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

by Hannah Nordhaus

  Schmidt has opinions about which body parts hurt most. The under-eye, he notes, is “going to floor you,” as is anywhere on the cartilaginous part of the nose. The upper lip, too, will engender “immense amounts of undue grief.” The scalp, Schmidt says, is “weird. It makes a hard little knot which is very annoying for a while because the tissue up there can’t expand.” Miller swears that if you get stung on the scalp, you’ll feel a phantom pain on the bottom of your foot.

  I had opportunity to test that hypothesis. Two days after my first sting, my eye still swollen near shut, it happened again. Bees are angry when their hives are being divided; after I watched Miller’s employees split some hives to create new profit centers for the coming summer, I drove a couple of hundred yards uphill to his office and took off my veil—safely removed, I thought, from the chaos of displaced bees. But when I got out of the car, a bee flew straight into my hair, struggled for a few seconds, and dug into my scalp. Whabang! I pulled on my veil, but another bee was inside it. That one got caught in my hair as well. And that was it. I threw my veil and gloves and notebook and pen and digital voice recorder to the ground and began flapping my arms and running in circles. This is, apparently, normal. “We have these innate reactions that are almost impossible to overcome,” says Schmidt, especially when it hasn’t happened to us often. Bees appear to know that: “They seem,” wrote Langstroth, “to take malicious pleasure in stinging those upon whom their poison produces the most virulent effect.” Experts, such as venomous insect specialists and beekeepers, react in a less frenzied manner, a response bred by long experience and peer pressure to prove that “you can get stung and don’t show it,” Schmidt says. “The only thing that sort of works is a whole lot of training. You know what you’re supposed to do and do it.”

  “Ineffective flapping” and running in circles is, of course, not what you’re supposed to do; it only attracts more bees. Better to run in a straight line away from the offending insects. “Most people like to flap and scream and duck and run, but that doesn’t get the bee out of your hair,” he says. The absolute dumbest thing you can do is jump in a body of water, because the bees just wait for you to emerge and then sting your nose and mouth, which makes it harder to hold your breath underwater. The smartest thing is to get inside, away from the bees. That’s not what I did. I kept running in circles until one of Miller’s employees led me inside to the office and removed the bees from my hair, along with a stinger and a three-inch-long string of bee intestine that was attached to my scalp. Perhaps I felt it on the bottom of my foot; I was too sweaty and agitated to notice. What is certain is that I felt on my scalp a tight, not remotely fruity pain that throbbed down my forehead and sinuses. From my description of this experience over the telephone, Schmidt correctly conjectured that my hair must be dark—bees go for dark-colored things because their main predators, such as bears, skunks, and honey badgers, are also dark. “Anemic” light-haired people from northern Europe, like him, have that advantage over their darker brethren. He also deduced that my hair was curly—bees get stuck more easily, and even if they hadn’t planned to sting initially, they often end up doing so. He assured me that the main problem with having bees in your hair is the anticipation of what those bees are going to do to you. I thought the sting was pretty unpleasant, too. And humiliating: I had shrieked like a toddler. Perhaps I wasn’t cut out for beekeeping.

  Bees make honey. They pollinate one third of our fruits and vegetables. And they will happily give their lives to cause you pain. I once read a particularly memorable newspaper account of two French horses that were attacked by bees left behind when their hives were moved. The three-year-old gelding and eighteen-month-old filly were covered in a thick layer of bees—witnesses estimated there were more than sixty thousand bees swarming their paddocks. The horses received thousands of stings all over their bodies. The veterinarian tasked with saving them put on a beekeeper’s suit and soaked the horses with fly spray to kill and repel the bees that continued to attack. Both horses were administered “massive doses” of cortisone along with fifteen different antihistamines, sedatives, and morphine. Nonetheless, the filly died of asphyxiation eighteen hours later; the gelding of intestinal necrosis ten hours after that. (The bees that had stung them died, too, of course.) Starry-eyed bee worshippers can say what they will; honey bees are not always forces of beneficence.

