by Tammy Horn
Similarly, with her spare writing style, Sue Hubbell created a lens through which to view the Ozarks in A Country Year. Hubbell, a female beekeeper in a predominantly male field, recorded many social changes experienced by women beginning in the 1970s. Domestic entanglements, gender differences, an eventual divorce, an eventual new beginning—through all these troubles, her bees stayed the course. With the success of A Country Year, Sue Hubbell began writing a book strictly about beekeeping. A Book of Bees was published in 1988, and at first glance, it seems remarkably similar to Mary Louis Coleman’s Bees in the Garden and Honey in the Larder (1939). Both are arranged according to the seasons, and both have intelligent, unpretentious writing styles. Despite the differences in geography, both women share the same frustrations and pleasures with beekeeping. The differences between the two are just as apparent, however.
An Ozark beekeeper, Hubbell is not worried about the three Cs (cooking, cosmetics, and cleaning). In fact, she is a divorced woman working her way toward a new life by writing and taking care of bees. In A Book of Bees, Hubbell provides a nice balance of history, literature, and practical instruction so that anyone could learn more than how to manage a beehive. The Ozarks are an important context in which this narrative is written:
The store in the little town between two ranches carries more than groceries. In the back of the shelves of peanut butter and canned corn are work clothes, axe handles, coils of rope and other country necessities. In the middle of it all is a Formica-topped table, where ranch hands are usually gathered drinking coffee from the pot that sits on a hot plate at the end of the meat counter…. I don’t know their names, but they know mine: Bee Lady. A middle-aged woman in baggy white coveralls who smells of burnt baling twine is a standout in any crowd.
At first, Hubbell stands out in the Ozarks, but she finds that she fits in quite well. She can talk weather with the ranch hands, and that is the real key to establishing friendships: “So we talk weather. We talk hay. We talk bees. We talk farm prices and shake our heads sadly.”78
Hubbell’s book begins in autumn, but the timelessness about the art of beekeeping comes through in the writing, regardless of the season. No matter when a person begins beekeeping, Hubbell suggests, there are challenges and joys. In the “Winter” section, one learns that bees are “forgiving” creatures, and will tolerate a good deal of gadgets, but the “best beekeepers I know are those who let the bees themselves, not equipment manufacturers be their teachers.” In fact, she says in understated Ozark humor, “The only time I ever believed that I knew all there was to know about beekeeping was the first year that I was keeping them.”79
Hubbell’s book is a practical guide to beekeeping, but it is also a love story. She loves her bees, her community, and the Ozarks. In the end, her love is returned. She hears from an old sweetheart, and A Book of Bees ends, appropriately, with discussion of nuptial plans of the queen bee.
Similarly, Fannie Flagg’s Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe features an androgynous female bee charmer. The novel begins with Evelyn who, having been married to the same man for twenty years, has lost her zest for life. She wanders over to the Rose Terrace Nursing Home, where Mrs. Threadgoode’s stories about Idgie and Ruth mesmerize her.
Idgie and Ruth make up the second plot line, set in the early 1940s. These two women break every social rule determining feminine behavior in the rural South. A tomboy, Idgie, the bee charmer, works her best magic in the woods: “She very slowly tiptoed up to [the tree], humming very softly, and stuck her hand with the jar in it, right in the hole in the middle of the oak. In seconds, Idgie was covered from head to foot with thousands of bees…. By the time she had gotten back, almost all the bees had flown away and what had been a completely black figure was now Idgie, standing there, grinning from ear to ear with a jar of wild honey.”80 Idgie’s offering of wild honey shows her complete, unconditional love for Ruth. When Ruth is clearly enchanted by her friend’s courage, Idgie was “as happy as anybody who is in love in the summertime can be.” Idgie’s crush on her friend is not allowed to develop given the pressures in a small southern town. But when Ruth marries a ne’er-do-well who beats her, Idgie hatches a plot to save Ruth, and they open the famous Whistle Stop Cafe.
