by Meredith May
“Because they make honeee!” one boy in a SpongeBob shirt called out.
“That’s right! What else do bees do?”
Silence. The kids looked to one another for the answer.
“They fly?” said a girl with braids and a confetti of barrettes.
“They sting!” screeched another, reaching for the teacher’s hand.
I was losing them. I stood up to show them the bee suit I was wearing, and pulled the veil over my head.
“I wear a special suit, so I’m safe. But bees are gentle. They won’t bother you if you don’t bother them. You don’t need to be afraid.”
I flipped the veil back to my shoulders and pointed to a raised garden bed. “What do you see growing in there?”
“Strawberries! Sunflowers! Cucumbers!”
“Would you believe the bees made those?”
I brushed my fingertip against a strawberry flower and showed them the yellow dust. “What’s this yellow stuff?”
“Honey?” asked one boy.
“It’s pollen,” I said. “Flower dust. The bees get it on their feet and mix it up when they visit lots of flowers.”
“In their pollen baskets!” chimed barrette-girl. Clearly, they had been studying bees in class. I was impressed.
“Exactly!” I said. “And when bees mix the pollen all around, it makes the flowers turn into food. Like a strawberry, or a cucumber, or a sunflower seed. Do you like to eat all those things?”
A fusillade of yeses fired into the air. Now they were primed for my main point.
“So the reason bees are so very, very special...is because they make our food!”
“They make honeee!” the boy in the SpongeBob shirt reminded me.
“Where’s the queen?” a girl demanded, crossing her arms and jutting a hip. “I wanna see the queen.”
I had no intention of opening the hive and risking someone’s child getting stung. Or my queen getting squished by curious little folk. Now seemed like the right time to divert them with the honeycomb frame and let them poke their fingers in to taste.
The kids dug into the wax, dripping strings of honey into their mouths, giggling at the naughtiness of breaking something and making a mess. I felt a tug on my shirt, and saw a boy in cargo shorts and neon blue tennis shoes bouncing urgently, like he needed a bathroom. He was grinning maniacally, like he was colluding with me, but about what I wasn’t sure.
I crouched down so he could have my full attention. He really needed to tell me something. The poor kid looked like he was about to burst.
“My grandpa has bees!” he shouted, jumping up and down like he’d just been given a puppy.
In that instant, all of San Francisco fell away and it was just this boy and me, alone in our private universe. We locked eyes and a shared thrill passed between us.
The little boy’s eyes shone, and I saw the innocence Grandpa must have seen in me all those years ago. I wanted this boy to know that the world was big, so big that there were an infinite number of places to find love.
I knelt down, just like Grandpa used to do when he was about to tell me something important. I put my hands on the child’s shoulders and whispered so that only he could hear.
“You are the luckiest boy in the whole wide world.”
* * *
Author’s Note
I was fortunate to grow up in a place and time when honeybees were healthier, when I could walk into the bee yard certain I’d find life inside the hives.
But by and large, the world has turned against the honeybee since the days of the honey bus. Grandpa’s prediction in the seventies of a widespread bee decline has come to pass, and the news is churning with apocalyptic stories of massive food shortages as we try to imagine a hungry planet without bees. I wish it were hyperbole, but when more than one-third of global crop production is dependent, wholly or in part, on bee pollination, it’s hard to ignore.
What went wrong?
Honeybees thrived for fifty million years, but began to decline shortly after World War II, not long after farmers began using synthetic fertilizers instead of flowering clover and alfalfa cover crops to add nitrogen to their soil. Bee colonies took a dive from four and a half million colonies in the United States to just under three million today.
But commercial beekeepers in the United States first reported something was uniquely wrong in 2006, when they opened their hives after the winter frost expecting to see the usual—that most colonies had survived and about 15 percent had succumbed to cold or hunger and perished in a pile on the bottom board. But instead they found a mass exodus, anywhere from 30 to 90 percent of their colonies vanished from seemingly robust hives. Beekeepers had never seen anything like this before—healthy hives one day, and then ghost towns the next. Overnight, worker bees deserted hives brimming with honey and new generations in the nursery, leaving behind one stunned, unattended queen and only a smattering of hungry, lethargic newborns that had not yet learned to fly or feed themselves.
