The Beekeeper's Lament: How One Man and Half a Billion Honey Bees Help Feed America

by Hannah Nordhaus

  “This calling feels good,” says Miller. It used to feel better. There were, he says, three major revolutions that changed American beekeeping. The invention of the Langstroth hive was the first, making it possible to earn a living from beekeeping. Migratory beekeeping was the second, making it possible to run beehives as a modern business. The third, in 1987, was cataclysmic, and it rendered life among honey bees—already a trying assignment—even more difficult.

  Chapter Three

  The Tiny Leviathan

  THE FIRST TIME JOHN MILLER SAW THE DIMINUTIVE PEST that would loom large over the rest of his career was in the early 1990s. He doesn’t remember the year, but he remembers the week. It was in early April, and Miller’s crew had just broken the top off a robust hive teeming with healthy bees. One of his employees glanced at a drone cell that had been mangled when the hive top had been pried off, and noticed a small, reddish-brown creepy-crawly thing tucked inside.

  No one present had ever seen such a creature. They had seen pictures, though, and knew that the barely visible tick-like bug was something called a varroa mite, which had first been spotted in the United States in 1987. Its presence in this one hive boded ill in the extreme, not just for that particular colony, but for the entire Miller outfit. Everyone in the yard stopped their work and gathered, speechless, looking at the mite. Miller uttered a few choice cowboy words and ran around “in an autistic loop” for about an hour. Then he went out and bought some chemicals to kill the mites. They were the first pesticides he would ever use inside a hive.

  Later, he would receive two official letters. The first was from the North Dakota Department of Agriculture, explaining that a state bee inspector had found a varroa mite in one of his bee yards. The second, the following winter, came from Placer County, his home base in California, also proclaiming the reality of his infestation. Miller was lucky. Had a single mite been found in one of his hives just a few years before, the state of California would have insisted that he kill his entire outfit, poisoning each colony and burning the equipment in which his bees lived. But the state had given up on that, because it was expensive and because, although the policy had wiped out beekeepers left and right, it had done nothing to stanch the mite’s spread.

  The letters didn’t impart any earth-shattering news. Miller already knew he had mites. But the fact that the agriculture authorities—ostensibly impartial third parties—in two states had publicly declared him infested was, he says, “like a stain.” Miller was once a “prideful” beekeeper. Other people’s outfits might suffer from foulbrood and varroa mites, but Miller’s were always clean, well tended, expertly managed. He was, he says, in a “delusional state of self-righteousness”—under the acute misperception that he was too good a beekeeper to fall prey to such pitfalls as the varroa mite. But the mite didn’t distinguish between good and bad beekeepers. It infested every hive it encountered, riding on the backs of bees from failing hives to infect healthy ones. Although the mite, which is the size of the head of a pin, might be small enough to overlook if you weren’t terribly observant, its oversized effects were hard to ignore. “This varroa mite,” says Miller, “swaggers like a colossus across beekeeping in North America.”

  THE VARROA MITE IS A BLOODRED-TO-BROWN, TICK-SHAPED creature, about 1.8 millimeters long and 2 millimeters wide. It has eight legs, a hairy, shiny dark shell, and a sharp, two-pronged tongue designed to pierce a bee’s exoskeleton and suck its hemolymph—what serves as blood in bees, who don’t have circulatory systems, hearts, arteries, and veins as we understand them, but rather blood-like tissue that flows osmotically between body segments. The mites jump onto adult bees like fleas onto dogs, in an instant, and set up camp on the bees’ backs or between their abdominal plates, where they are nearly impossible to spot. A pregnant foundress makes the first foray into a colony. She rides into a hive on an unwitting adult bee and jumps into a cell destined to raise the incubating bees—the brood—that will become the hive’s next generation. She times it perfectly, burying herself in the bottom of the cell during the period of larval feeding, before the worker bees cap the cells with wax to allow the larvae to incubate. Once the brood cell is capped, it is impossible for either bees or humans to spot or smell a varroa mite. The only way to find one is to open the cell, which kills the baby bee.

