Ten
Tracing the Collapse
The glass door on Logan Street reflects the empty silhouette of a bald man with two large silver earrings. I buzz Lawrence Forcella, aka Lorenzo, aka the bug-pinning artisan from chapter 1, into my building.
Lorenzo’s taking a break from his eight-hour drive from Wyoming after scavenging for dead animal bones and picking up an antelope head to sell to the Evolution Store—a collection of oddities that has relocated from New York’s SoHo neighborhood to NoHo, closing down the Entomology Room I visited in the process. It’s hard for him to lose the department he started. Now he pins bugs for his own God of Insects enterprise with the occasional Evolution consultation. When I heard Lorenzo was visiting family in Colorado, I asked if he’d make a pit stop in Denver and sample this local mead I’d just bought.
Back in my apartment, I pour two glasses of black raspberry mead. We toast and fill each other in on the happenings since I last saw him. I introduce him to Bill “Fucking” Murray sitting on my kitchen countertop, my discoid cockroach/botched attempt at cyborg science and current house pet. “You know what the selling point on the Blaberus discoidalis is?” he asks me. I wait for the punchline. “They like to disco.” The two nerds in the room start laughing. He gives me tips on how to pin Archy and Bill “Fucking” Murray when they reach the pearly gates, like creating a Jacuzzi for them to soak overnight, making their limbs flexible.
I tell him about Brazil and my visit to a couple of the University of São Paulo’s bee colonies. Unlike at your standard apiary, we weren’t required to wear protective garb. The variety of bee genus there is known as Melipona, and they are stingless. A student assistant lifted the lid off one hive no larger than a jewelry box, and I dipped a taster spoon into the colony’s honey bulbs, which looked like a string of quail eggs. The by-product was runny pancake syrup. The taste was invigorating. Wide commercialization of this honey,1 though, is not possible due to stingless bees’ slow production and restricted importation.
The conversation drifts to honey production in the United States and the dark effects of big agriculture and pervasive toxic chemicals.
“It’s a little like saying that any one particular thing is responsible for colony collapse disorder [CCD],” says Lorenzo in that emphatic Brooklyn accent. CCD caused a great stir starting in 2006. You know it as the phenomenon in which 30 percent of honeybee colonies were abandoned, leaving only some workers and queen bees, rendering hives, as beekeeping businessman Dave Hackenberg says, “ghost towns.” Beekeepers across 36 states lost as many as 60 percent of their hives in the 2000s. Cases of the mysterious disease have dropped in the past six years. The causality, still very much debated, has been pinned on a number of pests, fungicides, pathogens, and poor nutrition.
I ask Lorenzo, “Haven’t massive bee die-offs been an ongoing phenomena through centuries with different names?”
“It’s possible, but I actually don’t know much about honeybees. No one really asked me about bees until people came up to me asking if I’ve heard of CCD. ‘Well, how the hell have you not heard about it?’” he says, feigning aggressiveness. “People have gifted me beekeeping guides that are almost 100 years old. And it has a long list of stuff that can kill your bees! It’s like, oh my God, these things are prone to so many different diseases. And weird disorders that have strange names that obviously no one knew what it was.”
“Israeli acute paralysis virus. American foulbrood,” I say. (Both diseases are explained in the pages to come.)
“Back then no one studied this stuff scientifically. It was just knowledge passed on from beekeeper to beekeeper.”
“So what solution is there for the honeybee?”
It’s the pervading question thousands of bee experts, aka melittologists, have sought to answer about the European honeybee (Apis mellifera). Lorenzo mentions how there’s a “mad scramble” by melittologists to discover native bumble bees before they go extinct. Bees appear on every continent but Antarctica, and have an estimated worldwide value of $153 billion a year. Entomologist Marlene Zuk points out how “218,000 of the world’s 250,000 flowering plants, including 80 percent of the world’s species of food plants, rely on pollinators, mainly insects, for reproduction.” Managed bees pollinate 100 crops in the United States, from watermelon fields in Florida to California’s 1.1 million acres of almonds. So it’s vital to find out the why. Why this decline? And what can we do? Bugs are nearly as necessary to humans as breathing.
I think back on my earlier question at the start of this book: what is a bug? Coming away from this journey, I’d say they are saviors and survivors, shaped by the world to, in turn, shape it.
