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

by Hannah Nordhaus

  John Miller doesn’t want his bees to die. But he’s also got a healthy respect—awe, really—for bees that survive on their own. On a back road near his house in Newcastle, tucked in between the trophy estates that have overrun the place like so many behavior-challenged honey bees, there’s a house with a tattered blue roof and degrading siding in a raucously untended meadow dotted with sheep and California poppies. There’s a swarm in the roof there, Miller says, that has survived for a half century—through foulbrood and nosema, tracheal mites and varroa mites and perhaps even CCD. Miller’s own property houses boxes and vats of antibiotics, miticides, and fungicides, but he’s not so hardened that he can’t admire the spectacle of nature taking its course. “I like to think they’re survivor stock,” he says: hardened bees with an infinite capacity to endure and regenerate, bees with mysterious properties of survival that have eluded the entomologists and the breeders and the queen-rearers, and especially the straight-up beekeepers.

  But come to think of it, he hasn’t seen that swarm for a while.

  Chapter Eight

  The Human Swarm

  SOON AFTER MILLER’S NEW QUEENS COMMENCE THEIR reigns, he trucks his bees to North Dakota. It takes a month or so, but by mid-June all have hitched a crowded semi from a withering bee yard in America’s populated, ever-replenishing West to the nation’s empty interior. Miller arrives for the summer in June. He used to drive the Corvette; now he takes his Toyota at a more leisurely pace. He stops in Wyoming for dinner with Larry Krause, then pushes on to Greater Metro Gackle, where he places bees and waits to see what the summer’s harvest will hold. June brings the flowering of the sweet clover, then alfalfa. July is more fickle.

  I first visited Miller in Gackle the summer before CCD arrived. It had been a particularly cruel July. The temperature had hovered well above 100 for much of the previous weeks. Mid-month, a weather station on the state’s southern border recorded a high of 120 degrees. Corn drooped knee-high, earless in the fields, the stalks edged a frayed yellow. Alfalfa florets withered in the meadows; locals wore expressions of stoic exasperation. But the day before I got there in early August, it finally rained, and the long-awaited moisture left the landscape a deep, heartbreaking emerald. After a long, hot month, the sloughs filled with runoff, waterfowl, and sudden, immeasurable hope.

  I met up with Miller at the Bismarck airport, and we drove together to Gackle. In its subtle, windswept way, the land was breathtaking. The hills rolled to the horizon; the sky shone opalescent; great, billowing clouds built like temples to the ionosphere. The slopes that surged across the prairie looked like tallgrass snowdrifts, and in a geological sense, they are—the product of glacial ebb and flow, millennia of wind and water and ice marching across unbroken plains and then retreating.

  North Dakota is, these days, a place of near-constant retreat. First the glaciers withdrew, pursued by the weather. Then the Plains Indians dispersed and the bison disappeared, run from the land. Then went the trappers, run out of quarry; the homesteaders and farmers who ran out of luck; the cattle who ran out of forage; the banks that ran out of money. After generations of defeat, this battered territory is, as Miller explains, “a place of modest expectations,” where the aging farmer’s boldest dream is to pay off the farm, move to town, and own a Buick. That is to say, it is John Miller’s kind of place. Many flowers, few people.

  Not even his family joins him now. When his kids were younger, they traveled with him; now they are off on their own and Jan prefers to stay in California, so Miller leads a bachelor life during the summer. If the winters weren’t too harsh for honey bees and modern families, he’d stay here year-round. His life in California is dictated by global markets, eight-lane highways, and the springtime pollination dance of supply and demand. In North Dakota he and his honey bees stay put. The bees spend the summer feasting on a smorgasbord of flowering crops and wildflowers that burgeon on the borders and margins between fields; Miller spends the summer tending them and his vegetable garden. “I see more traffic on a trip from the airport to my house in California than I do in an entire summer in North Dakota,” he told me before I arrived. “I don’t need to use my turn signals here. Everybody knows where I’m going.”

