by Tammy Horn
When America redefined its position as a major power in world politics after World War II, the country also had to redefine its relationship with beekeepers. If indeed America would become what Steven Stoll, in Fruits of Natural Advantage: Making the Industrial Countryside in California, calls the industrial countryside, the country would need beekeepers to provide pollination not just to almond groves, but to pumpkins, blueberries, cucumbers, cherries, and strawberries. Recognizing in a small way the importance of bees, the federal government provided beekeepers with more assistance and protection than they had in any other century of American history. When America became a world supplier of food, pollination became a major way for beekeepers to supplement their incomes. During this period of globalization, American beekeepers would have to redefine how they operated given the number of pesticides, new imports, land zoning regulations, federal quarantines, mites, and chemicals.
Technology affected how beekeepers approached their business. Airplanes were both a help and hindrance: beekeepers could scout new fields, but pesticide applicators could drop chemicals whenever and wherever the winds would scatter the load. Forklifts, hive lift machines, honey pumps, and semis would become the norm by the end of this century. Improved interstates provided the lifelines to the migratory beekeepers.
Culturally, technology affected how the honey bee was perceived by the public. Television, computers, and the Internet became powerful forces in transferring information. Ironically, the century noted for commercialization, federal legislation, and scientific research ended with more questions than answers about bees. Never before had there been so many possibilities to inform or misinform the public about beekeeping. Although the media hype about the African honey bee created a near hysteria until the 1980s, other forces were at work to educate and entertain the public about not only the African honey bee but also mites, imports, and pollination.
Beekeepers still struggled for a variety of social, ecological, and financial reasons, however. Commercial pesticides were not well regulated, so bees died at alarming rates. Honey prices dropped after World War II with the easy availability of sugar, and “heavy outbreaks of European foulbrood (which did not have a chemical treatment) caused beekeepers to go nearly bankrupt,” according to American foulbrood researcher Bill Wilson.1 In addition to European and American foulbrood, other diseases and pests such as chalkbrood (1972), tracheal mites (1984), varroa mites (1987), and small hive beetles (1998) caused significant turmoil in the fields and the pocketbooks of beekeepers. By the 1990s, the African honey bee suddenly seemed a very small threat, if only because it showed some resistance to the varroa mite.
Indirectly, the postwar housing shortage created a building boom of suburbs, representing more long-term threats than people could possibly realize when William Levitt built his first town in Hempstead, New York. By converting farmland into premanufactured houses, Levitt could build an unspecified number of houses within months. According to David Halberstam, “Starting in 1950 and continuing for the next thirty years, eighteen of the nation’s top twenty-five cities lost population. At the same time, the suburbs gained 60 million people. Some 83 percent of the nation’s growth was to take place in the suburbs.” In fact, Halberstam goes on to state: “Bill Levitt had helped begin a revolution—that of the new, mass suburban developments…. By 1955 Levitt-type subdivisions represented 75 percent of the new housing starts.”2
Bill Levitt was not alone. Government loans and GI benefits fueled this massive building boom. Very few restrictions were placed on land usage. Suddenly, the dream of owning a home was not impossible, especially if the buyer was white. All of these elements spelled trouble for beekeepers fighting a constant battle against pesticides, lost forage area, and zoning restrictions.
Furthermore, because major social rifts were threatening to tear apart the “good life” that many Americans had thought they created, this country’s arts environment used the honey bee to negotiate difficult power struggles between races, between spouses, between political parties, between generations, between legal rulings. The entertainment industry was the most visible force in redefining the honey bee’s new values. Because of successful black musicians such as Muddy Waters and Slim Harpo, the honey bee became synonymous with the pains and frustrations associated with love and intimacy. The blues singers had a short period of popularity compared with rock ‘n’ roll musicians, but they left an indelible impression on the late twentieth century. Likewise, the gospel group Sweet Honey in the Rock used the image of honey to sing against political and gender oppression during the civil rights movement; the group’s legacy has extended beyond the 1960s.
