Bees in America: How the Honey Bee Shaped a Nation

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EPILOGUE I am fascinated by the interactions between bees. I am fascinated by the interactions between beekeepers. —Marla Spivak In Hawaii, Michael Kliks, owner of the Manoa Honey Company, and his assistant Keoki Espiritu have invited me to see their hives on Oahu. We don bee veils and jackets, the garments setting each of us in relief against the smoky cloud-covered mountain. The pink jasmine vines threaten to overtake us. Tall banana trees shade the hives, a colorful combination of mainland and Molokai boxes. Yellow ginger punctuates the green setting like confetti. Together, we clear out the brush to create more space for Kliks’s hives. The false pakaki (fake jasmine) vines need to be cut back, so we work for a couple of hours. When we finish, there’s an orderly little bee yard in the midst of this Hawaiian jungle. We watch the body surfers at Wanamaeigo, munching on Keoki’s bologna sandwiches , credit going to his wife. California. John Miller, a fourth-generation beekeeper descending from N. E. Miller. Ever the native migrant, he’s been making the trek from Blackfoot, Idaho, to California since he was fourteen. Add Gackle, North Dakota, to his tour, and, well, there is one of America’s last real 252
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cowboys—to use Douglas Whynott’s phrase—alive and well in the twenty-first century.1 Driving down the Sacramento Valley, we see the industrial countryside has indeed thrived: there are almond orchards on one side, being planted in new diamond-shaped patterns as opposed to the 1950s grid square because the new research suggests that diamond patterns allow for two more rows of trees, thus increasing the almond yields. Thus, the traditional pollination formula has been revised in California, so that a grower needs two or three hives for approximately 130 trees. Furthermore , trees are now uprooted at the end of a thirty-year cycle. New planting patterns make life easier for the beekeeper, who must pull the hives in and out of fields. There is more room between the rows to back in and out, a detail most orchard growers don’t think about. Yet once we get into the fields, the Miller crew is as about as individualized as the orchards are systematized. There’s nineteen-year-old Mike Asher, who’s filling feeders with sugar water from a large tank as casually as if he were watering flowers. There’s Layne, a former CEO transitioning into another career. There’s Jay, with six daughters, who welcomes me into the crew by reminding me that he is the better looking , smarter, and nicer brother of the family. John—well, he’s busy checking the numbers. Each bee colony is refreshingly different too. One colony needs more sugar, one has mites—no, make that two colonies. Mike calls from a couple of hives over, “This hive has varroa too.” I have never seen varroa mites, but the men take time to show me the red specks, almost like drops of blood, on the bees. And I see the damage too: the deformed wings, the slower pace of the bees, the undeveloped workers. The men confer about the next steps: Perhaps we need to do some tests. Let’s try some sugar. Okay, let’s mark these and finish feeding. These steps are part of a normal day. And when Eric Mussen estimated the value of those days in 2002, he concluded that John, Jay, and Layne Miller and other beekeepers in California “earned $52 million in honey and beeswax , nearly $62 million renting colonies for crop pollination, and $5.5 million selling queens and bulk bees to other beekeepers. Furthermore, the value of the crops grown in California that were pollinated by honey bees was $4,353,460,249.” An amount that he says, “eclipses the $126,651,220 total gross earnings of all beekeepers.2 253
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Apitourism—tourists that visit other bee yards—has a good future, especially as more novices join the ranks and the beekeeping conferences continue to draw crowds. In surroundings such as Hawaii and California , apitourism can appeal to an emerging niche market in ecotourism. Apitourism also defines a new direction for beekeepers in other equally exotic places in the varied American landscape: the Rio Grande, the Appalachians, the Plains, the East Coast. American beekeepers have always been travelers, and this aspect of the industry...