  As we drove down the highway, it was clear that blinkers were beside the point. The hundred miles of highway running east from Bismarck to Gackle are straight, the homes along the road infrequent. Almost every field along the way hosts a haphazard-looking aggregation of white bee boxes. Year after year, the state vies with California as the nation’s top honey producer, and Miller’s outfit ranks as one of the largest in North Dakota, harvesting more than a million pounds a year. Still, not every hive we saw belonged to him. Around Gackle, most do. In nearby Jamestown they are likely to bear Zac Browning’s brand; in Medina they belong to Miller’s local nemesis, a part-time bee sharecropper who rents colonies from Florida for the summer and who, according to Miller, dilutes his honey and lets his hives go “rotten with hive beetle.” Unlike bees, which can forget as quickly as they enrage, a beekeeper knows how to hold a grudge.

  Miller had a yarn to tell about every bee yard and farm we passed. Those bees over there belong to Zac Browning: “I commingle my hives with him all the time.” Look at that farmhouse: a young couple with ten children who have single-handedly brought the population slide in southern Kidder County to a temporary standstill. “They go through gallons of honey.” That field full of cars? “Those are Kevin Klevin’s. I haven’t seen him for a while.” Kevin Klevin is the nephew of Jim Klevin. Kevin used to let Miller keep bees on his farm, but another beekeeper—one of Miller’s ex-employees, in fact—stole him away. That small red home hidden behind a hillock, perhaps a horizon’s length away from the road? A bachelor farmer named Duane Trautman lives there. A few years ago, a Canada goose showed up at the back door, bonded with the cat, and didn’t bother, when the cold came, to fly south for the winter. “Maybe,” Miller surmises, “the damned thing liked cat food.” The goose stayed for a few years, and then one day gazed skyward—hearing, perhaps, the distant gabble of former companions—and flapped his wings and flew off without saying goodbye. Now Duane Trautman and his cat are alone again.

  Loneliness is epidemic on the northern prairies. We turned off the empty four-lane highway onto a narrow and even emptier two-lane road. Each mile, exactly, the road intersected another thoroughfare—a paved street leading to a small town or a graded gravel road extending to a home, but most often a rutted, grassy two-track slowly returning to nature. This methodical network of roads runs throughout the northern plains, a vestige of the railroad surveys at the turn of the twentieth century and a reminder that there was a time when North Dakota’s population could support such orderly and optimistic dissection of the landscape. Every so often, we flew past a small town with flaking clapboard churches, rusting railroad tracks, and careworn houses; some still had occupants, while others appeared to have succumbed to slow neglect or even hurried abandonment, like a hive left empty after the colony has departed. Finally we passed a large and glimmering slough teeming with ducks and egrets and red-winged blackbirds and approached a water tower that peered above a large hillock adorned with red-white-and-blue tires. They were organized to spell the word Gackle.

  In both form and content, Gackle embraces every agricultural cliché that Miller’s wintering grounds in the Central Valley don’t—the lonely dairy silo at the edge of town, the grain elevator, the rolling fields, the clapboard one-room library, the fluttering flags, the sign that informs visitors there are five churches that serve the town of Gackle (although the sign is not technically accurate anymore, because the Assembly of God building fell down, and after St. Anne’s Catholic Church lost its priest the diocese sold the building to a hunter for $1000—leaving only the Church of Christ and the Lutheran and Baptist churches). We drove past a dusty grocery, and, in quick succession, the Gackle Community Café, the Gackle Senior Center, and Dani’s Place, Gackle’s only bar. Then the Krieger movie theater
, which shows first-release films to weekend audiences that number in the single digits; a bedraggled Ford and farm implements dealership; a Tastee-Freez; a dairy-turned-firehouse; and a guy named Paul trimming a lovingly tended shrub. It was like a sepia, soft-focus campaign ad: morning in an America most Americans have never had the privilege to know.