  Ensconced now in the cell, the foundress hunkers down and lays four to six eggs—one male, the rest female—and after five to eight days the eggs hatch into juvenile mites, which feed on the hemolymph of the bee larvae and pupae. The mites mate, then emerge with the immature bee to colonize a new cell. Bees whose brood cells hosted mites often emerge damaged and ill, surviving only hours, rather than weeks. They suffer a variety of disabling defects—crumpled or disjointed wings, undeveloped glands, shortened abdomens, insufficient proteins, reduced sperm quality. They also weigh less than healthy bees, and fly less often. The sickest ones are quickly evicted from the hive, where they crawl helplessly at the base until they die. With all the disabling viruses mites bring along with them, even a single mite can cut an adult bee’s life span by as much as half. When mite populations grow, they sap the strength and vigor from entire hives.

  The varroa infestation is, cruelly, a malady of prosperity. The mite preys most effectively on colonies that are thriving. A beehive’s population peaks in the middle of July, when honey flows are at their strongest and a queen can lay thousands of eggs a day. Miller calculates that on July 16, a healthy colony may house almost 80,000 bees—which means his total population of bees, across all of his ten thousand hives, is approximately 776 million bees, “or half the number of rats in Manhattan.” That’s a lot of bees, and initially, the mite has little impact on a colony, because in spring and summer a hive’s ability to replenish population lost to age and roadkill is almost infinite, while each varroa mite can lay only four or five or six eggs every seventeen days.

  In August, however, queen bees begin laying fewer eggs as they prepare for the scarcity of winter, and as bee populations drop, the mite populations continue to grow—at this point, exponentially, thousands of mites each laying multiple eggs, now a mind-boggling rate of increase. The varroa population reaches its full strength in late fall, just as the bee population hits bottom. In winter, the population in any one hive drops to fewer than thirty-five thousand individuals—“or one-tenth the number of roaches in Manhattan,” Miller says. When these two elegant population curves—of bee and mite—intersect, a hive, even one that was brimming with honey and brood and worker bees in June and July, will falter. With fewer healthy workers available as summer turns to fall and winter, honey, pollen, and brood production decline, and the hive becomes more vulnerable to starvation, predation, disease, and ultimate collapse. When the varroa mite population overwhelms the ability of a hive to recover, the colony “crashes.”

  The varroa mites, meanwhile, move on, riding into new colonies with drifting or robbing or absconding bees. Then they begin reproducing all over again, one pregnant foundress turning into many, to similar calamitous effect, creating a ripple effect of crashing hives, crashing bee yards, and all too often, crashing beekeeping operations. Since 1987, the mite has been the major cause of honey bee mortality across the United States. The nation’s CCD losses pose no comparison. In Miller’s grandfather’s day, a beekeeper’s major problem was American foulbrood infection, spread when beekeepers moved frames between hives and hives between apiaries. But the varroa mite moves from hive to hive on its own, at a speed that has confounded beekeepers’ ability to react to it. “This is going to be the challenge of my career, there is no question about that,” writes Miller. “My grandfather never heard of it; my dad was barely aware of it; it occupies much of my problem-solving time.”

  Varroa destructor is the official name.

  Varroa works just fine for me.

  Given its eerie resemblance to a garden variety tick,

  deer tick, goddamn tick, Lyme Disease tick,

  I often lapse into “tick” mode
.

  Call the thing whatever you want, it is a plague.

  The varroa mite’s disastrous appearance in American hives was presaged by the arrival of another parasitic affliction. The tracheal mite—a microscopic parasite that lodges in bees’ breathing tubes and interferes with their respiration—was found in the United States three years earlier. Unlike the varroa mite, which is hard to miss once you’ve suffered an infestation, the tracheal mite is impossible to spot with the naked eye. To see it, a beekeeper—or more likely, an entomologist or bee inspector—must dissect a bee, extract its trachea, immerse it in a solution that liquefies the tracheal tissue but leaves the mite intact, then smear the remaining matter on a glass plate and view it under a microscope. Tracheal mites also shorten a bee’s life, curtail its flights, and can ultimately undermine the health of the entire colony. First detected in Texas in 1984, they spread rapidly across the country.