  SOMETIMES BEES GO WHERE YOU DON’T WANT THEM TO GO. For all the talk of how important pollination is to the survival of humankind and the agriculture industry, there are some plants people would prefer that bees not pollinate. Blackberry and star thistle, for instance, make fabulous honey but aggressively send out creepers or windblown spores. They invade farms, destroy pasture, and spread across the landscape like . . . well, like weeds.

  Farmers would also rather that bees not visit certain citrus groves. This is a recent development. Oranges and bees were once a symbiotic dream team. The bees made the oranges taste and look better: sweet and juicy and big and symmetrical. The nectar kept the bees alive in early spring and helped them create what many in the industry consider some of the best honey around. But in April 2006, beekeepers in the southern San Joaquin Valley received a disturbing letter from a lawyer representing a huge agricultural firm called Paramount Citrus. Paramount is the largest citrus producer in California, a subsidiary of Los Angeles–based Roll International Corporation, which is run by Stewart and Lynda Resnick. The Resnicks made their estimated $1.5 billion fortune with the Teleflora flower-delivery service and the Franklin Mint collectibles company. They own the cleverly marketed Fiji Water and POM Wonderful brands; they control the Kern Water Bank, one of the largest underground reservoirs in the nation. They have mansions in Beverly Hills and Aspen and serve on the boards of prominent museums across the country. They are generous philanthropists, well-known liberal donors, and Hollywood favorites, perhaps the most formidable couple in California.

  In the 1980s and ’90s, flush with cash from Teleflora and Franklin Mint, they purchased large almond, pistachio, pomegranate, and citrus holdings in the Central Valley. They did so at exactly the right time, acquiring 120,000 quality acres at bargain prices from oil and insurance companies hit by a downturn in the 1980s. The acreage included that of a company called Paramount Citrus, a name they used for all the citrus acreage they subsequently acquired. In 2000, Paramount replaced many of its navels and Valencias with seedless tangerines, also known as clementine mandarins. Paramount was not alone: as consumer tastes shifted toward less messy seedless fruit, California mandarin plantings grew from 10,000 acres in 1998 to 31,000 in 2008. Seedless varieties, with their intense flavor and ease of peeling, typically fetch three to four times the market price of other varieties.

  But only if they don’t have seeds. Until recently, clementines wouldn’t grow unless they were cross-pollinated with another tree, and the process of cross-pollination created seeds. But in the 1980s and ’90s Spanish orchards developed a technique to simulate the growth hormones secreted by seeds. Farmers using the hormones could obtain an excellent harvest without relying on pollination. The seedless fruit that resulted quickly captured a large share of the high-end citrus market, commanding huge premiums and producing jaw-dropping profits. It seems that Americans will pay lots of extra money to avoid having to spit out the seeds in their fruit.

  People in the business of selling things enjoy jaw-dropping profits, and California citrus growers rushed to plant their orchards with similar varieties. The two most popular were the seedless Clementine nules—the classic thin-skinned clementine—and W. Murcott Afourer, another seedless, flavorful, and easy-to-peel mandarin that ripened later than clementines and thus extended the growing season for California producers. But the trees had a bee problem. If bees made a trip to a clementine or Murcott blossom while brushed with the pollen of another citrus variety, the fruit would explode in a riot of seeds, ruining the farmer’s crop. To prevent cross-pollination, growers consulted with South African citrus experts, wh
o recommended that they plant the varieties at least ten rows—or about a third of a mile—away from other types of citrus. On their advice, growers invested millions of dollars to plant thousands of trees on orchards across the southern swath of the Central Valley, carefully isolating the clementines and Murcotts ten rows away from other citrus trees.

