Show Me the Honey

by Dave Doroghy

  Parts of the hive looked like the ancient Italian city of Pompeii, which was buried under tons of ash from a volcanic eruption. During an excavation nearly 2,000 years later, archaeologists were able to see the exact position people were in when they died. My stomach went into a knot when I spotted a bee corpse with its head poked into a cell; it had obviously been feeding on whatever dismal stores of honey were left. I saw a three-quarter-formed larva in the fetal position, curled up dead. I saw a poor little bee with its legs stretched out in the position bees take when they are forming wax comb. And I saw an innocent newborn bee … I am sorry; I just can’t go on. Contrary to my last ray of desperate hope, there was not one survivor. I felt like I was going to throw up.

  Returning to the warmth of the float home, I kept thinking that all the bees just couldn’t be dead. Surely some must still be alive buzzing around somewhere, perhaps just late getting back to the hive? Maybe they would return tomorrow? I was like a cat owner whose pet has disappeared for three weeks and is still convinced Tabby will wander home, when in reality Tabby has been eaten. Later that night I realized that I was stuck smack in the denial phase of the grieving process. As Martin Luther King Jr. once said, “We must accept finite disappointment, but never lose infinite hope.” I even set the alarm on my iPhone in order to wake up at sunrise the next morning in hopes of finding that the bees had returned overnight.

  Next came the anger phase—you can bet it hit me hard. I was about $2,000 into this whole beekeeping venture. Other than the first year of good luck after my sister had dropped off the hive, that fortunate first year when I hit the honey jackpot and we won the prestigious award, I had not harvested one drop of honey. And now, after all of my investments in books, bee school, conventions, and clubs, as well as numerous pieces of equipment, two new queens, and frames of brood, now, after a number of stings and endless embarrassments, all of my bees were dead. You bet I was mad. As angry as a hive of bees toppled over in the back of an old pickup truck on the way to the outyard, as angry as a guard bee warding off an invasion of sinister hornets. Not to mention that the two grand could have bought me 400 small jars of honey, enough honey for the rest of my life. All I had to show for my beekeeping was a bunch of empty, ironically colourful bee boxes, a beekeeping suit that leaked, and a wounded ego and heart.

  Next came the depression phase, and thank goodness this dark abyss lasted for only one morning. The different emotional grief phases came on astoundingly quickly. After I got up the next day and was forced to accept that no bees had returned to the hive, I had to dispose of the thousands of dead bee carcasses. What a macabre task. I had affectionately called these little corpses “my girls.” Usually when you lift boxes of bees you do it with a degree of fragility, with slow, careful purpose. The empty boxes on my float-home deck no longer merited that type of painstaking treatment. I quickly disassembled the three-storey death house, anxious to get the extremely unpleasant task over with as soon as possible.

  What followed had all the dignity and decorum of taking out the garbage. There is no way to dispose of 10,000 bees in a respectful, solemn, and meaningful way. Yes, it was sad they were all dead. After all, they were individual bugs. Each bee had been a unique living being in her own right. But what was I supposed to do? Pick them up individually and say my goodbyes to every deceased bee? Throw the bees into the river one by one? Aside from the impractical fact that such a ceremonial approach would take all day, I just wasn’t into handling them. I did what I suspect most people would do in my situation—I grabbed the bottom board with the three-inch-thick mass of dead bees, held it out over the Fraser River, and turned it upside down. I recited to myself, “Ashes to ashes, dust to dust, and bees to the riverbed.” As I watched them all float on the outgoing current down the river, as if they were 10,000 Egyptian queen mummies on their funerary boats heading to a floral-laden bee afterlife, I was glad that none of the resident swans were around, as they probably would have eaten them. Thankfully, the dead bees peacefully floated away down the muddy river and out to the ocean—out of sight, but not out of mind. Needless to say, I was quite unmoored for the rest of the morning.

  As for the guilt part of the grieving process, I was most certainly guilty. Even with all the time and money I had invested, I was still an incompetent beekeeper.

  The final stage of the grieving process, acceptance, took me the longest to achieve.

