The Beekeeper's Lament (3 page)

Although he disapproves of dying, Miller doesn’t wear a seat belt. He once flipped a ten-wheeler on Interstate 80 in California, just west of the Riverside exit, a couple of days after Christmas. It was full of corn syrup meant to keep his bees alive until the almonds bloomed. A kid in “a hulk of an old Camaro” who had just repaired his brakes—or tried to—passed Miller’s truck. Just as Miller said to himself, “piece of junk,” the kid put on the brakes and nothing happened. He went thisaway and thataway across the freeway in front of Miller, and then the Camaro’s tires popped and the car came screaming crossways to hit Miller’s ten-wheeler behind the spindle on the front axle. The steering wheel spun out of Miller’s hands, the front axle went airborne, and when it landed the truck commenced an elegant 180, tipped over, and sheared the straps that held a thousand-gallon tank of syrup on the back. The tank rolled down the highway like a bowling ball and lodged against a guardrail. The steering column and shifting tower pushed past the dashboard into the spot where Miller would have been sitting had he been wearing a seat belt. Because he wasn’t, he was thrown to the floor between the seats as the cab crumpled to a space just large enough to fit a “fat, bald guy,” as he likes to describe himself—although he is not fat at all and not entirely bald yet.

Miller sat there, in the hive-like cavity of his crumpled cab, contemplating the unfavorable aspect of things. The state troopers were not going to be happy with him. The highway department would have to shut the road and sand down the slick of corn syrup to prevent further carnage. Miller would have to replace a $45,000 truck and pay an extra $1,200 for enough corn syrup to get the bees through the month. It was winter, and there was nothing in bloom, and there wasn’t enough honey to keep his bees alive until the almonds came into flower. There were orchards to visit and hives to place and pollen patties to lay. He had a whole lot of bees to feed before he was to leave on a Caribbean cruise four days later, one of the very few vacations he and his family had taken in all his years as a professional beekeeper. So here is what this particular brush with destiny taught him: never, ever wear a seat belt.

Y
ET NO ONE SHOULD WEAR THEM MORE, BECAUSE AS A MIGRATORY
beekeeper he is on the road more often than not. The American Beekeeping Federation estimates that there are probably 1,200 other roaming bee guys in the United States—like Larry Krause, Miller’s friend in Wyoming, and Dave Hackenberg, who first noticed the symptoms of CCD. It is a profession uniquely suited to the diversity of the American landscape, the bigness of American agriculture and industry, and the restlessness of the American people. Like retirees in Winnebagos, migratory beekeepers winter in warm places—California, Texas, Florida—and in summer head north to the clover and alfalfa fields of the Dakotas and other rural, northern states. Miller likes to call the annual flight of the beekeepers the “native migrant tour,” because he and his colleagues are among the few migrant agricultural workers these days who were born in this country, and he likes to call himself the tour’s “padrone”—because, well, there’s no one within earshot to disagree. If traditional beekeepers are like European bees, single-minded and docile, migratory beekeepers might better be compared to Africanized “killer” bees—itinerant and aggressive, traveling in swarms.

Miller is not the biggest beekeeper in the United States—South Dakota’s Richard Adee, with his eighty thousand hives, wins that distinction. But like the gentle, dark Carniolan bees he tends, Miller does have impeccable breeding. He is descended from Nephi Ephraim Miller, a Mormon farmer known as the “father of migratory beekeeping.” In 1894, N.E., as he was called, traded a few bushels of oats for seven boxes of bees and parlayed those seven boxes into a Utah beekeeping empire. “He was curious,” Miller says. “He was a gifted man, and he grew to understand the honey bee.” N. E. Miller pioneered the practice of migratory beekeeping, shipping his hives from the clover fields of Utah to the orange groves of California each winter, and he is famed for producing the nation’s first million-pound crop of honey. His sons and grandsons and great-grandsons followed in his footsteps, as have most of today’s commercial beekeepers, hoisting hundred-pound hives onto pallets and pallets onto semis that chase honey flows and pollination contracts north and south across the country.