Funding poured into national labs, where entomologists raced to figure out what was happening. Emergency hearings were assembled as beekeeper after beekeeper told the same devastating story of sudden financial ruin. Beekeepers in Europe chimed in, saying their hives had been collapsing, too. In China, bee losses were so bad in some places that farmers had begun hiring people to pollinate crops by hand, spreading pollen to flowers with small paintbrushes.
This inexplicable catastrophe was given a clinical sounding name that implied the authority of a known cause but had none—Colony Collapse Disorder.
Scientists, beekeepers and activists have since offered a wide range of theories, blaming pesticides or fungicides, migratory beekeeping practices, the parasitic Varroa destructor mite, climate change, habitat loss, monoculture and various honeybee pathogens. While there is some promising research suggesting ways to boost honeybee immunity to withstand these threats, there’s still no consensus on what’s causing wholesale colony failure.
Europe has aggressively targeted neonicotinoids, a specific family of insecticides developed in the 1990s, commonly used to coat corn and soybean seeds before planting. Designed with a similar chemical structure to nicotine, the synthetic toxins are absorbed by the growing plant and affect the nervous systems of small insects, leading many researchers to conclude they disrupt a honeybee’s ability to navigate back home. The European Union has experimented with a temporary two-year ban on neonicotinoids for flowering crops that attract bees, and a handful of states in the US no longer sell products containing neonicotinoids.
Results of these efforts are still being debated, with some pushing for a permanent ban and others arguing the experiments are inconclusive, wrongheaded, or worse for bees because they force farmers to switch to nonflowering crops or older, more toxic sprays.
Meanwhile, the bees are still struggling. While there has been a slight improvement in beehive survival since the shock of 2006, beekeepers continue to report to the United States Department of Agriculture that they are losing nearly one-third of their hives each year, a rate that is unsustainable over time even for a species that can multiply quickly.
Today, reports of colony collapse are just as inexplicably waning, and instead what a growing number of beekeepers say is killing their bees is not a mystery malady, but the parasitic Varroa destructor mite, a dark red creature no bigger than the head of a pin that attaches itself and sucks the body fluids of bee larvae and adult bees. They pass viruses to the bees that wreak havoc on the bee’s ability to walk and fly, weaken its immune system and cause deformities such as wrinkled, useless wings.
Since Varroa destructor first appeared in the United States in 1987, the mites have continually developed resistance to the various organic and chemical methods designed to kill them. They can overtake a colony in days, multiplying exponentially each time a female mite enters a honeybee brood cell and lays e
ggs on the larva. The young mites are timed to hatch when the sickened bee emerges from the cell, unleashing a population explosion.
There’s no easy answer to why bees are dying, but what’s clear is that modern life has become increasingly stressful for honeybees, leading some in the beekeeping community to rename the epidemic Multiple Stressor Disorder.
I believe Grandpa was onto something when he predicted a man-made honeybee die-off. We are the ones who paved over the wildflower meadows. We are the ones who took bees out of their habitat and forced them to migrate on semis. We replaced small, diverse farms with mono-crops, and then sprayed chemicals on the plants and trees we forced the bees to pollinate. The bees aren’t to blame for overpopulation, factory farming, or lengthening droughts that dry out their flowers. But like the canary in the coal mine, they are dropping first. We have weakened the bees to the point they can no longer defend themselves against Varroa destructor and a host of newer diseases such as Nosema gut pathogen and the Slow Bee Paralysis virus.
It’s death by a thousand cuts for the bees. But what to do? People have to eat, so crops need to be pollinated. Birds, butterflies, bats, moths and ants pollinate, too, but can’t possibly cover the millions of acres of produce the way honeybees can. Farmers need bees, but the paradox is that maybe we need them too much. We are squeezing the very lifeblood out of them to keep ourselves fed, and our farms profitable.