  Unfortunately, that wasn’t enough. In 2003, Sun Pacific—one of the earliest growers to plant mandarins in the Central Valley and a partner, with Paramount, in a joint venture to sell and market clementines and Murcotts under the California “Cuties” brand—found significant seeds in some of its plantings. The fruit had to be sold for juice at a deeply discounted price. The buffer zone, it turned out, was about six times too small. The South African experts had believed that the ten-row buffer was sufficient because bees tend to return to the same small area each time they leave the hive. It’s true, bees stay “constant” to one plant in one area. But bees also transfer pollen from worker to worker inside the hives. And if a bee that had visited a clementine tree rubbed against a bee that had visited a different type of citrus blossom, then returned to the clementines for another nip, it would effectively poison the flower, creating a seedy fruit that was worthless on the premium citrus market. So the proper buffer was in fact two miles. This presented a problem for growers who had staked big money on seedless fruit trees. Either the trees or the bees had to move. Because bees are easier to move than trees, Sun Pacific asked beekeepers in Maricopa, where most of the company’s seedless mandarin trees had been planted, to clear the area of bees within two miles of their plantings. As recompense, the company found the beekeepers new locations on Sun Pacific’s holdings in the main citrus-growing area farther north. They effectively emptied the area of bees in what Joe Traynor, a Bakersfield-based bee broker who represented some of the beekeepers in their dealings with Sun Pacific, came to call a honey bee “cleansing.”

  In 2006, Paramount Citrus encountered the same problem and attempted a similar cleansing. They sent beekeepers near Paramount’s mandarin groves a letter explaining that their bees were “trespassing” on Paramount’s clementine crop and should move their hives a minimum of two miles away. Should the beekeepers resist, Paramount threatened to seek compensation for “any and all damages caused to its crops as well as punitive damages.” Paramount offered alternative bee yards, as Sun Pacific had, but there simply weren’t enough good locations to absorb all the displaced bees. Creating a two-mile bee-free zone around the eight sites Paramount sought to protect meant clearing about seventy thousand acres of prime citrus-belt territory of bees. Pollination had become a crime, as had the mere existence of bees in a large swath of the Central Valley.

  Unlike almonds, most orange trees do not need bees—they can pollinate themselves, and for that reason, bee guys who place their hives in citrus orchards typically pay the growers a couple of dollars a colony (or a few cases of highly coveted orange blossom honey) for the privilege. Now some beekeepers who had kept their bees on nearby properties for decades were being kicked off their longtime yards, lest the landowners feel the wrath of Paramount’s considerable—paramount—power.

  The California citrus belt, the very place where N. E. Miller first wintered his bees, was no longer a friendly place for beekeepers. Paramount began pushing a “Seedless Mandarin Protection Act” in the state legislature, seeking to establish “no-fly zones” of two miles for hives around designated orchards. Rowdy public meetings ensued. Beekeeping advocates began speaking of a twenty-first-century range war. Finally, when Paramount’s legislative efforts sputtered and it became clear their legal efforts would do the same, the company backed down. They began netting their trees to keep bees from pollinating the blossoms. But the beekeepers who had already relocated from their “homeland,” as Traynor calls it, are unlikely to reclaim their prime citrus yards, because mandarin demand continues to grow and “additional mandarin settlements have been planted in the occupied territory.” In large swaths of California citrus country, the orange varieties that bees once visited are now forbidden fruit. It is an uneasy peace.

  John Miller actually grows mandarins on his property. They are, besides the bees and his trucks and his grandchildren, his pride and joy. They are called Owari Satsuma mandarins, and they are delicious.

  What you buy at Whole Foods is a rank amateur; a rotting, half-globe-trotted waste.

  Gassed, and waxed, it’s a sad excuse for Mandarins!

  I know!

  The mandarin crop coincides with Miller’s quiet time of year. The oranges are ready to pick just before the bees go into the cellars. That gives him plenty of time to “help” with the harvest.

  The bald fat guy eats his way across the orchard.

  You can spend a splendid afternoon, with your gimpy knees, and broad butt towards the sun; oblivious; completely oblivious to everything. . . .

  You are set beyond what a normal mortal should expect of life.

  It is ironic that Miller has chosen to grow a fruit that doesn’t need bees at the epicenter of his California operation, but he considers himself a savvy businessman, and sterile mandarins are a savvy investment. Other citrus growers have reached the same conclusion: in recent years, they have rearranged some Murcott chromosomes to create a sterile hybrid called the Tango, which is identical to the original but averages only one seed in five fruits regardless of how many bees hover nearby. Millions of the new trees have been planted. But for those who made early investments in trees that can’t tolerate bees, the new hybrids arrived too late. It is easier to interdict bees than replace trees.

