Bees in America

by Tammy Horn

  Yet once we get into the fields, the Miller crew is as about as individualized as the orchards are systematized. There’s nineteen-year-old Mike Asher, who’s filling feeders with sugar water from a large tank as casually as if he were watering flowers. There’s Layne, a former CEO transitioning into another career. There’s Jay, with six daughters, who welcomes me into the crew by reminding me that he is the better looking, smarter, and nicer brother of the family. John—well, he’s busy checking the numbers.

  Each bee colony is refreshingly different too. One colony needs more sugar, one has mites—no, make that two colonies. Mike calls from a couple of hives over, “This hive has varroa too.” I have never seen varroa mites, but the men take time to show me the red specks, almost like drops of blood, on the bees. And I see the damage too: the deformed wings, the slower pace of the bees, the undeveloped workers. The men confer about the next steps: Perhaps we need to do some tests. Let’s try some sugar. Okay, let’s mark these and finish feeding. These steps are part of a normal day. And when Eric Mussen estimated the value of those days in 2002, he concluded that John, Jay, and Layne Miller and other beekeepers in California “earned $52 million in honey and beeswax, nearly $62 million renting colonies for crop pollination, and $5.5 million selling queens and bulk bees to other beekeepers. Furthermore, the value of the crops grown in California that were pollinated by honey bees was $4,353,460,249.” An amount that he says, “eclipses the $126,651,220 total gross earnings of all beekeepers.2

  Apitourism—tourists that visit other bee yards—has a good future, especially as more novices join the ranks and the beekeeping conferences continue to draw crowds. In surroundings such as Hawaii and California, apitourism can appeal to an emerging niche market in ecotourism. Apitourism also defines a new direction for beekeepers in other equally exotic places in the varied American landscape: the Rio Grande, the Appalachians, the Plains, the East Coast. American beekeepers have always been travelers, and this aspect of the industry acknowledges the insatiable curiosity beekeepers have when visiting other colonies.

  Bees in an Electronic Countryside

  If I may tinker with Steven Stoll’s thesis, America has become the electronic countryside, and beekeepers are very much at the heart of this shift. Information about bees is now digital—DNA nucleotide sequence, research, information, e-mail, and Cornell University’s digital bee library.

  Apitourist that I am, I have great difficulty remembering that honey bees are being used to detect bombs and chemical weapon. Yet this research represents the latest development in honey bees. The Defense Department’s Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) had been conducting tests in which honey bees were used to track land mines in Afghanistan. Because honey bees can pick up trace amounts of chemicals in the flying zones, they are good indicators of major changes in the terrain.

  Honey bees also can be trained to fly to certain scents. According to journalist Andrew Revkin, “Scientists working for the Pentagon have trained ordinary honey bees to ignore flowers and home in on minute traces of explosives, a preliminary step toward creating a detection system that could be used to find truck bombs, land mines and other hidden explosives.”3 Alan Rudolph states, “even relatively simple organisms can boast sophisticated abilities to sense their environments and move about in them.”4

  This project is in its early stages, but according to Rudolph, “over the past eight months, researchers have mimicked land mines’ ‘smell’ in the field. The bees’ ability to locate targets is impressive.” Bee researcher Jerry Bromenshenk provides further analysis of bees’ olfactory senses. The Bee Alert team, stationed at the University of Montana, has concluded that bees can be trained to use their olfactory senses to detect chemicals with little or no reward such as sugar or honey. In other words, bees can be trained to explore for certain scents if done very early, before they link sight with taste.

  There are downsides to the project. Honey bees have time constraints: “Bees, like dogs, have limitations,” writes Revkin; “they do not work at night or in inclement weather.” Furthermore, when the World Trade Center was bombed on September 11, 2001, the entire project was suspended because the Defense Department underwent radical infrastructure changes.