The bees play a minor role in this novel, but the movie had a powerful effect on women during the 1990s. With such stars as Jessica Tandy and Kathy Bates paired with relative newcomers Mary Stuart Masterson and Mary-Louise Parker, many marginalized feminine topics were in the spotlight: lesbianism, old age, segregation in religion, and obesity. Most important, however, is friendship.
Evelyn overcomes her own fears after hearing about Idgie’s hopes and disappointments. Finding herself drawn to a black worship service, Evelyn “felt joy. Real joy. It had been joy that she had seen in Mrs. Threadgoode’s eyes, but she hadn’t recognized it at the time. She knew she might never feel it again. But she had felt it once, and now she would never forget the sensation as long as she lived.”81 From this point forward, Evelyn takes control of her marriage, her body, and her attitude. But the scene that keeps this movie from being a stereotypical chick flick is Idgie’s role as a bee charmer. Her courage, her natural assimilation into nature—Idgie is capable of finding joy amidst the hardships of life. The scene that best pays tribute to her skill is the last one, in which a jar of honey is left by the dilapidated remains of the Whistle Stop Cafe.
Appalachian writer Sidney Saylor Farr adds her distinctive voice in More than Moonshine, which focuses on the Appalachian diet that she grew up on in the 1950s. In a book very similar to Jesse Stuart’s The Beatinest Boy, Farr recalls how people were able to determine ownership of wild bees during the early part of the twentieth century: “When any of the Saylor men found a bee tree they cut two parallel vertical slashes in the bark. This mark let anyone else … know that the Saylors had claimed this tree.82
A Kentuckian by birth, Jesse Stuart provides a remarkably different twist to the old bee hunting tales of the nineteenth century in a coming-of-age story, “Saving the Bees.” Three teenagers steal people’s bee gums or saw down bee trees that have been marked. “Saving the bees,” according to Big Aaron and his buddies, means releasing the bees: “It is a shame to coop bees in boxes and sawed-off logs and make them work their lives away for a lazy bunch of people. We won’t have it!”83
One by one, each farmer is singled out. The boys “save” fifty beehives from local farmers and set the hives out in the forest. The typical male posturing happens between the teenagers as they determine manliness by how heavy the bee gums are, how much courage they, as bee thieves, have, or how much ingenuity they have when parents and neighbors question them. The tiny Appalachian community is in uproar: an unwritten social code that protects bee trees has been violated. When one man says he doesn’t know what the world is coming to, his wife answers, “It ain’t comin’ … it’s goin’ … and to the Devil it’s goin’ fast. We ain’t had sicha thing happen for years.”84 A moonshiner takes the blame for stealing the beehives, and the teenagers are let off the hook.
In Robert Morgan’s poem, “Moving the Bees,” the Old World funeral tradition once again finds a place in the twentieth century. When the beekeeper in the poem dies, the protagonist goes to shift the hives. Death in this poem is not the gussied-up ceremony that funeral parlors have dictated that it should be. Rather, the beekeeper dies with a simple farewell, suggesting that the process of dying is nothing more than another small movement. The protagonist in the poem explains:
In January cold
or March wind or summer dark the gums
must be shifted an inch, a finger
width, from the place the keeper left,
them or the colonies would die
or swarm and leave.85
The bees are so sensitive that this movement registers the death, along with the passage of the seasons, the sun, and the dances. Far from a lonely passing, the old beekeeper takes one last breath, “and the universe was moved.” Morga
n plays with two different meanings of the word moved (the motion and the emotion) in the concluding line. But I think on a broader scale Morgan moved his audience back to a simpler time when death could be marked by a simple goodbye.
