This must be the place.
My pounding on the white doors is muffled by the loud machinery beyond them. The doorbell has been removed. Fortunately, two students carrying lunch come up and keycard me in. LASI has had workers from across the world: Syria (that’d be Hasan, whom I meet in passing, whose full-time job is rearing their special hygienic queens), Germany, the United States, Italy, Russia, and France.
I mosey through the tight-knit LASI workspace. Cabinet shelves next to Ratnieks’s office act as a sort of Bee Shrine with various souvenirs and tchotchkes: Winnie-the-Pooh sippy cups, a liqueur mead growler, honeys (black, Spanish, Danish, lavender), 13 bottles of mead, a shiny bee tie bar, emptied honeycombs, and plush bee dolls. Outside in the slender garden on the opposite side of the gate’s warning sign is a flower patch of 14 friendly varieties, including the Velcro-y bulbous Helenium and purple cobs of catmint. All 14 varieties are part of LASI’s collaboration with nearby parks to promote garden flowers that are “100 times” better in helping insects.
Francis Ratnieks finishes writing an e-mail and escorts me back inside to the queen-rearing room. “This is a new venture,” says Francis. He stands over six feet with a mellow voice that carries as though his mood ring were a permanent dark hue, touting bits of bee knowledge as a sort of sage. Francis even visited the same stingless bee apiary as me in Brazil. As a demonstration of his prowess, he points to a bee forager performing a waggle dance in an observation hive. It repeatedly cycles in a figure eight pattern, and Francis instantaneously analyzes it: “That bee is communicating a distance of about 400 meters at 80 degrees left to the sun,” he says. “It’s probably bramble flowers.”
The room is full of small nucleus hives, intended for queen-mating. Like humans, bees learn to associate. They can pair colors and odors with food, navigate toward specific patches of flowers from the hive, and identify landmarks near the colony’s entrance. But hygienic behavior is innate, so finding hygienic bees takes meticulous vetting. “Hygienic bees remove dead and diseased brood from sealed cells,” Francis says, “and this confers disease resistance. And yet this behavior is quite rare and highly variable.” Five to 10 percent of the colonies’ honeybees are hygienic. Experts at LASI find them by making a frozen patch of dead brood. Hygienic colonies will quickly remove them. “You could literally breed for that trait,” he says.
So far they’ve shipped 80 hygienic queens and have orders for 80 more after only a month. Francis prefers using a nucleus hive over artificially inseminating queens—an intensive practice requiring intricate tools and the steady hand of a watchmaker. But artificially inseminated queens don’t live as long, making it harder to maintain your stock. However, the folks at LASI intend to use instrumental insemination to rear hygienic virgin daughters and drones.
We walk back outside to drink our coffee while sitting on a bench across from the Bee Shrine. “So,” I start, “do we depend on these bees we’ve domesticated as much as they depend on us?”
Francis immediately corrects me on my use of the word “domesticated.” In French, bees may be called l’abeille domestique, but that’s a far cry from any farm animal or dog. “[Bees] have been highly modified from their ancestors,” he says, “but I think honeybees are hardly different to the way nature made them. We have rather little affected honeybees. Almost everything that they do is part of their natural behavior.”
This is why hygienic behavior in bees, limited in the United States as they are for now, is so exciting. Had beekeepers not controlled diseases, and just let them be, sure, there would be more colony die-offs, but eventually evolution would favor hygienic bees. “The United States,” says Francis, “is a place that believes in chemicals” and antibiotics to manage various diseases and varroa mites. “But in the long run, they will not be successful because of resistance. Antibiotics tend to mask the disease rather than fully cure it.”
I am surprised to learn later that Francis doesn’t share the sentimentality of his bee behaviorist colleagues like Karl von Frisch. I ask him: “What fascinates you most about them?”
“Well, you’re talking to someone who’s obviously biased,” he says. “There’s so many angles to them … They do such incredible things. For instance, the other day I saw them police each other to resolve conflicts over reproduction. The honeybee has the most sophisticated communication signal of any organism other than humans. It also has a very strong link to humans.” Francis then points to the wall and recites a number of bee quotes hung on it. Charles Darwin. Yeats. The Qu’ran. My bee wordsmith Maurice Maeterlinck. And of course Frisch, who called them “a magic well for discoveries.”
