Bees work a longer season

Modern industrial beekeepers keep their charges hard at work pollinating and discourage honey production.  As a substitute for honey, an artificial food is supplied to the bees: high fructose corn syrup.  The same sweetener used in soft drinks is now fed to bees.  The super sweetener, combined with sucrose and protein supplements, arrives in tanker trucks at the temporary installations of migrants bees.  The bees do not appreciate the stand-in and frequently refuse it thus compromising their nutrition.  

In the 21st century, bees work a longer season, have less time off in the winter, travel thousands of miles from their home territory, and eat a modern diet based on corn syrup.  All of these condition weaken the species.  Worker bees become more susceptible to mite infestation.  Queen bees live shorter lives. A bee expert from Pennsylvania reports an exhaustion of sorts, “a strong immune suppression” which he compares to "the AIDS of the bee industry.”

Cross-country travel and an artificial diet are not healthy for bees.  Nor is the constant contact with insecticides and pesticides used in industrial-sized orchards and fields.  One insecticide, whose use continues to rise in the United States, has been banned in some European countries because it is a contributing factor to the decline of the bee population.  

If you have a pet, you probably have the chemical in your home.  It is the active ingredient in a popular flea treatments for dogs and cats.  To prevent fleas, just squeeze a dose of the clear liquid between the animal’s shoulder blades.  Used once a month, the neurotoxin collects in the oils of your pet’s skin and fur and is released over time to kill unwanted insects.  Since it is not soluble in water, the “medication” stays in the pet’s fur, even after swimming.  According to the package instruction, fleas and ticks are killed by “affecting the parasite’s nervous system, causing paralysis and death.”

Too busy to care

As Interstate 5 passes through almond orchards near Bakersfield, I watch carefully for hive-boxes.  I easily spot the squat white forms, about two-feet square, positioned at intervals along the dirt road that skirts the orchard and runs parallel to the freeway.

Five hundred feet separate one cluster of 20 or so of hives from the next. Each group is arranged haphazardly, the boxes not quite squared off into neat neighborhoods.  The bee quarters look like long, low, flat-roofed slums.  Even at 70 mph, I see bare gray wood on the two-storied hives where paint has chipped off.  The disheveled arrangement speaks of keepers in a hurry, too busy to care.

These are no bee mansions.  In other words, hives have not been equipped with extra stories where foraging bees store newly made honey.  Pollination is the game here.  Honey production is kept to the bare minimum.

Industrial agriculture prizes bees only as pollinators.  According to bee expert, Stephan Buchmann, only 25 percent of bees fly solely to collect pollen.  The other 75 percent primarily gather nectar; collecting pollen is only a side job.  Obviously, in an industrialized bee culture, there is a desire to reverse these percentages.  Genetic manipulation has proved somewhat successful in converting more members of the hive to work exclusively on pollination.

Honeybees, when allowed, still produce their own perfect food.  An intensely sweet viscous substance, honey contains 80 percent sugar and 20 percent water.  Made from nectar gathered from flowers, honey represents much hard work and flight time.  The contents of a 16-once jar of honey represents the efforts of tens of thousands of bees flying over 100,000 miles to gather nectar from more than four million flowers.  

Bees turn almond flowers into nuts

Almond trees require an insect intermediary to pollinate its flowers. An almond flower is only an inch and a half across.  Only a bee can turn each flower into a nut.  The flower is self-incompatible; that is, it cannot create a nut using its own pollen.  The flower depends on bees to bring it pollen from a different almond cultivar planted nearby.  To further complicate the process, an almond flower is more receptive to pollination on its opening day.  Pollination must be complete by day four or the flower will not set fruit.

Factory-sized fields require an industrial-sized pollination operation.  This is too big a job for wild gypsy bees or feral bees escaped from local hives. It involves hiring the services of more than a million hives, providing temporary employment to more than 20 billion bees.  And, therein lies the problem.

In Roman times, the beekeeper tended the bees and the bees tended his crops.  But industrial farming rearranges the formula.  Almond farmers have no time to care for bee hives, even though the insect residents are essential to the almond crop.  Instead, industrial orchardists leave bee tending to industrial beekeepers.  In the process, each farmer becomes a specialized monocropper: one with almonds, one with bees. 

