals and rapid-fire migration has forced bees to evolve far more rapidly than they would have in a state of nature. And beekeepers have had to evolve along with them—to become survivor stock, or else to become something other than beekeepers. Beekeepers are more difficult to influence than bees, since they reproduce at a rate of one generation every twenty-five years or so, not one generation per year. They too have the problem of resistance, though it is mainly having too much of it, not too little; they are resistant to messing with what’s always worked for them. Some beekeeping experts—mostly the kind who don’t keep thousands of hives—would like people like John Miller to stay home with their bees and keep them away from the disease-vectoring almonds, to banish all chemicals from the hive, even to shun mass production altogether. That’s not likely to happen, so long as we want to keep our supermarkets teeming with produce. There simply isn’t another way to feed the multitudes who want to eat such foods. Big agriculture requires big beekeepers. “John and I are trying to make a living and keep twenty people making house and car payments,” says Pat Heitkam. It’s not so easy to “live on roots and seeds” when you’ve got a real business to run.