  A couple of years later, Miller was in the bathroom of the Peacock Alley bar in the old Patterson Hotel in Bismarck, North Dakota, during a beekeeping conference, when he ran into a Florida beekeeper he knew. The Florida beekeeper was based in West Palm Beach. He hauled his bees up the East Coast to pollinate the blueberries of Maine, then headed west, arriving in Steele, North Dakota—about an hour from Miller’s summer base in Gackle—around July 20. This late date coincided with the fading of the summer’s major clover and alfalfa blooms, which didn’t seem a viable business model to Miller—but the Florida beekeeper was nonetheless flush with cash and fast cars and big boats and airplanes. He would arrive at beekeeping conventions in beautiful sports cars with beautiful women, parking in front of the hotel so everyone could watch. “Bee guys,” Miller says, “didn’t know how to cope with this.” It was perplexingly un-bee-guy-like behavior. The guy’s riches, Miller later learned, derived not from his bees—of course not—but from bales of marijuana he would transport up and down the East Coast along with the bees. Garden-variety drug enforcement officers had neither the equipment nor the gumption to search among and inside active beehives for contraband. Someone finally caught him, though, and he ended up in the Dade County lockup. But before he did, he’d brought a truckload of bees infested with tracheal mites from Florida to North Dakota, where the mites had not yet been found.

  When Miller ran into the Florida beekeeper in the bathroom of the Patterson Hotel, he didn’t ask him about his cars or his women, although, since this was before the arrest, Miller certainly would have liked to learn how a man could live like a rock star off the fruit of his bees. Instead, he asked him about a rumor he’d heard in the halls. Was it true? Did his bees have tracheal mites? “He turned to me and said if I were you I’d get my bees the hell out of North Dakota,” Miller recalls. The state of California had embarked on a campaign to stave off the mite, destroying outfits in which mites had been detected and closing state borders to hives from states where tracheal mites had been confirmed. The Florida beekeeper knew that North Dakota would soon be on that list. Miller called his father that day and convinced him to move the entire outfit to the company’s then home base in Idaho, where tracheal mites had not yet been detected. Other beekeepers were not so lucky; California soon closed its border to North Dakota bees, forcing migratory beekeepers who usually overwintered in California to tough it out instead on the frigid northern plains. The harsh winters, combined with back-to-back droughts the following two summers, spelled the end of a number of once-thriving beekeeping businesses.

  The frantic border closures and hive destruction did nothing to prevent the spread of the tracheal mites. They proliferated rapidly, hopping from hive to hive and state to state, eventually colonizing the entire continent. The mites killed colonies everywhere and wreaked havoc on the entire interstate beekeeping industry. And then they didn’t anymore. Over the years, as the colonies that were most susceptible died off, American bees appeared to develop a genetic resistance. Today, beekeepers and bee inspectors rarely test for tracheal mites—there are so many worse things to worry about. But in the mid-1980s, the beekeeping industry was in a genuine panic as it struggled with a new pest that could gain purchase so quickly in a world of increasingly fluid natural borders. Migratory beekeepers had allowed a whole host of migratory problems to hitchhike along with their bees.

  The dread would only escalate when, at 10:30 a.m. on September 25, 1987 (a time so precise it could only come from the memory of a beekeeper), an apiarist named Gary Oreskovic spotted a strange insect the color of dried blood riding on the back of one of his bees. He looked again to make sure, then called a neighbor, David Miksa, to come see whether it was, in fact, a varroa mite, as Oreskovic feared. Miksa was a queen-breeder of Croatian descent who had attended a beekeeping meeting in Budapest in 1983 and, while there, had toured central Europe to visit cousins and bee operations. In the 1970s, the varroa mite, which originated in Asia, had swept through the Soviet bloc countries, sequentially wiping out the bee industries in Romania, Bulgaria, and Yugoslavia before blowing through the rest of Europe. Miksa’s cousins were among those who lost most of their hives, and it was in their apiaries that he saw his first varroa mites: “I counted twenty-one mites on one bee in Zagreb,” he says. He realized instantly that they wouldn’t be his last. If the Iron Curtain couldn’t stop the parasite, there wasn’t much that would. Four years later, on a September day in Wisconsin, Miksa confirmed that Oreskovic’s novel pests were, indeed, the first wave of varroa mites in North America. Oreskovic destroyed nineteen of his 1,800 hives and sent a sample to the U.S. Department of Agriculture laboratories in Beltsville, Maryland. The lab verified the infestation.

