Bees in America Page 21
Occasionally, beekeepers could use a good cup of coffee to get on the good side of an inspector. The most delightful honey house inspector story from the 1940s involves Willie the Enforcer. Clay Tontz writes about the post-World War II days in Covina, California. Despite his short stature, Inspector Willie could strike fear in the hearts of honey sellers: “He was all in black—black suit, black felt hat, the brim turned down over dark eyes, gangster fashion. In his right hand he carried a huge, black fountain pen, gripped and pointing forward like a gat. Under his left arm he carried a long, narrow record book (black, of course) about as long as his arm.” Tontz had one ace—his wife, Jeanette. While Willie the Enforcer was busy writing his list of violations, Jeanette applied her makeup, started the coffee, and pulled out apricot pie. When she insisted he join them for dessert, Willie the Enforcer met his match. “The great, menacing black fountain pen faltered, then stopped,” writes Tontz. “His long book clamped shut like a pair of crocodile’s jaws at lunch.”136
Dances with Bees
Amidst the massive carnage of World War II, Karl von Frisch published Bee Dancing and Communication (1944), his findings about bee communication and social order. He was not the first to theorize that bees could communicate. Indeed, the early Greek writer Aristotle noticed that recruits were sent out in search of food. In The World History of Beekeeping and Honey Hunting, Eva Crane includes a quote from book 9 of the Historia animalium describing the foragers: “‘On reaching the hive they throw off their load, and each bee on his return is accompanied by three or four companions. One cannot tell what is the substance they gather, nor the exact process of their work.”137
As late as the twentieth century, writers assumed that bees were dancing for joy because they had found pollen. Crane includes a quote from E. R. Root (son of A. I. Root) writing in 1908 that a dance was “a sign of joy that they have found pollen, and that they take this means to communicate the knowledge of it to their fellows.”138 The black researcher Charles Henry Turner conducted color and pattern experiments in St. Louis in 1910, but his findings were overlooked. O. W. Park successfully tracked the dances of water-collecting bees, and these findings established the foundation from which von Frisch drew for his studies. So obviously, bee researchers had been interested in dances for a long time. But von Frisch was the first one to clearly describe and illustrate these dances in ways that a general audience could understand.
In order to communicate pollen and nectar sources, honey bees developed two dances: the round and the waggle dances. When a forager honey bee returns to attract recruits to the new sources, it can use these two dances to communicate distance and direction of the flowers. A round dance is performed when food is within ninety meters of the hive. First, the forager bee unloads its supply to its waiting sisters. When it is on the comb, it begins the dance: “On the part of the comb where she is sitting she starts whirling around in a narrow circle, constantly changing her direction, turning now right, now left, dancing clockwise and anticlockwise in quick succession, describing between one and two circles in each direction.”139 But the other bees in the hive will join the forager bee: “What makes it so particularly striking and attractive is the way it infects the surrounding bees … those sitting next to the dancer start tripping after her, always trying to keep their feelers on her,” explains von Frisch. In this way, the other bees can memorize the directions and go scout for the sources themselves.
The waggle dance is performed when food sources are farther than ninety meters away. The forager bees then must convey more information to their sister-recruits. The flower’s relation to the sun is more important in the waggle dance. Says Frisch: “The characteristic feature which distinguishes this ‘wagging dance’ from the round dance is a striking, rapid wagging of the bee’s abdomen performed only during her straight run.”140 The number of waggles increases with distance. Thus, the more waggles a dance has, the longer the distance the recruits must fly to reach the source.
James and Carol Gould best explain how the bees learn direction: “When the waggle run in a dance is pointed up (the dances are performed on vertical sheets of comb), the feeding station is always in line with the sun; when the food source is directly away from the sun as viewed from the hive, the dances point down; when the food is located 80 degrees to the left of the sun, the dance points 80 degrees to the left of vertical. A bee attending a dance need only determine the orientation and duration of the waggle run in order to know the distance and direction of the food.”141 These dances provide much-needed communication between the forager bees and the recruiter bees. Von Frisch was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1973 for this insight into honey bee communication.
Early in her life, the queen leaves the hive, although it is not to forage for food. In order to mate with the drones, the queen goes on several nuptial flights. The queen generally mates with the drones that fly the highest and are able to catch her. In unsympathetic language, Sue Hubbell describes the process, “When a drone sees a queen, he flies high in the air to mate with her. He mates by inserting his penis into her sting chamber, which closes around it, causing it to rip loose from his body as he bends over backward and falls lifeless to the ground.”142 The queen will mate a number of times in the air and then return to the hive. Beekeepers check to see if the queen has been out by looking for the drone’s entrails, something that they call the “mating sign.”
When the artificial insemination industry was in full swing, essayist E. B. White wrote a hilarious poem satirizing the human’s attempt to control the bee society, especially the queen. Published in the New Yorker in 1945, “Song of the Queen Bee” is told from the queen’s perspective and protests the industrialization of reproduction:143
Song of the Queen Bee
“The breeding of the bee,” says a United States Department of Agriculture bulletin on artificial insemination, “has always been handicapped by the fact that the queen mates in the air with whatever drone she encounters.”