  Unless, of course, you are a beekeeper. Unless you need billions of flowers to feed billions of insects that you can’t truly possess, that you can’t control, that can’t read no trespassing signs or understand the concepts of no-fly zones or hybridization or changing consumer preference. Unless you love something that can’t love you back, that is just as happy to hurt you, that lives without concern for its keeper or his profit margins or his pride, and that dies with astonishing indiscretion—that simply does what it was born to do.

  Chapter Six

  Charismatic Mini-Fauna

  WHEN THE ALMOND BLOOM APPROACHED IN LATE 2006, BEEKEEPERS hoped—as they always do—for a better year than the previous ones, when varroa mite had wreaked havoc across the industry. But then Colony Collapse Disorder came along, and people’s bees went missing, and Miller began getting lots of phone calls from journalists on the hunt for loquacious beekeepers. Before CCD, Miller received calls once or twice every year or two from some eager apiary neophyte—like me, or a food writer for the New York Times, or a reporter from North Dakota Horizons magazine—and he’d invite us along on his native migrant tour and make us a T-shirt and wow us with his quick wit and endless enthusiasm for the wonders of bee-assisted modern agriculture.

  By the spring of 2007, though, as the CCD toll mounted, Miller began getting calls more frequently, from daily newspapers and German magazines and British filmmakers and California food writers seeking to explain this new contemporary woe. Mass die-offs, apian or human, are always intriguing to those in the line of work that involves informing the public—especially when they may presage the end of the world or at the very least one third of our food supply, including the really good stuff like blueberries and cranberries and melons and almonds. This particular die-off was sexier yet for its inexplicability, and so the calls began coming fast and furious. A few weeks into the CCD hubbub, Miller sent me an email: “Hey!” he began:

  Tomorrow, NBC will be shooting and interviewing

  Gene Brandi on this whole damn thing. . . .

  it was supposed to be me . . .

  but NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO;

  I’m on a plane to Bismarck.

  America’s Loss.

  Stock market collapsed upon the news that my 15 min. were now yet to come another time. . . .

  Gene will do extremely well.

  It’s his 15 minutes, he has to.

  Brandi,
a longtime fixture on the California beekeeping scene, did just fine. But Brandi’s fifteen minutes, and Miller’s, and those of all the nation’s beekeeper-sages, were nothing compared to the fifteen minutes of David Hackenberg. He’s the Pennsylvania-based beekeeper who in November 2006 visited his hitherto healthy Florida apiaries and discovered them virtually vacant, though still containing a full complement of honey and brood. Hackenberg had been seeing some weird things for a couple of years, but he couldn’t quite put a finger on what was wrong. In 2005 he had lost 40 percent of the bees he had placed in apple orchards in upstate New York: “They swarmed out of the boxes and just flew away,” he says, leaving their honey behind. He’d restocked those hives with new bees, but they’d disappeared, too, and on a couple of occasions, he’d noticed bees hanging on the side of the hives but not occupying the interior. In January 2006 he’d tried again, stacking the honey boxes from the disappeared colonies on top of unaffected hives. Those colonies vanished, too.

  And then, in November 2006, he pulled into a bee yard in the late afternoon, around three-thirty or four, and noticed there weren’t many bees flying. He didn’t think much of it at first and went about his business, lighting up smokers to calm the bees and preparing his forklift to move the hives. Then it hit him. “All of a sudden I realized there’s nothing home,” he told me. “I started jerking lids off, and there’s nothing there, like someone took a sweeper and cleaned the hives out.” Nor were there any dead bees on the ground, as there should have been. The surface underfoot was gravel, so it was easy to see that there was nothing to see—“The dead bees wouldn’t have filled the bottom of a five-gallon bucket.” There were some more beehives across the field, and when he sent one of his employees to look at them, he reported seeing good-looking hives with plenty of bees. “Here’s three fifty, four hundred beehives, and those bees aren’t even attempting to rob this stuff, they aren’t even sticking a head in,” Hackenberg said. Under normal circumstances, rival hives would have marauded the dead colony’s honey stores, but there was no sign of that. He had seen lots of bees die in lots of ways, but he had never seen this before.