The Beekeeper's Lament (6 page)

But in 1917 N.E.’s debts began to overwhelm him. A pile-on of bad luck—the loss of an entire shipment of bees in refrigerated fruit cars, a poor honey crop, a raft of accounting problems, and a World War I labor shortage—made matters worse. “He had bills stacked high on his desk that he was unable to pay,” John Miller’s grandfather Earl recalled, “in addition to heavy notes at the bank, on which the bank was demanding payment.” N.E. briefly contemplated filing for bankruptcy, but decided against it. Instead he melted all the beeswax from the colonies that had perished and sold it off, along with some land he owned in Utah. Over the course of three years he managed to pay off his obligations.

Then he bought more bees. By 1926, the company had rebounded. With thirty-two thousand colonies, N.E., his sons, and their associates—men who had worked for N.E. and whom he later helped set up in business—produced the nation’s first million-pound crop of honey. It filled thirty-eight railcars. The triumph was short-lived, however. The Great Depression soon destroyed demand, and the price of honey dropped below the cost of producing it, destroying the prospects of those who made a living selling it. Scores of commercial beekeepers left the business. Hives went without repair; comb was eaten by mice and moths; colonies starved and died. In the fall of 1933, N.E. traveled to Kansas City, St. Louis, Chicago, Milwaukee, Council Bluffs, Iowa, and Omaha and Lincoln, Nebraska, to market his honey. He returned without selling a single carload. Again the debts piled up. In a return to the cottage-scale economics that N.E. had so long plotted to leave behind, the Miller sons traveled door-to-door selling honey to individual families. N.E. put everything up for sale, but there was no one to buy it. “We just had a cold banker threaten to take away all that water stock for a measly $350. It is worth or cost about $2,440,” he complained in a letter to Woodrow, who was on a Mormon mission in Canada. When a grandson, Clinton, inquired about getting into the bee business. N.E. urged him instead to pursue “the fields of commerce, communications, and public utility.” Woodrow, upon completing his mission, went to Washington, D.C., to work for the Department of the Interior, where he learned that “there was only one agricultural pursuit that was financially worse than beekeeping, and that was the raising of goats.”

In the end, Miller’s was one of the few commercial honey production companies that squeaked through the Depression. N.E. died in 1940 at the age of sixty-six, leaving to Woodrow, who had returned from Washington to help his ailing father, a business burdened with debt. For a time, Woodrow continued to travel with the bees. In 1941, he was the largest honey producer in the world, and the next year, his operation gained national repute when an article, “Woodrow Miller’s Traveling Bees,” appeared in
Reader’s Digest
. But after his father’s brushes with insolvency, Woodrow came to conclude that the business of keeping bees would always be precarious. The money, he reckoned, was in honey packing and distribution. He gradually rented out, then sold off, his colonies, focusing instead on bottling and selling other people’s honey. In 1954 he and a fellow honey packer invented the first plastic honey bear. Like Langstroth, they made little money off their invention, which they never patented. N. E. Miller’s company is today run by Woodrow’s descendants, who purchase honey from beekeepers across the West and sell it in eight-ounce bottles and forty-five-thousand-pound tanker trucks to retailers, bakeries, and markets in the United States, Europe, the Middle East, Japan, and the Philippines. Developers burned N.E.’s original honey production house in San Bernardino in 1962 to make room for a luxury residential development called Honey Hills.

N
OT EVERY BEEKEEPER, HOWEVER, HAS ABANDONED THE
field that N.E. pioneered. Like N.E., beekeepers have continued to harness new technologies in the hopes of making a consistent profit. In the 1960s, they began using forklifts and hardwood pallets that could hold four to eight hives, lifting the entire unit onto trucks, moving more bees faster. They also began making sugar syrup in three-hundred-gallon galvanized tanks, siphoning syrup to drip cans, which sit on top of hives and look like hamster-cage water dispensers, or in-hive feeders, which John Miller prefers—deep, narrow, rectangular plastic troughs that slide into a hive in the place of two frames. The feeders allowed beekeeping outfits to nourish and move their bees without worrying about the immediate availability of forage on the other end. They could truck them to, say, a holding yard in California for two weeks, feeding them syrup while they waited for the almonds to bloom. They could haul the bees to North Dakota in early May, knowing that the major honey flow didn’t start until late June. These supplementary feeding techniques permitted the growth of the twenty really big bee outfits in America today—John Miller’s among them.