  There is, within the commercial beekeeping community, this phrase: “the unknown transfer of ownership of hives.” Theft has such negative overtones. However, it does happen, although especially in the California desert, hiding such a “transfer” is difficult, and generally, a commercial beekeeper can “transfer” the hives back to the business. In other areas, many beekeepers can lose their hives and never recoup their losses.

  So Jerry Bromenshenk and Bee Alert are exploring the possibility of electronic hives. The concept is very similar to the branding of hives, except that electronic tools are used. If an electronic bar-coded tag is registered with the local authorities and then placed into the hive, local authorities can trace hives by doing a simple scan, as happens at many grocery stores. Migratory beekeepers take care of their hives by using computers to see which hives need immediate assistance or which ones have been stolen or vandalized. With this technology, beekeepers can monitor many hives from their homes. In this regard, migratory beekeeping may become—dare we say it?—less migratory.

  Speaking of electronics, the Internet has provided many opportunities to educate, connect, market, and communicate. Some bee journals are now available online. Information about conferences is at fingertips. Extension specialists are available via e-mail as well as by phone. And communities that previously shunned contact with the secular world, such as Trappist monks, have an avenue to market their products while staying true to their monastic codes. Libraries have gone digital, providing many of this industry’s foundation texts online.

  In addition, researchers Dr. Sunil Nakrani and Craig Tovey are just beginning research that compares the similarities between honey bee dances and electronic networks. At first glance, one may miss the link between two such different fields. But, just as forager bees communicate information about floral sources to other bees, so too do Internet servers communicate information to customers.

  Put simply, if all forager bees spent too much time tracing poor sources of nectar, the entire colony would suffer. Hence, the bees have adapted the waggle dance, which clearly communicates the quality and distance of the food source. The longer the dance in the bee world, the poorer the food source in terms of quality: “A nectar-collecting bee judges how good its flower patch is … by seeing how long it takes to find an unemployed food-storer bee. If it takes ages, then the forager concludes that the patch is nothing special…. But, if there is a plethora of food-storer bees, then the forager realizes that it has struck lucky.”5

  Similarly, the longer a customer waits for information on the Internet, the more one pays in time and money. So, in order to increase the efficiency of computer servers, Nakrani and Tovey have adapted algorithms to measure the similar difficulties between the bee dances and electronic servers to see if there are ways that computer programs can eliminate long searches. It seems that Americans continue to learn how to be more efficient from honey bees, even when it comes to computers!

  The Honey Bee Genome Project may affect how beekeepers can work with African bees and treat their bees for destructive diseases such as foulbrood and mites. The project began with a desire to help advance multiple fields, such as molecular biology, biomedicine, and agriculture. Knowledge of the genome may help breed bees that are more resistant to varroa, may help researchers develop gentler strains of African bees, and may help those allergic to bee stings. Because the infrastructure for studying the human genome project was already in place, Dr. Gene Robinson was able to pursue his goals rapidly. The U.S. Department of Agriculture teamed up with the National Human Genome Research Institute to donate $7 million to the project. Although the project was only approved in 2002, it was completed at Baylor University in 2003. Having such a sequence, Robinson explained in an interview, is a “ticket to tw
enty first century technology. It does not provide a cure to the problems of beekeeping, but it does provide a foundation to address these issues from a new way.”6

  Ecological studies are teaching us more about the relationship between bees and plants in the Southwest. A big discovery in 2001 was that mistletoe, long respected for its powers to encourage romance, may be a food for bees in the Southwest. “The plant is a parasite that attaches itself to trees. But when researchers recently looked at areas where mistletoe had run amok,” reports Seth Borenstein, “they found increased populations of bees and birds that feed on the plant’s whitish berries.”7 In fact, mistletoe blooms in the Southwest in February, a season in which there are very few pollen-producing plants in bloom. “Mistletoe has more of a role than we might imagine in our ecosystem,” said USDA bee researcher Eric Erickson, in Tucson, Arizona.8