Our closest tie to bees, and therefore nature, predates the invention of alcohol—a honey-fermented drink akin to the mead Lorenzo and I drank the night of our reunion. These omnipresent “flying dust mops,” bee researcher Jerry Bromenshenk once called them, pockmark all of history. Bees have inspired jubilation, romantic verse, cultivation, medical advancement, industries, and more.
* * *
The first solid evidence of the world’s greatest pollinator dates to 65 to 70 million years ago, and was found in modern-day New Jersey. Suspended in amber from the Late Cretaceous period is a eusocial bee, part of the classification family known as Apinae, which includes what are called corbiculate bees. Corbiculates include honeybees, stingless bees from Brazil, and solitary bees that live alone in holes, mostly in the ground or trees. But what makes them so important is that their legs are pollen baskets—saddles they use to carry a flower’s sperm, picked up with their front legs. They then travel at the hyper pace of 15 miles per hour. While evidence shows that pollinating flowers surfaced 100 million years ago, during the Cretaceous period, they only truly proliferate when bees are present. By calibrating fossil evidence to reconstruct the history of corbiculate bees, Cornell researchers recently hypothesized that bees’ eusociality (the ability to nest in colonies, store honey, etc.) may go as far back as 87 million years. Other US scientists have found evidence to place bees even earlier in the Jurassic period, or 200 million years ago.
This creature paves the way for early man. Honey was the original sweetener. Our first interactions with bees are depicted in Spain’s Cave of the Spider. The 15,000-year-old drawing shows an androgynous figure hanging by a vine and possibly holding a smoking bush to calm bees. You see, early man was a thief. Bee colonies hid within rock crevices. Dangled off trees. Before managing them with wicker baskets coated with mud, honey hunters risked their lives (and countless stings) probing around and chopping at branches or cutting portions of single-comb nests2 the size of Stegosaurus plates.
Later on, pottery vessels, present since 5000 BCE of the Neolithic period, were used to store colonies—and enable less harmful means of consumption. Honey cylinders could be found in southern Mesopotamia as early as 2450 BCE. Here, one preventive measure to deter moths (which produce the comb-eating larvae) from hives was to “sprinkle fresh milk and the urine of children” over them, writes The Sacred Bee author Hilda Ransome.
The first evidence of beekeeping is found in ancient Egypt. Bas-relief and hieroglyphs in the Sun Temple of Niuserre from 2400 BCE spell out how humans would be found “blowing or smoking, filling, pressing” the hives and “sealing honey,” Ransome explains. Eighteenth-century foreign travelers noted the migratory patterns of Egyptian beekeepers, traversing the Nile in rafts with pyramids of such potted colonies, gathering pollen and nectar from across the nation. Such migratory hives are also reported in Rome on the river Po by Pliny the Elder, with similar accounts from Spain.
Honey soon became an integral part of our culture.
Canopic jars that stored the intestines of deceased Egyptians had bees carved on them, symbolic of Horus’s sons. Egyptian matrimony promised “twelve jars of honey” to brides. Croatian wedding processions required honey smeared on doorposts as brides were fed a spoonful of honey to “live peaceably” with their grooms. That’s three spoonfuls i
f you live in Serbia. In India, traditional Hindi beekeepers carry holy basil while tending to the hives—a practice associated with honey (“food of the gods,” as Ransome points out) and Krishna’s maiden. Kama—the Hindu version of Cupid—is followed by a kite’s tail of bees. Passages from the Satapatha Brahmana place a heavy distinction on honey, calling it the “life sap.” Hindi newborns receive a drop of honey.
Soon honey laws became a necessity. Hittite laws circa the thirteenth century BCE deterred would-be thieves: “If anyone steals two or three beehouses, he formerly had to have his own hives destroyed, now he needs to pay 6 shekels of silver.” This is the earliest evidence of such legal action. “Bee-Judgements” in Ireland, starting in the eighth century CE, instructed honey payments to tribal chiefs from a swarming hive. A hundred years later, King Alfred demanded bells be rung at the sight of a swarm so it could be hived.