Even the biggest outfits, though, have kept it mostly in the family. John Miller grew up in Blackfoot, Idaho, and from the age of six, helped his father, Neil, work the bees. In 1996, he and his brother Jay bought the family business from their dad, who had bought it in 1957 from his father, Earl, who had bought it from his father, N.E. Almost every industrial-scale beekeeper in the business has a similar story: beekeeping may, in fact, be one of the nation’s last aristocracies. This is due in part to the imposing start-up costs. It’s easy enough to run a backyard hive or two, but to make a living, most beekeepers believe you need a minimum of six hundred hives. “You need three hundred thousand dollars to just get going with a frumpy old truck and a thousand hives,” Miller says. “You can’t just wake up and say, I’m going to be a bee guy.” Even if start-up funding weren’t an issue, it’s all but impossible to find good pasture in the nation’s prime beekeeping territories. The land has to be accessible, offer sufficient nectar and pollen, and not be covered with asphalt, shopping malls, or trophy homes. Miller keeps many of his bees on the same land his father and grandfather did. Orin Johnson, another California beekeeper I spoke with, places hives on property his family has used for more than sixty years. The same goes for Larry Krause. If an aspiring commercial beekeeper doesn’t have the patrimony, his best bet is to cozy up to “some geezer on his way out” whose kids are not interested in taking over the business, says Miller, and who might be willing to pass his equipment and bee yards on to an eager protégé. Otherwise, his bees will have a difficult time finding enough to eat.

Bee guys are sensitive about pasture. “Locations,” says Miller’s good friend Pat Heitkam, another California beekeeper, “are the most dear things we have.” They don’t like it when other bee guys horn in. Placer County, east of Sacramento, is John Miller’s winter “territory.” He shares it begrudgingly with a couple of Russian beekeepers and Bob and Joan Seifert, who are far enough away and keep few enough bees not to be a threat, and his friend Larry Krause, willingly, because he loves Larry Krause, and because Krause’s father bought those wintering grounds around the same time John Miller’s father did, and he has every right to claim them as his own.

Though it’s somewhat easier to find bee land in the less developed Dakotas than in California, a “dirty dozen” beekeepers, as one North Dakota bee inspector has termed them, have locked up most of the prime bee territory in the most desirable beekeeping states. In North Dakota, Miller has claimed sixty miles to the west of Gackle, twenty to the north and east, and twenty-five to the south as his summer digs. His friend Zac Browning operates out of Jamestown, forty miles away—far enough to keep their bees apart and their operations cooperative. Browning runs nearly fourteen thousand hives. He grew up in Blackfoot, Idaho, too, and is married to the sister of Miller’s manager, Ryan Elison. Such intermingling wasn’t always the case: Miller’s and Browning’s grandfathers hated each other.

In Wyoming, the law forbids commercial beekeepers from setting up apiaries within two miles of a bee yard run by somebody else’s outfit. Larry Krause has three thousand hives. His assistant, Jim Niezwaag, has seventy-three but can acquire no more hives unless he finds new yards. The two-mile rule limits his access to nearby pasture, though Krause, who is, remember, the nicest guy you’ll ever meet, lets Niezwaag use his yards—“We just want to keep those big migratory beekeepers from, say, North Dakota out of our state,” Krause explained. A similar law holds in South Dakota. In North Dakota, they did away with it because the big bee guys had so many hives spread so widely across beekeeping country that no one else could keep any bees. “Bee guys don’t play well together and with society in general,” says Miller. “That’s why bee guys are bee guys.” They like bees; people are another matter. “A honey bee only has a nine-hundred-thousand-neuron brain, so if I conduct myself within the framework of the bees’ limited understanding, they’re fine,” he says. “If I go outside their ability to understand what’s happening, things go south. I understand bees. I don’t understand people very well.”

Beekeepers are not, typically, “people people.” They like to be outside, working with their hands, alone. After World War I, the U.S. and British governments promoted beekeeping as a career for disfigured or shell-shocked veterans because they could work on their own. A bee yard is a good place to hide from other people, and for that reason beekeepers are often secluded souls. This is ironic, because the creatures that they tend are so existentially social. Bees live and die in communities. “Honey-bees can flourish only when associated in large numbers, as in a colony,” Lorenzo Langstroth wrote. “In a solitary state, a single bee is almost as helpless as a new-born child, being paralyzed by the chill of a cool Summer night.”

