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

  Perhaps that’s why the world was so taken with the mass collapse of 2007. It was creepy. Hackenberg was the first to witness and report a loss, but others soon followed. The scientific community initially gave the strange new malady the name “Fall Dwindle Disease,” but as fall turned to winter and winter to spring, and as beekeepers across the country and then the world began to report similar inexplicable losses, they renamed it Colony Collapse Disorder, or CCD. More than a third of the nation’s hives collapsed in thirty-six states, and losses were reported in parts of Europe, India, and Brazil as well. Some beekeepers saw up to 90 percent of their colonies fail that year and the next. Hackenberg lost 2,000 of the 2,900 hives he had shipped to Florida that year.

  Still, it wasn’t, after all was said and done, much worse than the die-off of 2005, when John Miller and many of his colleagues lost lots of bees. What was different was that the disease looked like nothing anyone had ever seen. Not Hackenberg in his forty-five years of beekeeping; not John Miller, whose family had been keeping bees for four generations; not the army of entomologists and geneticists and nutritionists and agricultural extension agents called in to investigate the problem. There is nothing like a calamitous mystery to pique the interest of the public. After years of invisibility, beekeeping had become suddenly, exquisitely interesting. Newspapers, magazines, and websites reported every theory bandied about to explain the puzzling malady, from pesticides to bad weather to bad corn syrup to high-voltage electric transmission lines to cordless phones to various viruses, bacteria, and fungi to the first sign of the coming “rapture,” when worthy souls—like bees—would be recalled to heaven.

  When reporters called Miller for quotes, however—which they often do, because he gives awfully good ones—he usually let them down. He placed the blame for CCD on a related disorder he called “PPM,” shorthand for “piss-poor management,” or “PPB,” for “piss-poor beekeeping”; some variation of the acronym swept through the beekeeping community as quickly as the disease itself. Miller believed that the afflicted beekeepers simply hadn’t taken good enough care of their bees. And that’s what he told the clamoring media.

  I sympathized with the disappointed press corps. I was working on a magazine article about John Miller, one that had been in the works long before CCD had arrived, and I admit it would have been wonderfully convenient for my purposes had his bees disappeared as well. But that winter wasn’t shaping up to be a particularly bad one for Miller—no worse than normal, anyhow. Millions of his bees died, because that’s what bees do these days. But they did not disappear in romantic and disturbing ways. They just died, en masse, of various ailments, as they had every year since Miller’s miserable February of 2005. I kept emailing him, hoping he’d report something terrible. He kept emailing back, offering me the latest beekeeper gossip—blaming genetically modified corn syrup for the deaths, or a new strain of an old fungal infection, or, most likely, a massive dose of PPM. Then Miller would change the subject to something far more interesting to him, like a dying neighbor, or a new truck.

  JOHN MILLER LIKES TO EMAIL. HE ALSO LIKES TO PONTIFICATE, joke, write, say incendiary things, tell stories, drip with sarcasm. Most of all, he likes to talk. The first time I spoke with him, in 2004, I phoned him for an article about Honey Stinger, a honey-based energy gel company in which he is a partner (along with Tour de France champion Lance Armstrong, who became an owner of the company in 2010). Miller told me he had been up all night for nearly two weeks straight, moving bees into almond orchards in California. “We all need to take a nap,” he said. That sounded worth a follow-up, so I called him again and asked him a few questions about his work. We spoke for an hour and a half, and I sent him an email thanking him. He responded not long afterward. It was a surprising email, written in stanza form, and I kept it, because it was funny and also somehow touching. I realized that I had stumbled onto someone who had taken an unusual and thorny route through life, someone who cared passionately about something strange and had a talent for expressing it. I had, perhaps, crossed paths with the email poet laureate of the beekeeping profession. I pasted his missive into a file, and later the next one, and eventually accrued hundreds of pages of free-verse emails that, in aggregate, form something of an epic poem—an Arial ten-point ode of Homeric proportions.

  “I am Mormon; though I only have one wife,” he wrote in his first email, and he continued:

  I have taken public speaking courses.

  I am a Toastmaster of some rank, though no longer a member.

  I believe, but am not sure, I am the only subscriber in this industry to the Wall Street Journal, Harvard Business Review, and Fast Company Magazine.