  We turned off the main drag. (No blinker, no need.) We drove up a gentle hill, past a remarkable procession of camouflage trucks—Gackle, with its generous sloughs, calls itself the “duck hunting capital of the world,” or in more modest moments, the duck hunting capital of North Dakota. The mayor ran a camo-painting business on the side. Miller pointed to each dwelling on our route. We drove past a well-maintained home on our left: “I lent that guy two grain bins and he collapsed them. I sent him a bill and he never paid.” A few houses down, another tale of woe: “A horse fell on that guy two years ago. He broke his ankle.” On our right was a large house; I think it was made of brick: “That’s a family from Washington, they’re not from here, they have lots of kids and we don’t trust them.” Then a slightly unkempt dwelling: “This guy is a drinker.” We passed a gray pickup truck: “I gave that truck away and I regret it to this day. It was a good truck.” And then we approached Miller’s place. Miller once claimed in an email that he didn’t know his house number.

  I am sure it has a street address . . .

  ask anyone,

  I live directly east, across the street from Melvin Muller, that’s all you really need to know, unless you need further detail as in, he lives just north of Denning’s house

  so there.

  Miller’s house was as unpretentious as the next, although bee paraphernalia dotted the front lawn where others might have placed plastic deer or lawn jockeys. Inside there were comfortable if not terribly attractive leather chairs, piles of books on the floor, a few dirty remnant rugs, and in the cupboard, far more varieties of honey than spices. Being a proper gentleman bee farmer, Miller thought it best that a strange woman avoid the impropriety of staying in his “man cave,” so he dropped me across the street at the large, comfortable house of Harry and Brenda Krause, who offered to be my hosts for the visit.

  The Krauses were kind and unadorned. Harry had a craggy Germanic face and white hair; Brenda had soft brown curls cropped around her face and a sturdy frame. They welcomed me and showed me to the basement room where their grandchildren usually stayed, explaining that they’d built the place four years ago when, discouraged by high fuel, fertilizer, and equipment costs, and with their children all decamped to Minneapolis to make real livings, they’d leased their farm to a larger operation and retired. After I settled in, they offered me fresh-baked bread with honey. There was lots of honey in the cupboard, and all of it—except one tub of creamy honey from Utah produced by Miller’s aunt Shirley Miller, “widow of David, and her slightly loopy daughter Eileen and son David Jr.”—came from John’s bees. Each year before the clover goes into bloom, Miller places his hives on his neighbors’ pastures. To the east, his bee yards range twenty miles—the soil is good in that direction, but farmers tend to plant high-value crops like corn and soy that supply little in the way of nectar for foraging bees. To the west, his yards range forty-five miles. The soil in that direction is rockier and harder to till, thus better suited to raising clover and alfalfa for pasture, grazing, and haying. Thus better suited to bees.

  Just as the first geese start rolling south—usually during the third week of October—Miller delivers a portion of last summer’s crop to far-flung houses around Logan, La Moure, Stutsman, and Kidder counties. He pays his rent in honey and gourds from his garden. (“Brilliant gourds, exuberantly diverse. The old ladies love them.”) Typically, he can do four honey drops an hour, far fewer if the farmers are lonely and want to talk. Most do. They talk of cattle prices and corn prices and sunflower prices and implement prices, and the loss of a grandchild or a husband or a dog, and “my God, how things are changing.” Many now live in skilled care facilities—more every year. The old grow older.

  I’ll visit Tillie Dewald who used to bring sheets of honey cookies to the honey house.

  And once I’ve left her room, smiling, I’ll cry

  Sometimes he can’t bear it, watching lives wind down, and he deliberately delivers his rent honey on days he knows people won’t be home. Sauerkraut Day in Wishek, when they serve German food and offer free blood pressure screenings, is always a good bet. It’s been going on since 1925, and on the third Wednesday of October each year, farms empty out all over central Logan County. If nobody’s home, Miller can blast through thirty properties in six hours.