National and local newscasts carry reports of strange, unexplained disappearances of bees in the Central Vally.  Thousands of worker bees leave in the morning and simply don’t return at night.  Other strange bee behavior also occurs.  The queen remains active in the hive.  The brood remains safe in capped wax cells.  Adequate food for the hive is present.  Why would the workers abandon all this abundance?

Acres of almonds

In early March, I drive from Los Angeles to Monterey to attend a California Small Farm Conference.  Interstate 5 connects the two cities.  Leaving southern California, the freeway is a straight arrow heading north out of the Los Angeles metro area.  Then the Tehachapi mountain range restricts the tidy flow of traffic for a while. Finally, the highway adds an extra lane and descends with sweeping curves into the broad and verdant Central Valley.  On the valley floor near the city of Bakersfield, mile upon mile of almond groves flank both sides of the six-lane freeway.  As yet, there are no leaves.  Each tree in enveloped simply, in an exquisite cloak of white blossoms.  

A typical California almond orchard varies in size between 20 and 400 acres.  The orchards near Bakersfield appear to be at the upper end of the range.  A row of 40 or 50 trees forms one leg of a plot.  Dirt roads run at right angels back into the field and separate one sector from another.  With this tree count, each section could contain up to 2,000 trees. 

In 2013, California has 810,000 acres of almond orchards.  The state has idea weather for almonds: a short, late winter chill and long hot summers.  Perfect weather allows California to produce 75 percent of the world’s almond supply.  California farmers added 20,000 acres of almond production in just one year, 2012. Miniature trees in adjacent fields represent future ambitions.  With frail trunks sheltered from the blustery weather in two-inch plastic pipes angled to face the prevailing westerly winds, these young trees will begin to produce nuts in three to four years.

These almond groves demonstrates monocropping on a grand scale.  We usually associate monocropping -- that is, the planting of substantial amounts of land to a single crop -- with corn, wheat, soybeans or cotton.  Here, almond trees replace the more familiar fields of corn.  Almond farmers face one problem, however, that does not trouble corn growers.  Corn is a wind-pollinated crop.  The natural breezes of summer carry corn pollen from plant to plant to create new kernels of corn.  Almonds, on the other hand, require an insect intermediary, the honeybee. 

Industrial exploitation of bees

Unfortunately, modern life has turned domestication of animals into industrial exploitation.  Honey bees have been particularly hard hit by the transition. By custom, small farmers have kept one or two hives to help with pollination of vegetables and fruit flowers.  With a season’s work complete, the farmer then feels entitled to usurp any excess honey. 

Until recently, commercial keepers of honeybees, just like small farmers, counted on two benefits from members of their hives: pollination and honey.  That is to say, large commercial bee operations counted on two profit centers: the sale of honey and hive rental fees for pollination services of their bees.

In 2003, however, the price of honey fell drastically and drove most American beekeepers out of the honey market.  That year, China alone exported 22 million pounds of honey to the United States. American honey producers complained about artificially low prices. In 2008, the federal government imposed "anti-dumping" import duties on Chinese honey. To avoid the duties, China sold to other countries who relabeled the product. The saga became a major food scandal when an American honey packer admitted buying cheap, illegal honey.

As honey profits receded for American beekeepers, the necessity of profits moved pollinating services to the fore.  Thus began a grand migration.

Instead of bees staying close to home and foraging locally, commercial beekeepers now use forklifts to load hundreds of hives onto flatbed trucks.  Collectively, these trucks cart tens of billions of bees around the country.  The largest American itinerant hive-keeper routinely assembles a caravan of 20 trucks to cart his bees from Florida to the West Coast.  Half of all of North American industrial bees and their keepers converge on the chilly orchards of California’s Central Valley in February to service the almond crop. 

Bees and human: mutually beneficial

Virgil encourages readers to consider bees 

    a small society comprising systems worthy of our high esteem.

He describes the perfect bee yard.  It must be protected from winds, close to a tree-lined stream to provide shade and water.  Near the hive 

let all round be gay with ... spreads of fragrant thyme

                                and masses of aromatic savory.