What Francis says next sums up my general feeling toward all bugs.
“People think interesting species exist but not usually where they live or in their national park,” he says. “Whereas, wherever you’re living—if that’s North America or Europe, Australia, Africa, South America—you can go outside and you can see honeybees foraging within yards of where you’re living. And I would say that that common animal is the world’s most interesting species. Maybe second to humans.” He looks down at his mug of coffee. “Um, of course I’m very biased”—he pushes his glasses up the bridge of his nose—“but there you go.”
From the Gospel of Maurice: “This secret spring comes from the beautiful honey, itself but a ray of heat transformed, that returns now to its first condition. It circulates in the hive like generous blood. The bees at the full cells present it to their neighbors, who pass it on in their turn. Thus it goes from hand to hand and from mouth to mouth, till it attain[s] the extremity of the group in whose thousands of hearts one destiny, one thought, is scattered and united.”
Francis and I join the lab students at a large table filled with sack lunches, brownies, and marmalade cake. Chatter evolves into a discussion about neonicotinoids. Banning neonics, as the EU has, could result in a backlash where farmers resort to old, more harmful pesticides like DDT and other lethal chemicals. The same ones used 60 years ago when 82,000 colonies died in California in one year. One of the LASI students, Nick Balfour, recently wrote his thesis paper about a long field trial with neonics. He found the insecticide did little to affect the colonies.
“When I see the way commercial beekeepers keep their bees in the States—move them thousands of miles—I find it hard to believe that’s not harmful,” says Norman Carreck, Francis’s colleague and a beekeeper since age 15. “A lot of losses ought to be preventable. There are a half dozen commercial beekeepers in the UK who’ve got a couple of thousand hives. Most of the others have a few hundred. We have nothing on the scale of these big US operations,” he says. “The British ones move bees but not very far.”
The theory directs attention to two overarching factors that can escape us: nutrition and stress. Dennis vanEngelsdorp suggested a simple solution—not a magic bullet—that the folks at LASI also promote, and it’s one you and I could do: start a pollinator garden with insect-friendly plants that encourage biodiversity—even if it’s small. Insects are married to specific plants. Research local ones in your area, and then lay down a diverse garden. In 10 to 20 years, it could make a significant difference. When I asked vanEngelsdorp if it was tough being an entomologist and if he was optimistic about the bee’s future, he outright said, “Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. If I wasn’t, I couldn’t do it.”
* * *
On my journey I’ve visited numerous labs and rearing rooms, bug artisans and maggotologists, comedic exterminators and beetle smugglers, cricket chefs and mosquito launchers. But the one missing facet has been a taste of the Old World.
Following Carreck’s line of thought, I make my way to London for a flight bound for Greece.
Before leaving the UK, I stop at Kew Gardens—a 300-acre, botanical behemoth—to see a 55-foot sculpture called the Hive. Created in 2015 by Wolfgang Buttress, the 170,000 aluminum poles spiral into what the artist has called a skeletal “latticework,” creating an interior dome lighted with hundreds of LEDs and a glass
floor with hexagon patterns. Inside is an oxytocin-fueled sensation. The lights’ intensity and the low pipe organ drone vibrating through the aluminum pieces is actually an interpretation of sound and activity transmitted via an accelerometer placed in one of Kew’s beehives. As the sun peers from the clouds, the bee-generated music swells and grows, resonating in this cathedral. Hundreds of attendants exit and return to the Hive, eyes open and necks craned in reverence.
Epilogue
At 8:00 a.m., the Mediterranean Sea is a rolling mass of black marble. It would be an opaque marble were it not for the twinkling glimmers of sun and the water-churning propellers of the Nissos Mykonos, a ferry docked in the Port of Piraeus. The foghorn sounds its departure. I board the ferry via the aft dock and watch the apartments and villas layered in sun shades become smaller. The propeller-generated trail of sea froth fades from the mainland. And the horizon where Athens remains is a thumb smear of olive oil murkiness.