  This does not make me better than anyone else.

  It does not make me worse than anyone else, either.

  I am curious, and probably read a bit more than the average bee guy.

  I spend 300 days a year outside, so my idea of camping is

  mid-town, say the Drake, 17th floor, room-service. THAT IS CAMPING!

  no bugs, no sleeping under the truck in a sleeping bag.

  When I get out of the bee yard, I want OUT of the bee yard.

  I like speaking to bee guys, and I think I have something to say to them. . . .

  Beekeeping, he concluded, is

  a mystery to me, and I love talking about it.

  People are always willing to listen to a fool, for some length of time,

  just for the entertainment value.

  I owned you for an hour and a half the other day . . . see?!

  He did. He had. I booked a ticket and in February 2006 flew from my home in Colorado to visit him as the California almond bloom unfurled toward its peak. He picked me up in the Corvette. The car was well loved and well kept, even though it was seven years old by then. It rode smoothly and close to the ground. We drove not much faster than anyone else—this being California and the highways being clogged with cars—from the Sacramento airport east to his home in Newcastle, where the Central Valley begins its slow ascent toward the Sierras. The house perched on a green hill overlooking three acres of mandarin groves and below them a few aluminum outbuildings, a fleet of trucks and forklifts and syrup tanks in various stages of obsolescence, a U-shaped assembly of trailers and modular homes for employees, and hundreds of rectangular white bee boxes grouped and stacked hither and thither, what Miller described as a “mad Jed Clampett scene.” “Bee guys,” he says, “shouldn’t be allowed to own property.”

  Such an assessment is not entirely fair to him, and certainly not to his wife, because his house was spotless, a model of order. It was still newish, with lots of windows and white furniture, walls adorned with family photos, impressionistic landscape paintings, and one blue-eyed, slightly angry Jesus illuminated in gray-edged clouds. We got there in time for supper with friends from church and Bill Miller, no relation to John, but rather the father of Alan Miller, a high school beau of Jenny Miller—John’s daughter. Bill was soft-spoken and recently divorced, and he was there not only for dinner and fellowship, but also to buy the Corvette.

  It was time for John Miller to move on. (“Three years passed, and I hadn’t had a speeding ticket,” he wrote. “What’s the point of owning a fast car?”) We’re not sure if Bill Miller took the car home that night. I like to think he did. John Miller’s wife, Jan, is pretty sure he didn’t. Jan is a slender, fit, and quietly agreeable microbiology teacher with auburn hair and big, astonished-looking blue eyes. She grew up in Blackfoot, Idaho, with John. They knew each other in high school, though they ran in different crowds. They started dating when they were twenty-two, and both agree that “he hasn’t grown up any since.” Jan tolerates her husband with amused exasperation—“sometimes amused, consistently exasperated,” Miller says. She keeps a clean kitchen and if my estimation is right, she is the one who tracks family details, so she is probably correct that they sold the car a few days later. John Miller neither remembers nor cares, but he’s not afraid of a little embellishment, so he
won’t mind if I conclude that the car did go home with Bill Miller that night—and so I was there for a passage in John Miller’s life, a small player in his large story.

  It’s a good thing to be part of John Miller’s story, because he tells it well. Miller is smart and engaged, a master of details. He remembers everything, though not always as it actually happened. He is also very funny—even in the face of the many unfunny things that happen to a beekeeper these days. Bob Koehnen, a queen-rearer and almond farmer who is not terribly funny but is very friendly and sturdy and thorough, once said to me that he didn’t know how John Miller could have a sense of humor when so many things in his business are not humorous at all. Yet he does. The wit is mordant; the humor gallows. He jokes and “yarns” and speaks out and joins boards and cares for the future of his industry, but most of all he cares about the loyal, industrious, sometimes violent, always fragile insects that die by the dozens every time he opens a hive. He doesn’t mind making a fool of himself to make that point: “I am the blabbermouth you’ve been seeking,” he told me.

