Fueled by a tablespoon of honey, a single bee can encircle the globe three times. This is the story of how I followed in her wake, a quest to keep healthy hives in my own backyard. This quest, this curiosity took me on a globe-trotting adventureand led to a PhD in biology, where I focused on how honey bees communicate via chemical signals called pheromones.
Bees and beekeepers are disappearing in the developed world. Since 2006, American beekeepers have lost 5.6 million colonies. An uncompensated loss of bees valued at $1.12 billion.
As I tracked declining honey-bee health in the United States and Europe, a complicated picture emerged. No single factor is to blame, rather many small threads interweave, forming a tapestry of loss that raises some difficult questions.
Bees forage in a wide radius. A hive’s dinner plate covers 27,900 acres and expands up to 77,400 acres under nutritional duress. Who can possibly predict what bees encounter? Or how those factors interact?
Globalization has not always been kind to the beekeeping industry, opening the doors to imported parasites, and allowing disease to flow easily across borders. Against this colorful woven backdrop of the beekeeping industry, individual personalities loom large. Ask any 10 beekeepers the same question and you will receive 11 different answers.
Sorting fact from fiction is not an easy task. Everyone with a few years of beekeeping under their belt voices an opinion with the conviction of a Southern Baptist preacher, unswayable in their belief that they have it right. There are no ifs, buts or possible exceptions. Until, of course, you ask another “master” beekeeper...
With the funds raised, I will complete a 6,000-word essay on my adventures with bees, a lyric guide to healthy hives from an insider’s point of view. Any funds raised above the initial goal will help turn this piece into a book about our 55,000+ miles of globe-trotting bee adventures.
On a cold night I pull a crumpled raffle ticket out of my pocket to claim my prize. A prize that rearranges my life, a life I fought to make with my husband, setting down roots in the first place that ever felt like home after all the moves of my childhood.
The prize the raffle ticket brings me doesn’t look like much and doesn’t make me rich. At least not financially, though the travels and the experiences that still lie ahead enrich me. The big white Styrofoam box with thick, rigid sides looks wholly unimpressive – a newfangled contraption masquerading as an insulated bee hive, but without its buzzing inhabitants.
Bees, we learn, are disappearing. They’ve been likened to the canary in the coalmine, with our planet subbing in for the mine. But my focus is never on what is killing the bees. My love of flowers, of beauty unfurling new each day, has instilled a single goal in me: to keep healthy hives and help the bees survive.
As participants in this short course, a condensed primer on how to keep hives, we have all endured several Tuesday nights cramped into long rows of hard metal folding chairs. Designed to teach you how to keep your hive alive, they bombard us with long lists of diseases that dispatch bees. This torrent of disorders rains down on us and quenches the spark in many eager participants before they light their first smoker to work their very first hive. Nothing, I assure you, kills enthusiasm more than learning how many ways your new charges can die.
“If the bees disappeared from the earth, man would have no more than four years left to live. No more bees, no more pollination …no more men!” Albert Einstein said.
There’s only one problem. Einstein never said it. At least no source can be found. Enterprising European beekeepers protesting cheap honey imports in Brussels probably invented the catchy slogan in 1994, adding weight to their claim that beekeepers were being driven out of the business. Despite the invented quote, the concept is decidedly true. Beekeepers are disappearing.
I see Einstein in that iconic photo, white hair wild, his tongue sticking out, and somehow I feel this false quote is him having one last laugh. “Go ahead,” his chuckling eyes say. “Use my name for a worthy cause.”
Bees are disappearing too, under attack from parasites, disease and a fragmented agricultural landscape dominated by huge swaths of monotone cash crops: corn, soy and wheat—the bee’s nutritional equivalent of dining daily on McDonald’s, Burger King and Taco Bell.
“Don’t let them scare you,” my husband Michael whispers into my ear. “All animals have parasites and diseases.” He has raised everything from poultry to pigs. A big sow is buried out in our top field because the 300 lb. monster died the night before she was to be butchered, catching a chill in her kidneys. Michael, I know, has learned the hard way that livestock is easily lost.
“We will figure it out,” he adds.