Photographers and movie directors recorded the daily details that feature honey bees or the people who work with them. Photographers such as Richard Avedon redefined the bee hunter in the twentieth century: he or she is no longer on the outskirts of society, but someone who looks like the next-door neighbor. He and other photographers detailed the difficulties of survival in this new land of milk and honey.
For the first time in the history of the honey bee as a cultural symbol, the bee was a villain in The Swarm, reflecting the country’s fear and paranoia of the African honey bee. However, by the 1980s and 1990s, the country had regained some of its equilibrium. Fried Green Tomatoes (1991) offered a female bee charmer on the silver screen. Dramatizing the link between military service and beekeeping for the first time, movie director Victor Nunez used the honey bee as an appropriate reconciliation metaphor in Ulee’s Gold in the 1990s.
It’s no surprise, however, that baseball and finally softball teams continued to adopt the honey bee as their mascot after World War II. With the issue of race becoming an explosive issue, sports and schools became the avenues for the American public to address racial and gender prejudice. Because Americans don’t have a national religion, sports provide a way for people to share rules and values. From the Burlington Bees to the Salt Lake Buzz, baseball teams chose the honey bee as their icon because such a symbol emphasized a tightly organized social infrastructure, which good baseball teams need.
During the late twentieth century, the honey bee reflected a wide range of values in a variety of media, complementing the complexity of American domestic and international policies. By the end of the 1990s, the honey bee no longer just meant industry and thrift or even a central organized society. The many cultural contexts in which the honey bee appeared reflected how much the American Dream always had been an interdependent global dream.
The 1950s
In an effort to bring stabilization and control to wildly fluctuating honey-market prices, Congress voted in 1949 to pass a price support system that would encourage small farmers to become honey producers. According to Pamela Moore, the Honey Support Program (1950) encouraged beekeepers to remain in business so that pollination of commercial crops would be ensured.3 The benefits were good because beekeepers had a ready market and did not have to contend with wildly fluctuating prices. Put simply, according to Douglas Whynott, “A beekeeper used the honey support program by taking a loan and using the honey as collateral. The loan allowed him to pay operating costs, and to hold the honey until he found the best market. After the sale, he paid off the loan.”4 The Commodity Credit Corporation (CCC) acted as the middle agent between the government and the beekeeper. During the first two decades of the price support program, the market price was higher than the price the government offered beekeepers.
Still, afraid that a cycle of dependency would be nurtured between beekeepers and the government, Walter Kelley cautioned beekeepers, “government support should be looked at as only temporary.”5 Later in the year, he urged beekeepers in 1953 to buy back the surplus honey from the CCC offices located in different regions. He stated, “By so doing you will show the government that you are in earnest in doing your best to make this price support program work and at the same time you will be holding your trade and making some profit.”6
However, American foulbrood remained the
nemesis it had always been because beekeepers could not administer Terramycin as quickly and efficiently as it was needed in the hives. In fact, Bee Culture writer Karl Showler declared that the industry almost bottomed out. Researcher Bill Wilson explains the beekeeper’s dilemma: “Bee researchers determined that diseased colonies needed to be dusted with Terramycin on a weekly schedule for five or more times (200 mg of oxytetracycline each dusting with a total of 1,000 mg or more per treatment period per colony). This schedule was difficult for commercial beekeepers with widely scattered apiaries. Some bee yards were more than 100 miles from the center of the beekeeper’s operation. Travel costs were high.”7 When Wilson devised sugar Terramycin patties (which could be left in hives and slowly consumed by the bees over time) in the late 1950s, beekeepers could medicate their hives in larger intervals, and American foulbrood ceased to be as great of a threat.