When the air is wine and the wind is free
and the morning sits on the lovely lea
and sunlight ripples on every tree
Then love-in-air is the thing for me
I’m a bee,
I’m a ravishing, rollicking, young queen bee,
That’s me.
I wish to state that I think it’s great,
Oh, it’s simply rare in the upper air,
It’s the place to pair With a bee.
…
There’s a kind of a wild and glad elation
In the natural way of insemination;
Who thinks that love is a handicap
Is a fuddydud and a common sap,
For I am a queen and I am a bee,
I’m devil-may-care and I’m fancy-free,
The test tube doesn’t appeal to me,
Not me,
I’m a bee.
And I’m here to state that I’ll always mate
With whatever drone I encounter.
…
Mares and cows, by calculating,
Improve themselves with loveless mating,
Let groundlings breed in the modern fashion,
I’ll stick to the air and the grand old passion;
I may be small and I’m just a bee
But I won’t have science improving me,
Not me,
I’m a bee.
On a day that’s fair with a wind that’s free,
Any old drone is a lad for me.
I’ve no flair for love moderne,
It’s far too studied, far too stern,
I’m just a bee—I’m wild, I’m free, That’s me.
I can’t afford to be too choosy;
In every queen there’s a touch of floozy,
And it’s simply rare
In the upper air
And I wish to state
That I’ll always mate
With whatever drone I encounter.
…
If any old farmer can k
eep and hive me,
Then any old drone may catch and wife me;
I’m sorry for creatures who cannot pair
On a gorgeous day in the upper air,
I’m sorry for cows that have to boast
Of affairs they’ve had by parcel post,
I’m sorry for a man with his plots and guile,
His test-tube manner, his test-tube smile;
I’ll multiply and I’ll increase
As I always have—by mere caprice;
For I am a queen and I am a bee,
I’m devil-may-care and I’m fancy-free,
Love-in-air is the thing for me,
Oh, it’s simply rare
In the beautiful air,
And I wish to state
That I’ll always mate
With whatever drone I encounter.
All hail the queen!
Sex was indeed in the air for war-weary Americans, and Delta blues singers appropriated the honey bee in their songs about romantic relationships. The blues singers knew about difficult relationships: they were black in a white world. The combination of the honey bee image, bottleneck slide guitars, and a gravely voice worked its magic with at least two musicians: Muddy Waters and Slim Harpo. The blues—well, the blues made listeners feel better about life’s bitterness, or at least less alone.
If you were black and wanted to sing in Mississippi, you could play in a juke joint almost any night of the week somewhere on Highway 61. But if you were black and wanted to get paid real money, you headed up to Southside Chicago, which joined New York as a center of black culture in the 1930s. It offered more freedom, more economic opportunities, and more music. By 1930, the largest population of Mississippians outside the state was in Chicago.144 As America’s entrance into World War II stoked the industrial fires of the northern factories, the need for soldiers created a labor crisis in the factories. Of the African Americans who went north in the first half of the century, nearly half migrated between 1940 and 1947.145
A cotton sharecropper named McKinley “Muddy Waters” Morganfield had a habit of composing songs to pass the time while riding on a tractor in Mississippi. One of his most famous, “Honey Bee,” became a hit after he moved to Chicago in 1939. Although blues musicians didn’t hit the big time until the 1950s, the solid black cultural base began to form in the cities as early as 1915 with Jelly Roll Morton’s first jazz notations and in the 1920s with Mamie Smith’s “Crazy Blues.”146 During the 1940s, when the black veterans returned from World War II and relocated from the rural areas to the urban cities, the blues found a new energy. When black musicians started singing about honey bees, they were singing to an audience divorced from the land, their family, and their heritage.
Postwar Progress
After the war, Congress realized the need to provide and protect honey bees in order to maintain the food supply for this country and other nations if it wanted to attain superpower status. In 1949, Congress passed the first price support programs for commercial beekeepers. The government’s aid was long overdue, but the price support program had its own flaws: Congress only took honey and beeswax economic values into consideration and completely ignored the value of pollination services. Furthermore, many beekeepers unloaded their inferior grades of honey onto the government. Still, the price support program offered stability to honey producers for the first time since it had become an industry.147
Research funds were also appropriated to discover quick, efficient chemical ways to combat age-old beekeeping problems. The knowledge of sulfa drugs learned in World War II was transferred to the beehive: Leonard Haseman and L. F. Childers learned that sulfa drugs could contain the spread of AFB. AFB is a bacterium caused by Paenibacillus larvae, formerly called Bacillus larvae. The compound sodium sulfathiazole provided a short-term control by suppressing the symptoms. It also prevented the reproductive spores from germinating. Consequently, largescale commercial beekeepers got a boost.148 Administering sulfa as a powder or mixed in sugar syrup did not require the immense amount of labor that shaking bees onto new foundation demanded, or the expensive practice of killing colonies and burning the contaminated equipment. Researcher Bill Wilson explains why commercial beekeepers adopted the chemical cure: “Eventually most beekeepers and inspectors realized the economic value of protecting colonies with the chemical treatment. It wasn’t long before the practice became widespread. From that point on, the ancient scourge of beekeeping, foulbrood disease, lost much of its impact.”149 The availability of sulfa drugs had a downside: research about natural bee resistance to AFB was neglected until the latter part of the twentieth century. Thus, O. W. Park’s studies, which had been done in the 1930s, were shelved until the 1980s.