         Let there be gardens to amuse them with the scent of 

                brightly colored flowers... wild strawberries

                 ... a luxury of limes and lindens and lilies ...

In Georgics, Virgin beautifully describes the mutually beneficial relationship that has evolved between bees, flowering plants and humans over the past 10,000 years.  In the 21st century, however, the disappearance of honeybees is a worrisome possibility.  What if this symbiotic relationship ceases to function?  Simply put, if worker bees disappear from our farms, vital foods disappear from our grocery store shelves and Farmers Markets.  Neither tomatoes nor cucumber nor squash can exist without bees to pollinate their flowers.  Almonds and walnut will vanish along with fruits such as  peaches, pears, nectarines and apples.  

Human beings have successfully domesticated several animal species.  Cows, horses, sheep, goats, cats, dogs and honeybees -- all accepted the human invitation to share our lives.  Mutually beneficial relationships have existed between human and these species for thousands of years.  Cows, sheep and goats trade their milk and meat for protection from predators.  Horses accept the confines of safe corrals and give farmers their broad shoulders for work.  This last is an important trade since each horse produces the work of ten people.  Cats trade who-knows-what rewards -- only they truly understand -- for convenient hunts of rats and mice.  Dogs are more forthright.  They alert us to intruders and lap up our appreciation of work well done. 

Bees gather pollen

Virgil, a Roman poet writing fifty years before the Christian era, uses poetry to educate his readers about working the land. He discusses how to lay out a vineyard.  

                              Make sure the [rows] run parallel

             and still maintain right angles with the boundary lines.

He advocates crop rotation. 

While your land gets a chance to rest by changing crops

    don’t think that all the while your fallow isn’t earning a return.

Virgin devotes an entire book, 568 lines of poetry, to the habits and proper care of honeybees.  He describes foraging bees as :

youngsters who haul themselves back home exhausted

                        
leg baskets loaded down with thyme.

The “thyme” carried in “leg baskets” is not the actual herb, but pollen from the herb’s flowers.  During a gathering journey, a bee moves among many flowers of the same species. An herb such as thyme is a favorite.  On her rounds, she (since all worker bees are females) carries pollen from one thyme plant to the next.  

Pollen, sticky and bright-colored, is a plant’s equivalent to semen.  It clings to hairs on the bee’s back and legs.  Some pollen brushes off as she dives into each new blossom in search of nectar.  The flower uses the captured pollen to begin a process of pollination and setting seed.

But not all pollen stays behind in the field.  Surplus amounts remain on the forager’s legs.  When she returns to the hive, these grains are removed by other worker bees and stored in wax cells as food for newly hatched brood. 

The difference between bees and wasps

To protect myself from an allergic reaction to bee venom, I carry an Epipen at all times for a self-administered dose of epinephrine if necessary.  I arrange my garden pathways to minimize contact with plants and bees, and I organize my garden schedule to avoid the special bee hazards of early fall.

Apis mellifera

Actually, it was a mistake to blame this scary event on bees (Apis mellifera). The actual culprits were yellow jackets (Vespula vulgaris), more properly identified as wasps, not bees.  We lump the two species together because they share some common characteristics.  

Both species live communally; both species are organized around a queen; member of both species are similarly colored, yellow and black/brown.  

Vespula vulgaris

In several ways, the two species are quite different.  Bees only seek food in flowers.  Yellow jackets, on the other hand, forage for sweet sap and carrion as well as flower nectar.  They become pests at picnics because they find hamburger, soft drinks and discarded pieces of peach attractive as food.

Both wasps and bees inject venom through their stingers.  Because of its barbed stinger, a honeybee stings only once, then dies.  A yellow jacket has no barb, so a wasp can sting repeatedly.  In addition, if their nest is disturbed, yellow jackets will attack, even swarm, an intruder.  Honeybees are much less aggressive. 

While honeybees over-winter in their hives, yellow jackets die off each year.  Only a fertilized queen wasp survives the winter.  Yellow jacket hive-membership reaches its peak in September.  Overcrowding and a diminishing food supply make for anxious and easily angered insects.  To be safe, I make few visits to my garden between early September and first frost in mid-October.