With the addition of Alaska and Hawaii as states, westward migration came to an end, although the two states could not have been more different. Honey bees had been in Hawaii since the 1800s when Catholic missionaries arrived in the islands. Hawaiian beekeeping followed the cattle industry, as it had in Texas and California. So when Catholic missionaries arrived in Hawaii, they brought the descendants of the Texas cattle that had first been brought from Spain in the 1580s. The missionaries also introduced the mesquite tree, which is known as kiawe in Hawaii. With mesquite trees, cattle, and bees, many Hawaiian plantations flourished during the early part of the century, although honey was considered a secondary interest compared to the sugarcane industry.
However, Hawaiian bees declined in the 1950s. “The stimulus of WWII was insufficient to rebuild the industry to its former proportions,” according to J. E. Eckert, “and in some instances the number of colonies and production dropped still lower.”8 The Hawaiian beekeepers had difficulties with mismanagement, American foulbrood on some islands, and the disruption in trade as a result of World War II. Compared with the honey industry in the 1900s, the post-World War II Hawaiian honey industry was tepid at best.
Alaskan beekeepers were just getting started, on the other hand. Starting in the 1920s, beekeepers had two obvious challenges: difficult winters and transportation of package bees. These challenges overshadowed the “normal” challenges of forage plants or labor concerns that other states may have, according to Stephen Petersen.9 The winters routinely dipped to-45°F. Transportation prices to Alaska were high, so a full-scale industry developed very slowly.
Not true in California. It was there in 1951 that “my dad [C.F.] cashed his first check for pollinating almond orchards,” reminisced honey bee package producer Bob Koehnen.10 The Almond Board of California, created in 1950 by the U.S. Congress, promoted the relationship between almonds and honey bees. With extensive research paid for by almond companies, growers were able to learn the optimal grid patterns for orchards and the formulas of hives per acre that would ensure adequate pollination of their almond trees. For every ninety-five trees, two hives should be planted to ensure maximum pollination. Every forty years, the almond trees should be dug up and replanted with fresh stock. The result of these studies is easy to see: More than six thousand almond growers farm over half a million acres in California.11 California is the only place where almonds are commercially grown in America, and it also supplies 80 percent of the world’s almond needs.12
As far as beekeepers are concerned, almond orchards provide one of the earliest sources of nectar and pollen, which is important to commercial beekeepers in need of colony buildup. Because almond trees are not self-pollinated, beekeepers can rent their hives for higher prices between February and March to almond growers. Writing in 2000, Roger Morse explains the interconnected relationship between beekeepers and orchard growers: “More colonies of honey bees are owned and operated in California than in any other state. California usually leads the nation in honey production. In the 1989 paper, it was estimated that 70 percent of the colonies of honey bees rented for pollination were rented in that state, where, of course, more colonies were used for almond pollination than for the pollination of any other single crop.”13
Although there is great variation between pollination schedules and crop varieties, extension specialist Eric Mussen suggests that the 1950s were when the research studies about pollination finally started to transfer to a practical application in the fields.14
Commercial pollination was happening in other states as well: wild blueberries in Maine, apples in Washington, cherries in Michigan, cucumbers in Ohio, Madrid sweet clover in Texas. However, given the unique growing conditions in California, almond growers have had a niche on that market. “If you want to see supply-and-demand economics,” explains Eric Mussen, “this is it.”15
Another factor in this successful agricultural formula, then, is the queen and package bee producer. The queen-rearing industry in California became more integrated with the almond industry in the 1950s. Bob Koehnen explains that package bee producers have had two interrelated responsibilities over the years: to keep the bee lines as true as possible, and then use them as good crosses when bee breeding so that good traits are passed on to the young bees.
When preparing his packages, Koehnen says nothing is left to chance. Young colonies are set in the almond orchards because almonds generally are the first crop to bloom. Thus, foragers can bring back nectar and pollen, allowing colonies to gain strength and numbers. Later, they produce the queens developed for packaged bees. It is a case where “the trees take care of the bees, and then the bees take care of the trees,” says Bob’s wife, Yvonne.16
The package industry is labor intensive. For a hundred days, seven days a week, Koehnen’s crew works at grafting queen cells with larvae, filling nucleus boxes called cell builders, and driving these cell builders into orchards. Twelve people are queen cagers; these people place the young queens in a small wooden shipping cage that has enough sugar to sustain the queen while the package is being shipped to a beekeeper.