There is plenty of bee superstition. Counting hives in France was bad luck, and stings were thought to be the result of swearing, which really would only beget a cycle of curses and stings in equal measure. In Rome, where slaves and nobles partook in beekeeping, the bee goddess Mellona is portrayed with a beehive-topped3 staff. Dionysus, a mythological being of pleasure, is rumored to originally have been the god of mead rather than wine. At the time, “bees flying through the cracks of rocks,” writes Sweetness & Light author Hattie Ellis, “were thought to be souls emerging from the underworld.” In Iran, fifth-century4 BCE historian Herodotus notes, dead kings were enveloped in wax.
Apiculture, or the maintenance of honeybees, was derailed for some time in Europe because of ravaging Barbarian invaders who destroyed the land. But beekeeping picked up once again as wax candles were sought out by Catholics.
Similar to earlier sanctioned bee laws, “England’s Charter of the Forests in 1225,” writes Hattie Ellis, “established that taking someone else’s honey and beeswax was an act of poaching.” (Speaking of minding one’s own beeswax, the childish taunt stems from olden days when women smeared wax on their face. If standing too close to a fire, UC Davis entomologist Elina Niño told me, they were quickly warned to “mind” it.) Seventeenth-century reverend and bee fanatic Charles Butler praised beeswax candles, saying that they “maketh the most excellent light, fit for the eyes of the most excellent; for cleernesse, sweetness, neatnesse, to be preferred before all other.” (Apparently he’s never been to Yankee Candle.)
Even with all this bee hubbub, it wasn’t until the 1500s that we sought ways to harvest honey without killing the bees.
Before the nineteenth century, beekeepers had a more rough-hewn mentality. The standard enclosure used by Chinese beekeepers was a mud-coated basket. Hives in Europe might consist of oak cork or wicker baskets or logs originally strung up in trees and then later placed on the ground. German bee masters, aka bienenvater, refer to these hives as klotzbeute. At times, they were topped by gables, giving the impression that Keebler elves lived inside.5 Superstition in western Germany prevents traveling beekeepers from strapping their hives onto themselves like backpacks facing behind them, lest their bees flee. A colony may also depart when a bienenvater dies. Similar to traditions in other regions of the world, when a beekeeper passes away, relatives or friends must then tell the hives their master is gone or else “the bees will follow [them] and die.” Such animistic lamenting is captured beautifully in this two-stanza excerpt from nineteenth-century poet John Greenleaf Whittier’s “Telling the Bees”:
Before them, under the garden wall,
Forward and back,
Went drearily singing the chore-girl small,
Draping each hive with a shred of black.
Trembling, I listened: the summer sun
Had the chill of snow;
For I knew she was telling the bees of one
Gone on the journey we all must go!
Honeybees arrived in Virginia around 1622. As Thomas Jefferson noted, “The bees have generally extended themselves into the country a little in advance of the settlers.” He also mentions that Native Americans referred to them as the “white man’s fly,” although Central and South Americans began beekeeping before the arrival of Spanish conquistadores. For their trip across the Atlantic, bees were transferred to inverted straw baskets called skeps. Barrels of hives over ice would keep bees calm while traversing eighteenth-century seas. Sometimes anxious, frenzied sailors heaved hives over the side, blaming poor weather on the bees.
In 1657, English cleric Samuel Purchas wrote what might be considered the first beekeeping handbook, A Theatre of Politicall Flying Insects: Wherein Especially the Nature, the Worth, the Work, the Wonder, and the Manner of Right-Ordering of the Bee, Is Discovered and Described.6 At that time, observation hives, with lone-standing window frames, made it possible to see how honeycombs were constructed. By the eighteenth century,7 blind scientist François Huber published New Observations on the Bee, which discussed queen bee mating and birth, temperature control, and oviposition. He described royal jelly, the foodstuff of queen larvae. But the design of the beehive frames prevented critical research on the inner workings as combs attached to the walls. Destroying them was regular practice up until about 1851, courtesy of a three-eighths-inch revolution.