  I had gained quite a reputation on the river as a beekeeper; I had even given honey to many of the other float-home owners. I’d often run into them in the small suburban town centre near the river. Errands in town tended to be quite social, exchanging pleasantries and small talk. Only problem was that small talk almost always led to questions about my bees. Imagine how you would feel if you just lost 10,000 of your loved ones (even if they were a cross between livestock and pets), and the next day some well-meaning neighbour confronts you at the supermarket with a big smile, barking out across the aisle, “Hey, Dave, how are your bees doing?” Like the rigor mortis that had settled into my poor dead bees’ bodies, I affixed a frozen, deadpan smile on my face. “They are doing just fine,” I lied. I couldn’t accept that my bees were all dead. I couldn’t bring myself to say it out loud in such an informal setting. Sometimes people I ran into would ask, “Hey, as soon as you get more honey, can we buy some?” I would reply, with a regretful shake of my head, “I heard the nectar flow won’t be great this spring, so I don’t know when I’ll have some more to give you. But I’ll keep you posted.” I even entertained the dismal idea of going down one of the aisles of the supermarket to purchase some of that cheap corn syrup–infused honey from China to pour into my jars and give out to all my neighbours to make them shut up and leave me alone.

  Or I could move. After all, I lived on a floating home, and they are pretty mobile. One call to Brent, the towboat guy, and I could be headed down the river following the trail of my dead bees to another dock on another bend of the river.

  It was pathetic. I was a living lie, pretending to be an award-winning, government-certified apiarist. Pretending to be Mr. Natural: your friendly neighbourhood beekeeper, your source for fresh honey, one of the top students in bee school. Oh, come on, who was I kidding? The award-winning honey credit belonged to my sister and brother-in-law, and I cheated my way through the apiarist exam. Because of my distracted nature, the shortcuts I took, my sloppy ways, and my inattention to detail, I had killed all of my bees. It was my fault. In the three years since Miriam and Len had dropped off that hive, I went from hero to zero. Of all the grief stages, guilt grabbed me by the collar, shook me, and wouldn’t let go.

  As a result of my shame I didn’t go out shopping for a few weeks, instead living off of my usual Costco haul of jumbo, oversized stashes of everything from cereal to macaroni and cheese. I was fine—I would survive—but the bees weren’t coming back, and there was nothing I could do. Beekeepers have a term for what happened to my hive: they call it a “dead out.” I have a term for it: I call it “loser on a barge.”

  I beat myself up for a while longer. Like a father rearing his children, I had wanted the girls to grow up to be healthy and happy. I wanted what was best for my bees. Where did I go wrong?

  Then one day I stopped feeling sorry for myself, taking uneasy solace in the statistic that nearly 50 percent of hives kept by amateur and even professional beekeepers are dying each year. What happened to my hive was not unusual. I began to back off on the self-imposed pummelling; instead, I read further into what may be killing our honeybees. Due to the gravity of what I discovered in my research, I decided to take some of the blame for my individual hive’s demise, but in the larger scheme of things, the blame for the declining state of honeybees in the world needs to be spread around. It made me feel a bit better, yet also more disturbed, knowing there are larger forces at work.

  Colony collapse disorder (CCD), a mysterious phenomenon, has played a major role in widespread hive decline. While CCD is not exactly what happened to my hive—
it was a “dead out” displaying actual dead bees—it is likely that some of the factors at work in CCD preyed upon my hive as well. Colony collapse disorder first appeared around 2006 and has continued to wreak havoc for over a decade. In a sudden bizarre occurrence, bees began to disappear from commercial hives—no dead bees left behind and no evidence of mites, pathogens, or predators. Even weirder, the queens and brood were left behind. And by now you know the protective and diligent manner in which the workers normally serve their queen. Uncommonly all alone, the queen would wear herself out laying more brood to try to keep the colony alive. But even the amazing egg-producing queen bee could not lay fast enough to replace an entire hive of workers and drones. And, so, the terrifying result: large numbers of dead hives. Sometimes 500 hives could be lost seemingly overnight. Once, over a few months, Bret Adee, America’s King of Beekeepers, lost 40,000 hives—about 2 billion bees. And this has happened to him more than once; in 2016, Adee lost about half of his 90,000 hives.