The cell builders are brought back from the fields as strong colonies, the queens are caged and ready to be packaged, and an assembly line creates a mail-order package to send to beekeepers. The Koehnens have worked out a system with the United Postal Service that ensures efficiency in mailing. The Koehnens ship their queens the same day the queens are caged and put in a package. His company has achieved a “marriage of quantity and quality on an efficient schedule.”17
Just as pollination was beginning to be big business, honey prices slumped after World War II, aggravated by the unregulated use of pesticides. Beekeepers had learned that migratory beekeeping was the most profitable way to stay in the industry: “Migratory beekeeping had become the rule rather than the exception,” according to Charles Lesher.18 Owners were required to register locations, and their routes crisscrossed the United States from as far away as Florida, Texas, Arizona, and California to Washington and North Dakota. But because beekeepers were often the last to know about pesticide schedules, they incurred heavy losses. Chemicals didn’t affect other farmers’ livestock or crops, so beekeepers often were left with little recourse, except through a federal compensation program.
If chemicals didn’t affect schedules, weather did. Writing of the Rio Grande beekeeping routes, Clay Eppley details a series of weather-related routes that completely disrupted migratory routes to that region. In 1949, there was a killing frost. Then in 1950, a torrential rainstorm and even boll weevils plagued beekeepers. Finally, in 1951, Eppley described the “daddy of all Valley freezes … and in only a few hours our Valley citrus orchards were gone and with it our fine crops of citrus honey.”19
But beekeepers weren’t the only ones following migration routes.
Los Abejas Bravados
Initially, the African honey bee bore the burden of bad press and bad timing. Dubbed the “killer bee” by the American media, this honey bee was unfairly vilified, as was the researcher who studied it.
Dr. Warwick Kerr, the great-grandson of a Civil War Confederate sold
ier, is a renowned geneticist and specialist in native stingless bees. He is also an advocate for the poor and oppressed in Brazil. In 1956, Kerr won a cash award from the Brazilian government that would combine both of his interests: studying bees and helping poor people. The award funded projects that would help Brazil’s poor people learn skills. Beekeeping is a low-cost agricultural enterprise to initiate compared to other industries because beekeeers do not need land to operate. Kerr thought beekeeping would provide a good sustainable economy if Brazil had a bee better adapted to the tropical region. African bees, despite their temper, have a great gift: they are survivors. The African bee is, to quote researcher Marla Spivak, “well-adapted to subsistence living. It can find patches of nectar that other honey bees will overlook.”20 African bees put all their energies into population building. Thus, they tend to swarm more often than Italian honey bees, and when their nests are threatened, they are more defensive than other honey bees. The initial hope that the African bees could be hybridized with other strains did not happen quickly, and it remains a question whether hybridization occurred at all during the twentieth century.21
Forty-seven African queen bees survived introduction to São Paulo University, Brazil. But the bees were soon shipped to a eucalyptus forest owned by a railroad company. The accident occurred there, according to Dewey Caron: “A railroad employee removed the double queen excluders from the entrances of 26 of these colonies in early 1957, apparently because he saw pollen loads being removed from workers returning to the colonies. The colonies swarmed soon thereafter.”22 The African bee started swarming north, but the media moved even more quickly. “Killer bees” made for great headlines.
As if that misfortune were not enough, when Kerr criticized the Brazilian military government for its treatment of the poor, he was imprisoned. While imprisoned, the Brazilian government criticized Kerr’s research with the African honey bees. Even though Brazil eventually became a large honey producer, Kerr was not appreciated by Brazil or America until the latter part of the twentieth century, when it became apparent that there were more devastating enemies to North American honey bees than African bees.