Bees organize their lives around seasons of plenty and want. So does Miller. Like his bees, he is frequently on the move, his life a series of numbers- and date-driven bursts of activity. Winter is a time of quiet, of loss, when bees cluster for survival in the hives, some stored near his home in Newcastle and some in leased potato cellars in Idaho, where 40-degree temperatures and well-ventilated darkness ensure a brief period of dormancy for the bees, to reserve their energy for the coming spring. Miller too hunkers with his family over the holidays, preparing for the busy year to come.

Spring is a time of bustle, birth, rebuilding. It starts early for Miller and his bees. On January 19, he inspects and feeds the 2,700 hives he has stashed in fields and clearings near his house in Newcastle. On January 20, he begins shipping the rest of his bees—7,000 or so hives—from the Idaho cellars to California. From January 26 through the first two weeks of February, he roams a two-hundred-mile range from south of Modesto to north of Chico, placing colonies in almond orchards. During that time, he visits lots of taco wagons. On March 1, the bloom peaks, and from March 9 to 13, almond farmers “release” the bees that have been placed on their property from their contractual obligation, and Miller is free to take them away. He’s got to get them out fast then, or risk their starvation in the now-blossomless desert of the orchards and exposure to the variety of agricultural pesticides loosed on the Central Valley in spring. Pollinating crops is like being a hooker, Miller says: “I come in the night; I wear a veil; they give me their money; a few weeks later they call me and tell me to get out of there.”

So he does. In late March, he ships 3,000 or so hives home to Newcastle to prepare them to receive new queens; 3,000 travel to Washington to pollinate the pink lady apples; 1,600 go to the cherries around Stockton. On April 2, he divides his Newcastle hives and buys new queens for them; on April 5 the Stockton bees leave the cherries for Newcastle, where they too receive new queens. On May 5 he ships his apple bees from Washington to Gackle, North Dakota, his summer home, for the honey season. On May 10 he flies there, too, and plants a garden in the backyard of his summer home. As he plants, he assesses the promise of the northern spring: the subsoil and topsoil moisture levels, how warm the dirt is, the blooming of the lilacs next to the garden, the early health of the honey locust and apple trees nearby. He notices if the spring wheat has been sowed on surrounding farms, and for how long. This tells him how much supplementary feed he may need to keep his bees alive until the clover starts blooming in late June. By then all of his bees will have arrived in North Dakota. He will stay there for the summer, with brief visits home to see his wife in California.

The summer is a season of bounty, harvest, work. The honey-producing season begins June 20. The first crop is yellow sweet clover, whose flow typically coincides with the first big mosquito hatch. When the mosquitoes become obnoxious, Miller knows the clover is set to bloom. Yellow sweet clover usually blooms a few days before the alfalfa and peaks around July 4, when, if the weather has been auspicious, it can be truck-mirror high. The white sweet clover peaks ten days later. The dairy guys cut down their first alfalfa crop before the end of June; beef guys, looking for more tonnage, wait until the first week of July. Miller likes beef guys, because he prefers flowers over shorn and useless stalks. If the rains are good and the stars align, there may be a second crop of alfalfa, peaking from late July to August 4—but a smart beekeeper should never bank his honey crop on a second alfalfa bloom, because there’s no guarantee that by July 15 the flowers won’t be scorched. After the clover and alfalfa go, there’s buckwheat and gumweed, which make darker honey, and goldenrod.

August 20 marks the end of honey production. In a good year, Miller may wait until after Labor Day to begin “robbing” his harvest boxes, which are shallow wooden rectangles stacked two or three high above the main body of the hive. Those harvest “supers” contain all of the honey bound for sale. The stores in the double-deep main hive chamber at the bottom of the stack, where the queen lays her eggs, are for feeding future bees—that honey is always left alone. Bad years, he may start stripping the harvest boxes as early as August 15. The goal is to have all the salable honey off the hives between September 25 and October 5. By the autumnal equinox, around September 21, the first hives will be loaded into trucks bound for Idaho, where they will sit in big holding yards and wait until daytime temperatures drop to around 45 degrees. It takes eight weeks for Miller’s crews to get all the hives out of North Dakota. By November 25, they’re all in Idaho, where it’s finally cold enough for the bees to go “to bed”—hunker down in the climate-controlled potato cellars. A smaller batch of bees is sent to Newcastle, where they get another feed before dormancy. And then, on January 25, the almonds begin to bud and the year starts again.