  Miller was born in 1954. He has a pointed nose, quizzical arched eyebrows, an orderly crown of receding salt-and-pepper hair, a reassuringly sonorous, Jimmy Stewart–like voice, and an eternally bemused expression. He is an observant Mormon, but it is agreed in his family that he won’t take the sacrament when it is offered, because he still has some work to do before he ascends to Latter-day Sainthood. For starters, he often uses “cowboy words,” especially when he gets stung, which is a daily event for him, although each time it happens—as much as fifty times on a bad day—he seems somehow affronted. He has also been known, at times in his life, to down a supertanker of coffee or a six-pack of Coors Light in a sitting—vices forbidden by his church. He isn’t proud of it. “Church,” he likes to say, “is for sinners,” and his occasional mutinies make him all the more determined to reform. Still, reverence is not his thing.

  If he isn’t the picture of a perfect Mormon, neither does he look the part of the traditional flannel-and-rubbers-clad beekeeper. His usual uniform includes surf shorts, a baseball cap, running shoes, and a footrace souvenir T-shirt. He has run twenty-five marathons. His four kids—two boys, two girls—are grown and starting their own families, and some of them run races with him. None plans to be a beekeeper; they’re too sensible for that. Miller’s oldest son works for Apple in Silicon Valley; one daughter trained as a nurse, another as an accountant; his youngest son recently finished his Mormon mission and is contemplating law school. Miller suspects, and Jan agrees, that all four have surpassed him on the maturity front, the decision to forgo a life in beekeeping being one sure sign of a more evolved state. If you looked at a family tree, he says, he’d fall closer to the Neanderthals; his kids fall closer to Jan.

  Miller is wiry, though middle age has thickened him slightly around the waist. He never stands still; he veritably bounces. He gets excited about lots of things. He gets excited every time he pries the top off a beehive. He got excited about the beekeepers for obama pin he’d bought at a charity auction, even though—or precisely because—he didn’t support Obama in the least. He gets excited when people he knows are in the news. When he comes across their names, he mails them copies of the articles with a self-addressed envelope, to be signed and mailed back. He gets ideas, and he gets excited about them, and then he starts calling other people to get them excited, too. He wants all the bee advocacy groups to talk to each other. He wants beehives at the White House. He wants his employees to do things differently. Sometimes his ideas are good ones. Sometimes they wreak havoc. He likes that, too.

  He loves spreadsheets—loves them. If he were a mortician, he would log all the pallbearers into a database—he is serious about this because, remember, he feels strongly about death, but also because he believes that “numbers matter.” He keeps detailed records for every bee yard—spreadsheets galore—and knows the exact bloom date for every type of plant his bees visit. He knows all his friends’ phone numbers by heart. He loves his friends. A few years ago, Miller bought an old grocery store in his North Dakota summer hometown and turned the space into Miller Honey’s False Hope Gym, stocking it with exercise equipment and leaving it open 24/7 for the locals to use, no fees required. He believes in lost causes.

  He is not patient. He often disappears without goodbyes. He rarely sits through a church service or a party or a beekeeping meeting without an abrupt and unexplained departure and return. He can be very, very peevish. He relishes saying things that make you cringe. He likes you to be complicit in his fun. Even un-fun things can sound fun when he describes them.

  Although he disapproves of dying, Miller doesn’t wear a seat belt. He once flipped a ten-wheeler on Interstate 80 in California, just west of the Riverside exit, a couple of days after Christmas. It was full of corn syrup meant to keep his bees alive until the almonds bloomed. A kid in “a hulk of an old Camaro” who had just repaired his brakes—or tried to—passed Miller’s truck. Just as Miller said to himself, “piece of junk,” the kid put on the brakes and nothing happened. He went thisaway and thataway across the freeway in front of Miller, and then the Camaro’s tires popped and the car came screaming crossways to hit Miller’s ten-wheeler behind the spindle on the front axle. The steering wheel spun out of Miller’s hands, the front axle went airborne, and when it landed the truck commenced an elegant 180, tipped over, and sheared the straps that held a thousand-gallon tank of syrup on the back. The tank rolled down the highway like a bowling ball and lodged against a guardrail. The steering column and shifting tower pushed past the dashboard into the spot where Miller would have been sitting had he been wearing a seat belt. Because he wasn’t, he was thrown to the floor between the seats as the cab crumpled to a space just large enough to fit a “fat, bald guy,” as he likes to describe himself—although he is not fat at all and not entirely bald yet.