While the gospel group Sweet Honey in the Rock continued to become more popular in the 1980s, blues took a back seat to rock ‘n’ roll, except for a skinny Texas dude named Stevie Ray Vaughan. Vaughan, who grew up with blues legend Albert King as an influence, barreled out a primal version of “Honey Bee,” which had a lot in common with the blues players of old. Although the blues had been marginalized as a genre during the 1980s in favor of synthesized sounds, Vaughan bucked the tradition, going back to the southern black guitarists and the rural images they were surrounded by. In this peppy song, the protagonist in the song begs his “queen bee” for a kiss, “cause we just can’t miss.” Claiming that her gift is the ability to give him a buzz, Vaughan strolls off with a rollicking guitar solo, in effect creating that buzzing sound on his six-string. Rather than end the song with a tune going down the scale, Vaughan delicately plays up the scale, leading the song and the listener into an imaginative ending, where it is hoped the queen and her adoring drone fly off somewhere in the Texas cattle cradle. This song then ends like many blues songs in which, as Vaughan himself once described, “music used to be based on common everyday occurrences like the train sound going down the tracks, someone walking down the streets, a horse walking … that’s where these rhythms came from.”86
The beekeeper’s “blues” began in earnest with the arrival of the tracheal and varroa mites in the 1980s. However, in terms of cultural shifts, the nation reverted back to the honey bee, using it as a way to help people connect with nature, the past, and themselves. Perhaps no one did the honey bee better than Roxanne Quimby, who, with clever packaging and solid business principles, started Burt’s Bees in Maine in 1989. After approaching Burt Shavitz for beekeeping lessons, Quimby decided to apply her artistic talents and business skills to start her own cosmetics line. The result was a line of high-quality, bee-related products, often made from old American Bee Journal recipes, and a folksy package. “Little did she know that 14 years later,” writes Howard Scott, “she would be presiding over a $55 million dollar empire.”87
The 1990s
The plagues affecting bees in the 1990s created a crisis of epic proportions: varroa mites, tracheal mites, federal quarantines, African honey bees, import woes, and, last but not least, small hive beetle damages. Even El Niño created havoc. As honey bee populations were declining in the United States because of mites, domestic beekeepers were competing with foreign imports from Argentina, China, and Mexico. As if those two pressures were not enough, beekeepers finally had proof that bacteria causing American foulbrood had developed resistance to Terramycin. Integrated pest management, once an option, now became a requirement.
Globalization was the key concept in 1990s honey production. Compared with other agricultural industries, the beekeeping community always has been small. Whereas other farmers could hire cheaper migrant labor or buy newer labor-saving technology, beekeepers simply have not had those options. Beekeepers must train their workers to care for bees, and their skill and knowledge can have immediate implications. Furthermore, pollination has not been an industrial service the way that other agricultural services have become. “Very few contracts will ever get written in paper,” explains Eric Mussen. “Pollination is still very much a verbal agreement between an orchard grower and a beekeeper that often has developed over years.”88 So the beekeeping community in the United States became even smaller in the 1990s as older beekeepers retired, bees died in record numbers, and competition with other countries increased.
Furthermore, within this small community, sharp differences of opinion about how to approach problems of importing honey came to the surface in the early 1990s. Although domestic honey production was down because of the mites, the weather, and fewer beekeepers, many domestic beekeepers were upset with cheaper honey being imported into the country. Although there had always been splits in the beekeeping community, the question of honey tariffs solidified two distinct groups: the American Honey Producers Association and the American Beekeeping Federation.
The American Honey Producers Association represents the interests of domestic commercial beekeepers and backs price supports and tariffs. Yet this group could not possibly provide the honey needs of the country. It also could not serve the niche market created by raw honeys or varietal honeys. Yet its members wanted (and would still like) more oversight of honey being imported from China and Argentina.
The American Beekeeping Federation represents much of the industrial interests of beekeeping: the honey packers and importers, the queen and package producers, and a large number of commercial and sideline beekeepers. Although tariffs were proposed to keep imported honey out of the United States in order to support domestic beekeepers, the American Beekeeping Federation also recognized that some honey would have to be imported to meet the country’s needs.
As a government-sponsored marketing group, the National Honey Board (NHB) cannot lobby on the issue of tariffs. Instead, it promotes the use of honey through generic advertising and data for honey users, commercial honey producers, importers, packers, and the public. It also sponsors research projects to improve the use or increase the use of honey. The NHB sponsors round tables for the American Honey Producers Association and the American Beekeeping Federation, but it was not able to fund the legal research necessary to convince Congress to pass honey tariffs in the 1990s.