The buildup of the United States as a cold war superpower required the participation of bees. In order to test chemical warfare, bees were used to check radioactive pollen from land areas where tests had been done. The army used the Aberdeen Proving Ground in Maryland as a dump for chemical warfare agents, unexploded munitions, and wastes from research and production facilities throughout the 1940s. Because seepage from these materials affected surrounding insect life significantly, the army still maintains wired hives with infrared bee counters to track flight activity and search for deviations from the insects’ normal patterns.150
Even as the United States was looking into the future to define new strategies for war, political power, and diplomacy, many communities were looking backward to celebrate the past. Salt Lake City commemorated the honey bee in its 1947 centennial parade. On one massive float, one lady stood out above all the rest, with a huge crimson hoop skirt, gold hives sewn around the hoop, and gold bees on the gossamer fabric sleeves. The other ladies, sporting dresses with wagon wheels and seagulls, did not stand a chance next to the queen bee.
This beehive dress embodied a classic dilemma facing 1950s America: the desire to move forward, but the simultaneous desire to hold to symbols of the past. In the Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee screenplay Inherit the Wind, the lead defense attorney summed up the effects of technology on American culture in his closing argument: “Progress has never been a bargain. You’ve got to pay for it. Sometimes I think there’s a man behind a counter who says, ‘All right, you can have a telephone, but you’ll have to give up privacy, the charm of distance. Madam, you may vote; but at a price; you lose the right to retreat behind a powder-puff or a petticoat. Mister, you may conquer the air; but the birds will lose their wonder, and the clouds will smell of gasoline!’”151 Scientific advancements and improved transportation further opened the possibilities of a commercial honey industry, but in doing so, beekeeping lost the appeal of a cottage industry. With the opportunities for federal support came the need for legislation and regulation. When people moved to the cities, they forgot the joy of opening a hive to get honey. When they preferred electricity, they forgot the pleasant scent of a beeswax candle. So they recaptured those pastoral ideals by turning to the arts—to songs, to books, to poems, and to ballroom dresses—without having to forego the hard-won accomplishments earned during the Depression and two world wars.
5.17. Salt Lake City Mormon celebration float, 1947. Courtesy of Utah State Historical Society. Each gown featured in this photo is an important symbol to Mormon society—the bee skep, the wagon wheel, and the seagull. The bee skep dress is on the right. The dress itself is crimson with gold skeps. Bees are on the sleeves.
Chapter 6
LATE TWENTIETH CENTURY GLOBALIZATION, 1950-2000
Nature has unlimited time in which to travel along tortuous paths to an unknown destination. The mind of man is too feeble to discern whence or whither the path runs and has to be content if it can discern only portions of the track, however small.
—Karl von Frisch
Almond trees dot the California valley like Degas ballerinas. The limbs, pruned precisely so that sunlight will strike the middle of the trunks, fan out like pink tutus. The blossoms have a dusky, dusty scent so thick it is almost cloying.
Almost. Little did Franciscan priest Junipero Serra know how the almond trees he brought with him to California in 1767 would affect American beekeeping. It is not by accident that the Spanish would transplant so many crops to California. The state has many of the same Mediterranean conditions that defined successful Spanish agriculture—that is, approximately fifteen to twenty inches of rain a year, dry heat, good drainage, and chilly winter temperatures. Before Father Serra died in 1784, he had established nine missions along the western branch of El Camino Real, which stretched from California to San Antonio. In the 1840s, growers were finally experimenting with hybrids and grafting and each mission contained a grove, although the perfect tree eluded them.
By the 1950s, orchard growers finally accomplished what they were striving for: a good combination between an irrigated valley floor, almonds grafted to a peach root stock, and acreage—a lot of acreage. Half a million acres, to be exact. More acreage than Spain, the world’s primary almond supplier until the 1950s, to emphasize the point. In short, California provided ideal growing conditions for producing bumper crops of almonds for the world—if beekeepers could provide the bees to pollinate the almond orchards. Almond trees are not self-pollinating, and because of this basic fact, the ancient relationship between bees and cows shifted subtly in twentieth-century America. Although it had been proven that cows and cattle could succeed virtually anywhere in America, almonds most assuredly could not. If specialization was the key to succeeding in the industrial countryside, almond growers captured the moment in the 1950s, and beekeepers were an inextricable element in their formula.