  Miller sat there, in the hive-like cavity of his crumpled cab, contemplating the unfavorable aspect of things. The state troopers were not going to be happy with him. The highway department would have to shut the road and sand down the slick of corn syrup to prevent further carnage. Miller would have to replace a $45,000 truck and pay an extra $1,200 for enough corn syrup to get the bees through the month. It was winter, and there was nothing in bloom, and there wasn’t enough honey to keep his bees alive until the almonds came into flower. There were orchards to visit and hives to place and pollen patties to lay. He had a whole lot of bees to feed before he was to leave on a Caribbean cruise four days later, one of the very few vacations he and his family had taken in all his years as a professional beekeeper. So here is what this particular brush with destiny taught him: never, ever wear a seat belt.

  YET NO ONE SHOULD WEAR THEM MORE, BECAUSE AS A MIGRATORY beekeeper he is on the road more often than not. The American Beekeeping Federation estimates that there are probably 1,200 other roaming bee guys in the United States—like Larry Krause, Miller’s friend in Wyoming, and Dave Hackenberg, who first noticed the symptoms of CCD. It is a profession uniquely suited to the diversity of the American landscape, the bigness of American agriculture and industry, and the restlessness of the American people. Like retirees in Winnebagos, migratory beekeepers winter in warm places—California, Texas, Florida—and in summer head north to the clover and alfalfa fields of the Dakotas and other rural, northern states. Miller likes to call the annual flight of the beekeepers the “native migrant tour,” because he and his colleagues are among the few migrant agricultural workers these days who were born in this country, and he likes to call himself the tour’s “padrone”—because, well, there’s no one within earshot to disagree. If traditional beekeepers are like European bees, single-minded and docile, migratory beekeepers might better be compared to Africanized “killer” bees—itinerant and aggressive, traveling in swarms.

  Miller is not the biggest beekeeper in the United States—South Dakota’s Richard Adee, with his eighty thousand hives, wins that distinction. But like the gentle, d
ark Carniolan bees he tends, Miller does have impeccable breeding. He is descended from Nephi Ephraim Miller, a Mormon farmer known as the “father of migratory beekeeping.” In 1894, N.E., as he was called, traded a few bushels of oats for seven boxes of bees and parlayed those seven boxes into a Utah beekeeping empire. “He was curious,” Miller says. “He was a gifted man, and he grew to understand the honey bee.” N. E. Miller pioneered the practice of migratory beekeeping, shipping his hives from the clover fields of Utah to the orange groves of California each winter, and he is famed for producing the nation’s first million-pound crop of honey. His sons and grandsons and great-grandsons followed in his footsteps, as have most of today’s commercial beekeepers, hoisting hundred-pound hives onto pallets and pallets onto semis that chase honey flows and pollination contracts north and south across the country.

  Bees organize their lives around seasons of plenty and want. So does Miller. Like his bees, he is frequently on the move, his life a series of numbers- and date-driven bursts of activity. Winter is a time of quiet, of loss, when bees cluster for survival in the hives, some stored near his home in Newcastle and some in leased potato cellars in Idaho, where 40-degree temperatures and well-ventilated darkness ensure a brief period of dormancy for the bees, to reserve their energy for the coming spring. Miller too hunkers with his family over the holidays, preparing for the busy year to come.

  Spring is a time of bustle, birth, rebuilding. It starts early for Miller and his bees. On January 19, he inspects and feeds the 2,700 hives he has stashed in fields and clearings near his house in Newcastle. On January 20, he begins shipping the rest of his bees—7,000 or so hives—from the Idaho cellars to California. From January 26 through the first two weeks of February, he roams a two-hundred-mile range from south of Modesto to north of Chico, placing colonies in almond orchards. During that time, he visits lots of taco wagons. On March 1, the bloom peaks, and from March 9 to 13, almond farmers “release” the bees that have been placed on their property from their contractual obligation, and Miller is free to take them away. He’s got to get them out fast then, or risk their starvation in the now-blossomless desert of the orchards and exposure to the variety of agricultural pesticides loosed on the Central Valley in spring. Pollinating crops is like being a hooker, Miller says: “I come in the night; I wear a veil; they give me their money; a few weeks later they call me and tell me to get out of there.”