  Perhaps I should stop second-guessing every sloppy mite vaporization, every missed wasp, and every incorrectly boiled batch of sugar water. “Dave,” I coached myself, “give yourself a break. Part of the reason your bees died was beyond your control.”

  For a time, scientists looking into CCD were flummoxed, and there is still no hard and fast agreement as to the causes. What we do know is that there is likely a combination of reasons for it. I’ll focus on just five or six suspected factors that are easy to understand. Granted, I am just an unsuccessful amateur beekeeper who lost one hive, and I am not an entomologist, but this is my humble understanding of CCD thus far.

  Let’s start with almonds and the almond milk I buy in bulk at Costco by way of example. I drink large quantities of almond milk because I think it is healthier than cow’s milk, and I like the way it tastes. I also rarely leave the float home without a handful of almonds in my hand. Okay, so what do almonds have to do with bees?

  California dominates global almond production like the Arab nations dominate world oil production. Over 80 percent of all the almonds produced in the world come from that one state. It’s remarkable the way almonds are mass-produced down there in the Golden State, and it is why I can go to Costco and buy a three-pound bag for $30. Our incredible honeybees have everything to do with the success of the California almond industry. Every spring it takes 1.6 million commercial hives to pollinate California’s almond crops alone. Let me repeat that: not 1.6 million bees, but 1.6 million beehives. And this is just for almonds. In addition, bees are trucked all over North America for agricultural pollination—from Florida and the Midwest to Washington to pollinate that state’s cherries and apples. This is not new. The Egyptians would float their hives down the Nile on barges. But the staggering numbers of bees and hives trucked about is a fairly recent state of affairs. The hives are required for only a short period of time when the trees are in bloom and rife with pollen, and then they are loaded up and off to the next destination. I envision each hive as a sort of ragged, exhausted touring rock ’n’ roll band, constantly on the road and only vaguely aware of the next city they must perform in.

  So for almond trees in bloom each spring, about 1.6 million hives—estimated to be more than half of the managed hives in all of North America—are trucked in from afar. Most commercial beekeepers across America, and even far away up here in Canada, make more money renting their beehives out for pollination than they do selling honey. Their local honey profits, sadly, have been upstaged by the sugar-infused honey from overseas.

  Jeannie and I once cycled through the San Joaquin Valley in California, where weather and soil conditions are ideal for growing almonds, and we saw the almond extravaganza with our own eyes. We usually cycle at about 12 miles per hour, and for an entire hour we witnessed row upon row of identical almond trees as far as the eye could see. Every third row had a four-box beehive sitting neatly at the foot of a half-mile-long line of trees. And what we passed through was puny in comparison with the size of the overall almond industry. In 2015, the California Department of Food and Agriculture estimated that the state had over a million acres of almond farms. Each one of the almond trees on those huge farms is looking for a honeybee to drop by, pick up some tiny bits of pollen dust, and drop them off on another almond tree down the line. Almonds require 100 percent bee pollination. Most other plants can rely on the wind and other plants to help.

  But it’s really not nature’s intention for us to move bees halfway across the country and back again as California pollen couriers, just so frugal shoppers like me can save a few bucks on a bag of almonds. Just like it disturbs our natural rhythms to hop in a car and drive across the United States, it does the same thing to the bees. There are negative stressors, and the bees have to adapt quickly to new weather patterns, new temperatures, and the different position of the sun in the sky. Also, just like travel exposes humans to colds, flu, or allergies, all that travel also exposes bees to unfamiliar pathogens, fungi, and other environmental influences. Above all, the steady diet of only almond tree flower nectar and pollen every day is unnatural. Hey, don’t get me wrong, I love almonds more than anyone, but I don’t think I could live on nothing but almonds.

  So is the answer to saving the bees to stop buying almonds at Costco? Well, sort of, but not really. Without the almond industry, the honeybee industry in its current form could not exist. It’s complicated. Colony collapse disorder is a catch-all phrase that points out all the man-made interventions we are creating to screw up the climate and honeybees and life here on the planet. It all boils down to overpopulation. You can cram only so many bees into a hive and only so many people onto this planet.