Bees differ from their keepers in other ways as well. Honey bees are the epitome of organization and collaboration. They have defined roles, and they perform them with alacrity. “So work the honey bees,” wrote Shakespeare. “Creatures that, by a rule in Nature, teach / The art of order to a peopled kingdom.” The peopled kingdom of beekeepers, however, has a hard time keeping things ordered and unified. There are two major beekeeping organizations, the American Honey Producers Association and the American Beekeeping Federation. The Honey Producers are strictly a domestic commercial beekeeping group, full of “dads and lads” who have run the family beekeeping business for generations. The Federation is an umbrella group of commercial beekeepers, sideline beekeepers, backyard beekeepers, honey packers and importers, queen-breeders, back-to-the-earth types, and, Miller jokes, “people who have actually ridden in flying saucers.” The two organizations were one until 1969, when a bitter feud over the question of proposed tariffs on imported honey prompted the Honey Producers to swarm off into their own organization. “They took their double-knit polyester and stormed off,” Miller says—although today “no one knows what we’re fighting over anymore.”

There are also plenty of similarities between the bee and its keeper. Bees’ and beekeepers’ lives are both governed by climate. When the weather is propitious, the beekeeper and the bee are both out working. They are steadfast. Bees would do anything for their queen, including die. They are even loyal to specific blooms, a trait that is known as “constancy,” visiting the same flowers until the bloom is over. Beekeepers are also creatures of fidelity and habit. John Miller eats the same lunch of chicken salad—add relish, mayo, and pickled veggies from his North Dakota garden—most every day. At beekeeping conferences, he and Larry Krause eat at the same restaurant every meal. Miller and Krause rely on long-standing relationships with honey packers and almond ranchers. Good beekeepers rarely jump ship for a better deal, a sweeter bloom. They save leftover hives to help out their beekeeper friends when they fall on hard times. They offer each other tips for dealing with pests. They share leads on new pollination contracts.

Commercial beekeepers are throwbacks that way—“knuckle-dragging Neanderthals,” Miller would say. In an era of constant career change, beekeepers still work in family businesses; many have never done anything else. They don’t blog; Larry Krause doesn’t even email. They never throw away anything, not a hive tool, not a tattered veil. Bees are confused for a few days when their environment changes, when their hive is moved or their queen replaced, but they soon forget their old circumstances and adapt. Beekeepers, not so much. They are profoundly disoriented when the world around them changes. They tend to be stubborn. “I am well aware how difficult it is to reason with beekeepers,” Langstroth wrote, “who stigmatize all knowledge which does not square with their own, as mere ‘book knowledge unworthy [of] the attention of practical men.’ ”

Miller considers himself something of an innovator in the beekeeping industry. He reads business journals and speaks to beekeeping groups about such perplexing concepts as the cost of funds, proper depreciation decisions, long-term versus short-term acquisitions, and nonperishable versus perishable consumables. He realizes that what makes a good beekeeper—a love of bees, a respect for life, a sense of stewardship—is not necessarily what makes a good businessman, and he strives to be good at both. He believes passionately in reinvesting in the industry, in research into bees and into new technologies, but he fears that his field is “infested with small thinkers.” Like his great-grandfather N.E., he doesn’t believe himself to be a small thinker. Successful beekeeping, he says, requires a willingness to adapt and change. But most beekeepers like to do things the way they always have done them.

There’s no one way to do it. There’s the John Miller model: go south to pollinate, divide and multiply the hives, move to the northern plains to participate in summer’s abundance, make honey, put the bees in the Idaho potato cellars for two months, start over again. There’s the Richard Adee model, which is the John Miller model on steroids. Adee runs about 80,000 hives between operations in Mississippi and South Dakota and California, acquiring other outfits as they go out of business: 5,000 here, 15,000 there, achieving unheard-of economies of scale. There’s the Orin Johnson model: Johnson runs 700 hives, keeping his numbers down and trying to manage well what he has, placing most of his bees in the wild sage fields within fifty miles of his home in Hughson, California. There are those who, like Miller, pollinate the almonds and oranges in California, but then send their hives to other bee guys in the northern plains for the summer. There are the northern bee guys who eschew the hassles of the almonds altogether and stay put for the winter, letting their bees die and restarting their hives from “packages” of mail-order bees the next spring.