  Migratory Patterns in the New Millennium

  Although it is too soon to tell how the African honey bee (AHB) will affect the major pollination centers such as California and Florida, researchers have been surprised at how slowly and contained the African bees have been since they arrived in Hidalgo, Texas. Experts had predicted that African honey bees would have spread across the southern region of the United States. However, as of 2004, the bees are in southern California, Arizona, New Mexico, Nevada, Oklahoma, Kansas, and Texas as well as Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands. The other southern states—Louisiana, Alabama, Mississippi, and Florida—seem to have a natural barrier caused by humidity, states USDA entomologist Jose D. Villa in an article written by Kim Kaplan: “What immediately jumped out at me was the correlation in rainfall,” Villa explains. “Rainfall over 55 inches, distributed evenly throughout the year, is almost a complete barrier to the AHB spread.”9 However, Villa does not know exactly why rainfall might be limiting AHB dispersal. Perhaps the best approach in dealing with the mystery of the African honey bees is Spivak’s lesson when she was working in Peru and Costa Rica. “The Latin American counties know how to take it as it comes.”10

  As the Latin American countries have discovered, beekeeping will not be the same. Marla Spivak explains that beekeepers will need to leave more space between hives and approach hives without provoking the insects; researchers need to consider more genetic breeding of the gentler strains; and civilians and hobbyists will need to invest in protective gear. Bee Culture editor Kim Flottum estimates that more hobby beekeepers will leave the bees to commercial beekeepers. On the other hand, a side benefit of African bees is that people are organizing conventions, learning about the bees, and preparing for the species well in advance of the swarms.

  Quarantines mandate that beekeepers may enter a quarantined zone, but once in, they must keep their bees in that place—or try to. Bees often swarm, though, so the quarantines can prove ineffective, although they slow advances of threats such as mites or African bees. The quarantine in Texas, designed to slow the African honey bees’ advance, is on a county-by-county basis, which beekeepers respect, but African bees don’t. However, beekeepers confined to a quarantined zone rich in nectar and pollen stand to make handsome gains in terms of pollination fees, if their bees are healthy.

  Or losses, if one looks at the counterargument. One lesson about the North Dakota quarantine of 1986 is clear: beekeepers have gone bankrupt because of decisions made by uninformed politicians. North Dakota winters aren’t conducive to large commercial operations left stranded. There is worry that the quarantines will reduce the hobbyists. If hobbyists decline in number, the pool of experienced people who can handle a bee-related emergency is substantially reduced. If a truck were to overturn in Medina, Ohio, Kim Flottum has a list of hobbyists he can organize to respond to such an emergency. But if the quarantines stay in effect, Flottum predicts, the number of people with equipment and expertise to handle bees will drop substantially.11

  Beekeepers continue the centuries-old pattern of immigration and emigration, bringing knowledge about other species and skills from other continents. A case in point: Robin Mountain, a second-generation beekeeper, first began working with African bees in Pretoria, South Africa. When he immigrated to California, he worked in the commercial queen and package bee industry in California and Texas. He brings to the Ohio Valley a combination of extension work and genetic research. While organizing a portable extracting unit in conjunction with Kelley’s Bee Supply, Mountain and his family are training a new group of queen producers in the Kentucky region. The dual nature of his work has one purpose: “We’re trying to create a farming industry,” he explained to Jason Simpson of the Leitchfield Record.12 Kentucky is a far cry from the industrial countryside that is California, but for now, beekeeping cooperatives can rent the portable extracting unit for affordable prices. For the first time, Appalachian beekeepers have access to equipment they wouldn’t ordinarily have.