  A second suspected cause of CCD and the downfall of our little pollen-seeking friends also relates to farming. Modern industrial fruit and vegetable agriculture uses a method called monoculture. All that fancy four-syllable word means is the cultivation of one single crop. In the days of yore, small family farmers planted and worked dozens of different crops that would ripen at different times of the year, providing an ongoing living for the family and a continuous smorgasbord for bees. It was not the least bit unusual for beans, corn, carrots, wheat, and potatoes to be planted side by side in perfect harmony. Luckily, many smaller farming operations currently focused on sustainability have revived this practice. Furthermore, before our relatively modern obsession with lawns and lawn mowing, homeowners used to have chickens, goats, flowers, and vegetables, not perfectly groomed grass, in the front yard. Even larger farms used to leave large swaths of tall grass and flowers—a haven for bees—right next to the cultivated crops. But now, in order to keep “pests” at bay, many industrial farms leave no wild corridors at the edges of their fields.

  Monoculture is not confined to almonds. On that same biking trip through California, Jeannie and I saw countless other large-scale monoculture crops. This method has emerged from large-scale farming practices aimed at high yields and efficiency, from big businesses concerned with profit margins, and from a human population bursting at the seams needing to be fed. Almost every “perfect” supermarket fruit or vegetable you buy today—and we’ve grown spoiled in expecting these items any time of year—is grown on a corporate farm that takes advantage of the money-saving economies of harvesting a single crop. Farm-stand fruits and veggies grown locally on small-scale farms that raise a variety of crops with fewer or no pesticides are never “perfect” in terms of colour, shape, and blemishes. I am probably not telling you anything new about how food is mass-produced and farmed today, but stop and think about it from a bee’s perspective. To bees, the two farming practices are the equivalent of the difference between a delicious and varied all-you-can-eat organic buffet and an institutional dinner tray with mashed potatoes and creamed chipped beef topped with a dressing of pesticides, again and again and again.

  I haven’t even mentioned genetically modified food crops, the infamous, potentially evil GMOs, as a source of pollen and nectar for bees. Since GMOs are a complex topic of
debate, let’s just say that neither monoculture nor GMOs are natural and leave it at that. One thing is certain—when Mother Nature designed the amazing range of bee species millions of years ago, their diet certainly didn’t include the kind of food we are producing and feeding them today.

  One particular type of sustenance for commercial bees is highly suspected of contributing to incidents of CCD. You guessed it; it’s that white processed sweet of sweets—sugar. Beekeepers are trucking commercial bees all over tarnation to slurp on monoculture crops. At the same time, wild foraging habitat are growing scarce, so beekeepers have increasingly turned to using sugar-water solution. Unfortunately, it’s become more and more apparent that bees cannot survive on sugar alone. Like humans, they need a balance of carbohydrates and protein. Carbohydrates come from sipping honey in the hive, and they get their protein, ideally, from floral pollen. Due to their hectic schedules and having an increased fare of cane sugar, our honeybees are growing malnourished, which, of course, puts them at increased risk of all the other stressors like diseases, mites, and fungi.

  The next possible human interference in the fate of bees is less organic, more high-tech, and fairly controversial. If you are starting to feel guilty because you eat almonds and consume produce from monoculture crops, then this next paragraph comes with a warning: please turn your cellphone off now.

  When CCD first appeared, research attention turned to technology. A Swiss study found that signals associated with cellphones confused the highly sensitive nervous systems of the poor bees. Upon exposure to cellphone signals, the bees piped up the way they do when anything disturbs the hive or when they are about to swarm. This original theory linking cellphone signals to CCD has since been called into question by further studies. However, think about this: there are countless frequencies, not just cellphones, beaming through the sky at any given moment in our crowded atmosphere, many of which were not present at all or to the same degree half a century ago: AM radio signals, FM radio signals, shortwave radio signals, radar, microwave signals, and Wi-Fi signals. The list of frequencies and signals goes on and on. Bees communicate through buzzing and frequencies, along with waggle dances, so our human technological noise must be, at the very least, causing one massive bee migraine. I am no scientist, but I can’t imagine how this mass of radio frequencies and electromagnetic static is not severely disrupting bee communication.