So why am I sailing to a 99-square-mile island called Ikaria? A while back I read about Blue Zones—one of the many health crazes from the 2000s promoting Mediterranean diets. What made Blue Zones stand out is that researchers found places across the world whose inhabitants happened to have greater longevity. Ikarians held a place in their heart for a special honey made from the nectar of heather flowers called reiki or, as the locals refer to it, anamatomelo, aka anama. Thick as peanut butter, it reportedly boosts the preternatural longevity of Ikaria’s inhabitants. This once-unmarketable bee by-product that only locals would take as a daily “vitamin” or medicine is now a key attraction for health nuts touring Greek islands. Other honeys on the island, not necessarily as mystic or purportedly life-extending, are pollen and nectar cocktails of heather, pine, fir, strawberry, orange, wild lavender, and more.
Doing some more digging, I found a blog post about Lina Tsingerlioti, a young, city-raised woman attracted to Ikaria’s simplicity. The article mentions her recent beekeeping hobby. After a couple of false leads, I was able to track her down. I expressed my interest in visiting the island and tasting its fabled honey. Greek honey has stood out since ancient times as the most “prized” and “distinctive,” writes Sweetness & Light author Hattie Ellis. Thymomelo is one such remarkable honey nurtured from thyme. (Actually, honey is regurgitated from the mouths of bees. But “nurtured” sounds prettier.) Lina and I corresponded for several months before my trip to Europe, and she gave me the addresses of two of the island’s best beekeepers: Giorgos Stenos and Yannis Kochilas.
After weeks of planning, I find myself on the Nissos Mykonos on the way to meet the beekeepers. The Aegean is vast and its shorelines distant. The ferry calmly cuts through the liquid sapphire sea, its engines emitting a mechanical rumble like a cross-legged robot chanting Om. We stop at two islands: Syros and Mykonos—tourist destinations with bleached-white, LEGO-brick homes snapped into the mountainside. When the Nissos Mykonos reaches Ikaria’s Evdilos Bay, the travelers gather in the ferry’s garage, luggage in hand, and watch with anticipation as the 20-foot cargo door lowers in the port. The ardent sunlight tightens my skin as I round the cove. Small cafes and confectioners and shops line the streets with locals sitting at tables langorously conducting the air with open hands mid chit-chat. The island is entirely mountainous with serpentine gravel roads. Although many townsfolk hitchhike to get around, I’ve elected to rent a car—more precisely, a supercompact Chevy.
Exotic Ottoman classics play on the radio as I weave around the coast toward my hotel. The mountain flora is parched. The spines of juniper trees elegantly twist from the ground, their branches reaching out. I learn from a local beekeeper named Xenia Regina that the island has a plague of wild goats, or rhaska, some of which I see on the road’s edge as if they are hitchhiking. (Apparently government incentives for owning a certain number of goats has led to their overpopulation.) There’s also been a concern over the growing number of tourists. “Thousands of people coming here to learn the secret of longevity,” Xenia told me. “It’s not that simple. You come here, they tell you some of the secrets, you buy some honey, oil, and wine and herbs—and that’s it, you’ll be 100 years old,” she says.
She attributes higher life expectancy to sociality. “[Ikarians] go to all the festivals, have gardens, watch grandchildren, dance at soirees,” she said. “It’s also like the laws of nature. The stronger ones survive.” (Interestingly enough, Giorgos Stenos taught Xenia apiculture. In fact, he’s taught Lina Tsingerlioti, my electronic pen pal, and anyone on the island willing to learn, imparting his secrets for harvesting such quality honey that only a select few have been fortunate to sample. His assistant was quick to state he was “the guru of beekeeping.”)
I reach my destination, Atsachas, a hotel and restaurant along the cliffs of Livadi beach. Its water clarity baffles me. I can only relate the crisp aqua palette to the fabric paint section of craft stores my mom would drag me through. For a moment I ponder how much dye would be necessary to achieve this beauty. Eugenia, the owner of Atsachas, greets me in the kitchen. She refers to me as “Colorado.”