But we are also the ones who can use our ingenuity to help the honeybees live closer to the way nature intended. Lucky for us, bees are incredibly resilient and, if kept healthy, can propagate quickly. Across the globe, entomologists are working to breed hygienic, mite-resistant bees. Others are experimenting with mushroom teas to boost honeybee immunity. Citizen scientists are collecting hive data and helping keep track of bee populations. Gardeners are restoring landscapes with pollinator-friendly native plants. Farmers are switching to organic crops, and pushing the demand for nontoxic pesticides.
There’s a growing consensus that we each have to do our own small act, whether it’s seeding the roadsides with flowering plants, starting backyard hives of our own, or breaking up the food desert by planting flowering borders around mono-crops.
It’s the principle of the hive—if each of us does our small part, it could add up to a bigger whole.
I owe Grandpa at least that much—to try.
And I owe it to the bees.
As long as honeybees stay strong, they can continue to pass their ancient wisdom to the next generation, so children can learn that even when they are overwhelmed with despair, nature has special ways to keep them safe.
My personality was shaped by the life lessons I learned in a bee yard. Every child should have that same opportunity to grow.
Acknowledgments
I am forever grateful to Heather Karpas at ICM Partners, who gave The Honey Bus its first green light. Her extraordinary talent, warmth and unwavering belief in this story kept me going, even when the road seemed long and twisting.
Editorial Director Erika Imranyi and the entire team at Park Row Books have done so much for me, and this book. It’s been a dream collaboration; an adventure that never felt like work. Thank you, Erika, for your insightful touch—it’s the secret ingredient on every page.
More applause for Helen Manders at Curtis Brown Group UK; and Maria Campbell and her whole team at Maria B. Campbell Associates, early champions whose endorsement ensured that the book would be translated around the globe. They have given Grandpa nothing less than immortality.
Group hug to my mentors David Lewis, reader of my first draft, and Ken Conner, shepherd through the last. Both gentlemen were my editors at the San Francisco Chronicle, and I’m humbled and honored that they continue to guide me through words, and through life. Thank you also to friends who read parts of this memoir along the way and gave invaluable feedback: Earl Swift, Shobha Rao, Sarah Pollock, Meredith White, Julian Guthrie, Lysley Tenorio, Joshua Mohr, Tom Molanphy, Mag Donaldson, Tee Minot, Lesley Guth, Maria Willett, Maria Finn, and Maile Smith.
I am indebted to my creative nonfiction professors at Goucher College where this book began as my MFA thesis: authors Tom French, Diana Hume George, Leslie Rubinkowski, Laura Wexler, and Patsy Sims. A big bow of gratitude to the American Association of University Women, which supplied a generous grant so I could attend Goucher’s graduate school program. This memoir was also supported by the Hedgebrook writers’ residency on Whidbey Island, which, in a radical act of hospitality, loaned me a cabin in the woods to work on the manuscript.
This book was graced by all the beekeepers who opened their hives, their hearts and their homes: Noah Wilson-Rich in Boston; Aaron Yu, MaryEllen Kirkpatrick, Aerial Gilbert, and Deb Wandell in San Francisco; and in Big Sur: Peter and Ben Eichorn, Diana and Greg Vita; and my Nepenthe clan: Meredith, Kirk, and Will Gafill.
For their patience, understanding and generosity; love and thanks to my family. I wouldn’t have had the strength to write this without the support of my brother, Matt; he protected me when we were young and countless times since. Thank you for being my confidante, for making me laugh and for making things right in the end.
To my father, David, who patiently answered my questions even when it was painful to do so, above all thank you for keeping the promise you made in 1975. You are, and always will be, my dad.
A never-ending thank-you to the honey in my life, Jenn. The bus seat next to me is forever saved for you.