Migratory beekeeping continued to be the most profitable way for American beekeepers to make money in the 1990s. The wanderlust of migratory beekeeping was effectively captured in National Geographic. Writer Alan Mairson interviewed Joe Tweedy and Jeff Anderson. These men and their families used eighteen-wheelers loaded with a thousand hives as they migrated from California to Minnesota, following the crops and providing an “essential but unheralded” service to American agriculture.89
Before the almond industry, Mairson reports, farmers would rent their hives for $2 a hive. But because of new research showing how important pollination was to orchard growers, prices climbed. During the 1980s, rental fees climbed to $20 a hive during the lucrative almond season. In the 1990s, Tweedy and Anderson charged $32. With all the beekeepers combined in California during February and March, “The almond pollination bill could exceed 25 million dollars,” Mairson sums up.
Mairson’s article was popular for many reasons: good, clear charts explained how migratory beekeeping worked; photographs with stormy clouds and golden hives created attractive visuals; statistics showed how little money beekeepers earned; and perhaps above all, the article emphasized the beekeeping family and its passion for bees. Even though Joe Tweedy had been in the business for thirty years, for example, he and his wife did not have huge savings accounts in the 1990s. Although migratory beekeeping has changed since this article was written, Mairson’s emphasis on family remains true. Many commercial beekeepers were and remain family operations. If you want to save family farms, commercial beekeeper Richard Adee cautioned, save beekeepers, whose businesses are primarily family oriented.
After forty years of publicity and fanfare, the African bee made its way to Hidalgo, Texas, on October 15, 1990. Two members of the African Honey Bee Information Team—Evan Sugden and Kristina Williams—documented the day the African bee arrived, which started out like any other routine day of checking African honey bee detection trap lines.
“The sixteenth stop was made at a somewhat dismal spot, distinguished only by two trees on the south side of the road and an irrigation canal bending to the north. Recently disked cotton fields and mature sugarcane dominated the horizon, except for a distant band of dark green foliage marking the twisted course of the Rio Grande. One bait hive unit hung in a small mesquite, the other in a gangly huisache, or acacia.”90
Two field technicians intentionally disturbed these bait hives, wavin
g black suede-covered patches in front of the bees: “The two patches attract guard bees like so many iron filings impacting a powerful magnet.”91 The patches were later found to contain over a hundred stings. When these bees were confirmed to be African, scientists set in motion an entire sequence of information, quarantines, and media relations campaigns.
Comparing the African bee to the Italian and German bees first brought to America in the 1600s, bee historian Gene Kritsky suggests that the two movements were similar to each other in the way they move along the coasts: “In an interesting parallel,” Kritsky notes, “the initial spread of the honey bee in North America was also along the coast.” By the time the first colony of African bees had appeared, fortunately, much of the worst publicity had passed because the tracheal and varroa mites had been so destructive. Some states tried to impose quarantines, Texas and Arizona in particular, but Kritsky cautions, “If history teaches us anything, it is that the African honey bee will not be confined by human activities but rather by geographic, climatic, and biological factors.”92
Furthermore, Marla Spivak cautions that the African bee has been so stereotyped that there has yet to be a lot of research concerned with breeding those African colonies that are not as defensive as popularized by the media. “There is a lot of variation among colonies,” she notes.93
The efforts of earlier twentieth-century researchers were not in vain. Many researchers went back to the 1930s and 1940s genetic studies in disease resistance to begin to find ways of dealing with mite and chemical resistance. In 1997, for instance, several honey bee colonies with American foulbrood in Wisconsin did not respond to the chemical cure Terramycin, which had been so effective in curing the bacteria since the 1950s. The first reported cases were in small bee operations in the northern Midwestern states. But resistance was soon found in other large migratory beekeeping operations shortly thereafter. Resistance to Terramycin, then, encouraged small-time beekeepers to implement integrated pest management plans in an effort to contain the problems of pests and diseases.