  Thirty years ago, Miller would have provided his neighbors with five-gallon buckets, but these days they’re usually happy with five-pound jugs, or even small honey bears. That’s because families in Gackle aren’t what they used to be. There are bigger farms and fewer farmers, who have fewer kids, and the kids tend to leave for college and never come back. Since the middle of the twentieth century, the town, which was first surveyed in 1902 when the Northern Pacific Railway built a spur line nearby, has lost more than half of its residents. Today it is home to 275 senior-citizen farmers. Vacant lots grow wild; homes stand empty—if you’re inclined to move to Gackle, you can buy a house for as little as ten thousand dollars. The school is the only public K–12 within forty miles. A few years ago it consolidated with the school in nearby Streeter, and Miller commandeered the bird’s-eye maple flooring from the decaying Streeter schoolhouse to give away as a finisher’s prize for the Streeter Centennial 5K “Strut-N-Skedaddle,” a race celebrating the town’s hundredth anniversary. No one objected to the loss of the school’s floor. By the time I visited, the combined school for both towns educated a total of 110 students. Twelve had graduated from high school the previous spring; only four would enter kindergarten that fall. Ultimately, if the trend continues—and there’s no reason it shouldn’t—the school will end up consolidating with the one in Napoleon, the county seat thirty-eight miles away, which already shares a football team with the Gackle-Streeter school. When that happens, there will be one public school serving an eighty-mile stretch of the state.

  THESE STORIES OF ABANDONMENT ARE ALL TOO FAMILIAR IN North Dakota. The state’s geography is particularly well suited to collapse. It lies at the very center of North America, far from the tempering effect of an ocean, and its “continental climate” brings brutally cold winters, cruelly hot summers, wrenching winds, and often negligible humidity and rainfall. Back when Gackle was surveyed, boosters of settlement in the Great Plains—which had previously been known as the “Great American Desert”—believed that cultivation of land would bring permanent humidity to the region. Rain, they said, would follow the plow. And so thousands upon thousands of northern European immigrants moved there, lured by abundant unsettled acreage and federal policies such as the Preemption Act of 1841, which offered public land for $1.25 an acre if settlers lived on and made certain improvements to their plots; or the Homestead Act of 1862, which promised 160 acres for farmers who occupied and cultivated the land for five years; or the Timber Culture Act of 1873, which offered 160 acres if ten of those acres were planted with trees. Others came for the dirt-cheap land offered by the railroad companies that hoped to lure customers to prairie depots like Gackle.

  For a time, it appeared that the boosters were right. The years between 1890 and 1928 were unusually wet ones, and the state’s population swelled with towns and farms that prospered as the nation’s demand for wheat grew. Towns with populations as small as four hundred people often boasted the amenities of much larger cities: a grocery, a hardware store, a mercantile shop that sold everything from dry goods to kerosene lamps to ax handles, a grain elevator—possibly two—a livery barn, doctor’s office, butcher shop, harness shop, and blacksmith. Also, often, a newspaper, hotel, billiards parlor, lumber yard, drugstore, restaurant, cream station, tractor and car dealer, dentist, movie theater, and dance hall—and, of course, a panoply of churches. But eve
n in flush times, North Dakota’s climate and population were hard-pressed to support such elaborately optimistic infrastructure. The state went through a series of booms and busts in the latter part of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Between 1878 and 1890, the population mushroomed from an estimated 16,000 people to 191,000. By 1920, it had grown to 647,000. It peaked in 1930 at 680,000.

  In 1928, North Dakota’s luck turned. It was an unusually wet summer. Ann Marie Low, a farmer’s daughter who lived near the town of Kensal, northeast of Gackle, and kept a lively and loving diary of her times, described a near-tropical climate that summer. “Crops and hayfields were lush; mosquitoes were thick and a continual torture to us and the livestock,” she wrote. At the end of that summer, devastating hailstorms struck the central section of the state, destroying most farmers’ crops. “The rest of the summer was a nightmare of slogging through either rain or clouds of mosquitoes to salvage what we could from the land.” The next summer veered to the other extreme: the rain stopped entirely and didn’t start up again for a decade. Summer after summer through the early 1930s, the heat was unceasing. Temperatures regularly measured upward of 110 degrees, sometimes climbing as high as 118 in the shade. It was so hot that horses dropped dead in the fields and bees stopped gathering nectar. In the years that followed, North Dakota farmers suffered calamities of biblical scope—drought, hail, swarms of grasshoppers, months of winter cold during which the warmest day was ten degrees below zero. And windstorms, unceasing windstorms, bringing dust that drifted like snow and coated clothes in closets and dishes in cupboards, windstorms that came in so thick it was difficult to see even inside a house, windstorms that blew so relentlessly that on white setting hens in enclosed barns, Low reported, “not a white feather shows.”