“The rest,” she says, waving it off with her hand—the rest being my name, David MacNeal—“is too difficult to remember.” Later I become visibly panicky trying to figure out how I’ll coordinate meeting Giorgos since my Ikaria connection, Lina, has briefly stopped e-mailing. This edgy feeling comes on, but Eugenia is quick to offer that Giorgos Stenos is actually her cousin. Meanwhile, her 20-year-old son Teo rolls a cigarette and offers to make me an iced coffee. He tells me how he intends to move to Athens to learn apiculture—the apple not falling too far from the tree.
After settling in my room, I swim in the sea, buoyant from the salinity levels. As I lay out on a lounge chair, the constant crash of the waves and sunshine lulls me. I pass out for what feels like an hour … but is actually three.
The next morning, I sit outside my room smearing store-bought Ikarian honey onto bread. Coffee brews in a briki pot on an electric hotplate. The beach is a flight of stairs away, in plain view. Directly in front of me I watch as bees forage from the succulents sparsely flowering in the garden plot decorated with white rocks and arranged in a spiral. This playfully bright honey is a blend of different plants and seasonal harvests. It’s fragrant and delicious. As of that moment, it’s the best I’ve ever had.
Bizarrely enough, when I meet up with Lina, we come across the other beekeeper, Yannis Kochilas. He is revving up his motorcycle in Christos Raches square, a rock-tiled enclosure in a mountain town 2,400 feet above sea level full of small tables, street-lamps, feral cats, cafes, and rustic villas. Lina translates the conversation in Greek for me. Turns out Yannis was about to write back to me, but then the Ikarian time paradox got to him—the one where one hour turns into three. And he forgot. That’s how, before sunset, Lina and I find ourselves in Yannis’s foliated home in the mountains.
The narrow street intended for donkey carts and traveling merchants is quiet. Cows bellow in the distance. A rooster crows. And a choir of crickets and cicadas sing. Flowering trees consume Yannis Kochilas’s home. Slabs of Sheetrock are slated on a roof on flagstone walls. The ancient honeybee clay pot Lina and I stare at is similarly enclosed. It’s called a hastri. “You can see on the mountain still, a few left,” she says of the hive from bygone eras. “But the people, sometimes they steal the clay pots. They make them chimneys for the houses.”
Yannis, a 53-year-old man with thick glasses and a wing-shaped T-shirt sweat stain, steps into a shed by the hastri. He comes back from his “honey house” holding Old World beekeeping tools. One resembles a dustpan-sized hay pitch. This wooden tool was used to hold the combs. The L-shaped metal crowbar would cut and separate the hexagonal honey stores from the combs containing the incubating brood. These tools go back in his family four generations, back when they had 10 hives at most. Today he keeps 150 hives.
He invites Lina and me into the honey room. Similar tools are meticulously displayed on the walls as though the room is a mini-museum: An old swa
rm cage, easily mistaken for a fencing mask; a rusted honey ladle; and a hive smoker that looks like a perforated kiln, once fueled with dry bull dung. Displayed alongside his collection are bee photographs as well as honey competition awards from Italy’s BiolMiel annual contest.
“Four samples I sent, and four I was awarded,” says Yannis. Unlike Giorgos, Yannis is more private in his beekeeping affairs. “The older beekeepers look at you like a competitor.” He just started entering his honey in competitions. His thyme honey took first place in 2014 and 2015. Yannis harvests little, but the jars of honey are worth the price. He charges 20 euros for his thymomelo, which is available only within Greece to select subscribers. His process involves waiting until the sea is calm, sailing out to an island, and climbing cliffs with a hive backpack that he’ll lay down in a flat area. He’s made these trips for the past 15 years.
“It’s more for his satisfaction that he does it, because it’s too hard,” says Lina. “He likes the situations of going to some rogue islands. It adds a good quality to the honey.” Other beekeepers new to Ikaria are intimidated by the footwork required as well as the aggressive behavior of the bees. But Yannis is devoted to the hunt. “When you attend the hives, you forget everything,” he says via Lina. “You don’t have contact with the rest.”
Yannis returns from his house carrying spoons and plates. Jars full of melted auburn, topaz, and sun-colored crystals stand on the table. The first organic honey we try is heather and strawberry. It’s thick and light with hints of vanilla. “It’s kind of rare to find pure heather honey,” says Lina. “It’s an honor, you might say, to try this.”
Bugged Page 25