After observing a friend’s glass globe beehive in the 1840s, Massachusetts pastor Lorenzo Langstroth became intrigued by bees. Combs had long been cut into pieces. However, Lorenzo knew of the Greeks’ movable combs and how some European hives had wood frames. Combining these ideas, he made slidable frames in a wooden box, removable like circuit boards in a mainframe, spaced three-eighths of an inch—just enough for bees to move through but prevent honeycomb buildup. This “bee space” would change apiculture. Some people must have been apprehensive at first. To them, he wrote, “Those who object to this as interfering with nature, should remember that the bee is not in a state of nature.” While his patent for it was accepted, other companies and apiarists were quick to make slight adjustments to their own inventions, echoing Langstroth’s bee space. But in the midst of feeling ill and combating depression, Langstroth didn’t pursue the lawsuit he’d filed. He died in 1895.
Apiculture flourished. Newspapers reported on the potential wealth to be made, sending flocks of people to California with “bee fever.” Those West Coast apiarists would very soon produce 2 million pounds of honey annually, writes Hattie Ellis.
What followed was a result of the bee craze. American Bee Journal was established in 1861. Honey extraction improved with the use of centrifugal force to spin the sweetener from comb cells. Five years later, in 1870, a New Yorker invented the modern bee smoker. The first train car full of honeycombs was shipped to Chicago in 1873. In 1901, author Maurice Maeterlinck’s book The Life of the Bee sparked beekeeping fever across the world. Soon after, our nation’s first apiculture expert was appointed by the Bureau of Entomology. And by 1909, the United States had its first commercial bee rental.
From the Gospel of Maurice (Maeterlinck, that is): “They are the soul of the summer, the clock whose dial records the moments of plenty … the song of the slumberous, languid air; and their flight is the token, the sure and melodious note, of all the myriad fragile joys that are born in the heat and dwell in the sunshine.”
Due to a market surplus of honey, we moved on to different extracts. Starting in 1930, German women worked full-time plucking worker bees from hive entrances to have them sting a piece of fabric. This absorbed venom, composed of a number of useful enzymes and proteins like mellitin, was then isolated and freeze-dried into a crystalline powder, writes bee researcher Eva Crane. This practice still exists today, but has been upgraded nicely by instead placing an electronic frame8 in front of hives, shocking returning workers that then release pheromones to attack a cleverly placed membrane, amassing venom.
Meanwhile, during World War II, in the United States, sugar was rationed so the troops could have some. To make up for it, the number of bee colonies, both hobby9 and commercial, went up to 5.8 million by 1946. Due to th
e surplus, commercial beekeepers diversified by extracting more byproducts like venom and royal jelly. And then the 1960s saw the growth of migratory services, upgrading to forklifts and semi-trucks to haul millions of bees to pollinate various crops across the nation. To help improve beekeeping in South America, African queens were bred with European bees with frightening consequences. Media scares circulated as aggressive “Africanized” bees moved north through Mexico to the southern United States, killing many people since their hybridization in Brazil.
Building a more resourceful bee via hybridization continues today. “Bee diseases have plagued the beekeeper since pre-Biblical times,” wrote Eva Crane in the History of Entomology, “and have been partially responsible in some areas for the fact that beekeeping has not developed into an industry.”
Our management of A. mellifera has been advantageous. But it also reveals a bit of human folly—an urge to tamper with nature without considering the costs. Fortunately, scientists, environmentalists, and individuals emotionally moved by the wonder of this creature seek ways for it to thrive today.
* * *
Buckfast Abbey lies near the southern tip of England on the edge of Dartmoor National Park, a densely wooded forest out of which a centaur or Hansel and Gretel might emerge. Getting here takes a 45-minute ride on a double-decker bus tightly hugging stone walls in the local market town of Newton Abbot and several hillside switchbacks. Trees on either side of the winding road intertwine their branches in tunnel formation, finally opening to a Benedictine church and monastery.
A breeze of linden drapes over the abbey’s neatly trimmed landscape. Established in 1018 CE, the abbey was rebuilt from ruin by 30 French monks in 1882. Today the monastic grounds, replete with a restaurant, lavender garden, shops, and exhibition, receive over 300,000 visitors a year. My theory for Buckfast Abbey’s popularity rests on the monks’ tonic wine. The bartender at a nearby inn tells me it’s like “angel’s piss,” as innocent in appearance as a bottle of Manischewitz, but an inspirer of “hooliganism.” So mighty is the tonic wine’s alcohol content that Scottish politicians have demanded its banishment.
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