  No one knows exactly how the varroa mite first arrived on U.S. shores. Mite-infested bees could not have flown on their own from varroa-affected areas, even those in South America, where the mite had been found in the 1970s. Those places were beyond the reach of even the most determined swarm. Most beekeepers and scientists believe the varroa mite entered the United States not through Wisconsin, but through Florida, where most of beekeeping’s scourges seem to originate. Oreskovic and his neighbor Miksa both took their bees to Florida in the winter to pollinate citrus, bell pepper, and watermelon crops, and the hives on which Oreskovic first detected the mites had all been stocked with bees he had bought in central Florida.

  Bee importation has been illegal in the United States since 1922, and the speculation is that the mite arrived either on a swarm that had taken refuge on a boat that docked in Florida or on an airplane. Miksa heard rumors that swarms had emerged from Drug Enforcement Administration planes flying between Florida and South America. Or perhaps they disembarked with beekeepers sneaking in queens from another country, a practice called “pocket importation,” because the smuggler literally hides the queen in a cage in his pocket or carry-on luggage. Not that it mattered: the mite had arrived, by whatever means, and by the time it was detected in Wisconsin, it had already spread extensively through Florida. By January 14, 1988, the Florida Department of Agriculture reported eight thousand infested hives in the state.

  Once the presence of the mites was confirmed, the Federal Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service swung into action, receiving emergency certification from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency for beekeepers to use fluvalinate, an insecticide that had proven effective against varroa mite in Europe and had been rapidly approved for sale in the States under the trade name of Apistan. When Miller found his first varroa mite, he quickly ran out to buy several thousand Apistan strips, flexible plastic sticks coated with low doses of the miticide. He placed them in his hives, and “they worked like a charm,” he recalls. At the same time, major beekeeping states like California moved to prevent varroa-infested hives from passing their borders. The Canadian government closed its borders to American bees and to queen breeders, who had previously done a booming business in Canada. Such quarantines did nothing to stop the spread of the pest, however. Swarms from infested hives had no regard for state lines or state laws, and worker bees plied the path
s to their chosen blossoms from state to state. Many beekeepers, likewise, traveled their usual migration routes, evading quarantines by driving at night and on back roads.

  It took two to three years from the time the first varroa mite was spotted until the nation’s first bee colonies started to experience difficulty. It took another couple of years until the mite, aided by large-scale migratory operations, had blanketed the country, jumping from hive to hive with alarming rapidity. During the first wave of infestation, the varroa mite killed nearly every single one of the continent’s feral colonies, obliterating the wild bees that once did much of the work pollinating the nation’s crops and flowers. Today, only an estimated 2 percent of the pre-1987 feral bee population remains, and those hives are most likely recently escaped swarms from beekeeping operations, not survivors of the varroa apocalypse. Because of the varroa mite, wild honey bees are now, for all practical purposes, extinct in the United States. If a bee guy doesn’t take care of his hive, it will be dead in less than two years; if a hive doesn’t have a bee guy to look after it, the chances of its survival are close to nil. Well-kept colonies like Miller’s escaped major damage only because of extreme vigilance and regular Apistan applications.

  THE VARROA MITE WAS FIRST IDENTIFIED IN Indonesia in 1904, when a naturalist named Edward Jacobson found a smattering of reddish brown mites in a colony of indigenous Asian Apis cerana honey bees on the island of Java. He sent them to the Leiden museum in Holland, where the Dutch biologist A. C. Oudemans determined that the insect belonged to a previously unidentified arachnid species. Oudemans gave it the taxonomic name Varroa jacobsoni, after its discoverer. It turned out that the parasites were endemic throughout Asia and did little damage to Asian bees, having coevolved over millions of years. The Asian bees had developed a natural defense, detecting mites on adult bees and in capped cells and ejecting them. So for another century after Jacobson’s discovery, no one bothered to take a deeper look.