Further Reading
A Book of Bees, Sue Hubbell, 1988
ABC and XYZ of Bee Culture, A. I. Root, 1879
The Queen Must Die, William Longgood, 1985
The Honey Trail: In Pursuit of Liquid Gold and Vanishing Bees, Grace Pundyk, 2008
Letters from the Hive: An Intimate History of Bees, Honey, and Humankind, Stephen Buchmann and Banning Repplier, 2005
Honeybee Democracy, Thomas Seeley, 2010
The Life of the Bee, Maurice Maeterlinck, 1901
Langstroth’s Hive and the Honey-Bee, L. L. Langstroth, 1853
The Bee: A Natural History, Noah Wilson-Rich, 2014
The Beekeeper’s Lament, Hannah Nordhaus, 2011
The Beekeeper’s Pupil, Sara George, 2002
New Observations on the Natural History of Bees, François Huber, 1806
Field Guide to the Common Bees of California, Gretchen LeBuhn, University of California Press, 2013
Fifty Years Among the Bees, Dr. C. C. Miller, 1915
Bee, Rose-Lynn Fisher, 2010
The History of Bees, Maja Lunde, 2015
The Bees, Laline Paull, 2014
The Keeper of the Bees, Gene Stratton-Porter, 1925
Bees, A Honeyed History, Piotr Socha and Wojciech Grajkowski, 2015
Big Sur: Images of America, Jeff Norman and the Big Sur Historical Society, 2004
The Post Ranch: Looking Back at a Community of Family, Friends and Neighbors, Soaring Starkey, 2004
My Nepenthe: Bohemian Tales of Food, Family, and Big Sur, Romney Steele, 2009
These Are My Flowers: Raising a Family on the Big Sur Coast, The Letters of Nancy Hopkins, Heidi Hopkins, 2007
Recipes for Living in Big Sur, Pat Addleman, Judith Goodman & Mary Harrington, 1981
A Short History of Big Sur, Ronald Bostwick, 1970
The Esselen Indians of Big Sur Country: The Land and the People, Gary S. Breschini, 2004
Grandpa visiting us in Newport, Rhode Island, 1974. I am 4.
Grandpa, Matthew and me in Newport, Rhode Island, summer 1974.
Mom and me shortly after my first birthday in Newport, Rhode Island, 1971.
My brother, Matthew, and me in 1975, just after we moved into our grandparents’ house in Carmel Valley. Behind us is the eucalyptus tree I would climb to get as close as I could to the honeybees.
Grandpa, Matthew and me in Carmel Valley, 1976. I’m holdin
g Harold and Grandpa is holding Rita.
My grandparents’ little red house on Via Contenta in Carmel Valley.
Every spring Grandpa caught honeybee swarms, like this one he scooped out of a tree in Pacific Grove in 1994.
Granny and Grandpa celebrating their 25th wedding anniversary in 1988.
The honey bus. Originally built in 1951 for the fleet at the Fort Ord military base, Grandpa bought the bus from a Big Sur friend in 1963, tore out the seats and built a honey bottling factory inside. (Photo by Jenn Jackson)
The left side of the honey bus. Wooden pallets in the foreground served as stairs to the back door. The small tower in the middle ground is the propane-heated water boiler Grandpa designed to send steam in a hose to the blade of the “hot knife” he used to cut open honeycomb. (Photo by Jenn Jackson)
Inside the honey bus. The honey spinner is in the foreground; behind it are two honey holding tanks with cheesecloth strainers. The Wesson Oil cans on the right were used to sell honey to customers who wanted large quantities. (Photo by Jenn Jackson)
The honey spinner, or extractor, used to spin honey out of uncapped honeycomb using centrifugal force. The pulleys were powered by a motor Grandpa cribbed from a lawn mower (hidden under the plastic). (Photo by Jenn Jackson)
Grandpa lifting a frame of honey inside the bus, 1986.
A honeybee parting its mandibles to suck up a drop of spilled honey through its straw-like proboscis.
Grandpa slicing open wax honeycomb before putting the frame in the spinner, 1986.