This annual bee migration isn’t just a curiosity; it’s the glue that holds much of our agricultural system together. Without the bees’ pollination services, many of our nation’s crops would produce only a small fraction of the harvest they generate with the help of the honey bee. Farmers depend on honey bees to pollinate ninety different fruits and vegetables, from almonds to lettuce to cranberries to blueberries to canola—nearly $15 billion worth of crops a year. Although wind and wild insects pollinate some plants on a small scale, only bees promise the levels of production needed to meet the needs of the nation’s grocery shoppers. Like every aspect of American agriculture, beekeeping has, by necessity, joined the global economy of scale. Bees are pollination machines, and many of America’s farmers need them just as much as they need their tractors, threshers, and combines. For problems with water, labor, pest control, and soil quality, there are irrigation systems, big machines, pesticides, and synthetic fertilizers. Today the biggest factor limiting the amount of produce grown is, for many crops, the number of bees available.

“To make a prairie it takes a clover and one bee,” Emily Dickinson wrote.

One clover, and a bee,

And revery.

The revery alone will do,

If bees are few.

She could not have anticipated the state of apiculture today. It is no longer so simple as bee, flower, honey. The millions of acres of intensely and singularly planted crops at the center of the American agribusiness machine simply cannot produce without the help of the beekeepers’ pollinating army. Without the itinerant bee and the migratory beekeeper, we would have to forsake one in every three bites of each summer’s harvest. We would say goodbye to many of the most delectable piles of fruits and vegetables at the supermarket. Without the honey bee, the American diet would be a far more lackluster affair.

But without the honey bee, John Miller’s life would be a far more agreeable affair. Since he was a young man, he has left his wife and children for eight or so months each year, keeping company with a rotating cast of migrant workers, farmers, landowners, and beekeepers. Even before the calamities that began in 2005, the keeping of bees could be likened to a continuous economic and natural disaster: infections rage, queens die, droughts wither, semis jackknife, equipment rots, prices plummet, competitors undercut, employees disappoint, bankers demand, neighbors complain, vandals, bears, and skunks raid. Miller’s income is uncertain, his predicaments constant.

In the century since N. E. Miller ushered in beekeeping’s industrial revolution, the occupation has become commercialized, rationalized, and preposterously complicated. John Miller’s bees ply some of the same fields that hosted his great-grandfather’s hives. He sells his honey on a handshake to the same processors his grandfather sold to and competes with the sons of the very same men his father competed against. But the business of beekeeping today requires more than just a comprehension of bees. It also requires a command of botany and molecular biology and chemistry and genomics and meteorology and acarology and accounting and immigration law and truck-buying and truck-driving and truck-fixing and marketing and public relations. Where N.E. used trains and telegraphs to conduct his business, John Miller’s tools are now semitrucks and email, spreadsheets and amortization schedules. Where Nephi made his income from honey, Miller now derives his profit from pollination fees.

Nor could Nephi have anticipated the kind of nationwide, devastating losses that John Miller and his colleagues have experienced. In 1990, there were 3.3 million bee colonies; in 2006, fewer than 2.5 million remained. In the wild, honey bees have disappeared entirely. The unschooled public tends to think the recent apiary apocalypse began in 2006. In reality, it started twenty years before that. Bees have been on life support for decades now, kept aloft only by the efforts of determined—perhaps imprudent—men like John Miller. “The past twenty years have been the most tumultuous years in the history of man’s relationship with bees,” Miller says; the past five, a bloodletting.

It’s true for bees as it is for human beings:

Life brings sickness with it. You can see

The signs of it in the bees, without any doubt:

Their color changes as soon as they fall ill;

Their bodies are all disheveled and there’s a dreadful

Emaciation in the look of them;

And then you can see the other bees as they carry

Out from the dwelling places the bodies of those

From whom the life has gone; and you can see

The sick ones not yet dead that hang almost