  Mountain also encourages beekeepers to rear their own queens selected for the unique regions in the Ohio Valley. In “Rearing Your Own Kentucky Queen,” Mountain explains that “probably the most important reason beekeepers leave the specialization of queens to a specialist is that the specialist can produce them at less expense than could other beekeepers.”13 They have the equipment, a labor force, and established shipping lines. As part of his extension work, Mountain teaches beekeepers that they no longer have to accept this set of circumstances. If beekeepers want to develop a bee adapted to winters or with more disease resistance, or even with a gentler temperament, they can. This possibility is exciting for beekeepers who have always depended on the queen and package bee businesses located in the West or the South. It remains to be seen how Mountain’s commercial expertise will affect this region, but it is one small example of how important extension work has become in this century.

  One group that stands in stark contrast to the migratory beekeepers is the Amish, who have been beekeepers since they first set foot on this continent. The four inventions from the nineteenth century still serve their needs just fine. Rather than upgrade to powered extractors, they still use hand-cranked versions. “They keep their hives clean,” explains former bee inspector Stephen Henderson. “They don’t engage in migratory travel, so they don’t run the same risks of bee diseases.”14

  That’s just it. When the commercial beekeepers chose to follow the bloom in the 1900s, they were following an American value system that rewards efficiency and ingenuity. The industrial countryside had not counted on the varroa and tracheal mites in the 1980s, but it does seem as if the beekeeping industry is working with scientists to develop ways that bees can protect themselves. Marla Spivak speaks with great conviction regarding her research: “My purpose was not to create a new line [of honey bees]. It saddens me that a hive cannot protect itself. My primary goal is to wean bees and beekeepers off chemicals.”15

  The Amish choose not to follow the bloom. In so doing, they sidestep many issues facing beekeepers: no federal quarantines, state and federal inspections, machines. To quote Steven Stoll, “The Amish hold these values above all others: anything that undermines their ability to cohere as a community of neighbors and linked families, anything that isolates them in their work or places production for profit ahead of the collective process, is prohibited.”16

  Although some use chemicals and gas-powered air compressors to operate extractors, the Amish tend to be affected by common problems a little differently than others, perhaps a little later, perhaps using a different type of cure. For instance, mites and diseases spread rapidly because of interstate travel, but the Amish tended to be affected later than everyone else. But this doesn’t make them throwbacks to the nineteenth century. Conversely, they have a vested interest in the new studies regarding hygienic behavior, suppressing mite resistance, and developing queens suited for their particular regions. Stoll argues that the Amish, by maintaining a sustainable system of agriculture from the 1820s, “represents an alternative—a progressive occupancy of land for the twenty-first century.”

  In a land not unified by language, religi
on, or political party, the honey bee still serves as a metaphor for stability and social order in America. The Utah State Capitol has kept the 1980 Grand Beehive exhibit on permanent display. Newspapers have incorporated the hive into featured drawings.17 Television commercials have continued to use bees to market everything from insurance to honey. Even though beekeeper Allen Cosnow wrote in a letter to the American Bee Journal in 2003 that he’d like to see the skep eliminated, the chances of that happening in the near future do not seem likely.18

  Although the number of minority beekeepers remains very small in the nation, Sue Monk Kidd’s The Secret Life of Bees explores in a fictional narrative three black women who were beekeepers during the 1960s. In the novel, three black beekeepers—May, June, and August—take in a young girl named Lily Owens and her black caretaker, Rosaleen. The black beekeepers market their honey using a black Madonna. It is this image to which Lily, abandoned by her mother, is instinctively drawn. When asked about her unusual label, August replies, “Everybody needs a God who looks like them.”19

  An adolescent, Lily is trying to figure out her troubled past, but more to the point, she’s trying to figure out how to live in the future. By the end of the novel, Lily sees that a “cluster of beehives is the eighth wonder of the world.” “From a distance,” Kidd writes, “it will look like a big painting you might see in a museum, but museums can’t capture the sound. Fifty feet away, you will hear it, a humming that sounds like it came from another planet…. Your head will say don’t go any further, but your heart will send you straight into the hum, where you will be swallowed by it. You will stand there and think, I am in the center of the universe, where everything is sung to life.”20