Bees in America Read online

  In the meantime, American beekeepers had their hands full with American and European foulbrood, pesticides, and even some infighting between beekeepers themselves, if H. L. Maxwell was correct in his assessment of beekeeping in 1959. Maxwell, using Virginia as an example, states that commercial beekeeping in Virginia was difficult. Commercial beekeepers tended to see small honey producers as competition, and the small honey producers saw the commercial beekeepers with a type of envy. He reported that meetings were rarely attended, and younger members were impossible to attract. Maxwell stated, “The most sustained effort at any official level has been that of the state inspector, and it is essentially a police effort. “23 He suggested that the average beekeeper was still an independent character, and it was not unlikely for an inspector to be met at gunpoint.

  “Independent” adequately describes one Alabama beekeeper named Euclid Rains, totally blind since a childhood accident scarred his eye tissue when he was three. His parents were determined not to treat him any differently, and so he grew up on the farm, orienting himself by using sound. In 1956, he bought a couple of hives from two men who delivered the bees, but then left. So Rains had to move the hives to a place where the bees would not be in the way. As he says, “The bees were very unhappy with the way I was handling their homecoming party and were more than vocal with their objections.”24 In 1957, he was the first person to receive a loan from the Farmer’s Home Administration. He is reported to have said, “If I was not too blind to pay taxes, I was not too blind to borrow tax money.”25

  Indeed, beekeepers were still independent, even if the rest of the nation was watching television shows that advocated conformity, such as Leave It to Beaver and I Love Lucy. California beekeeper Clay Tontz describes a hermit beekeeper nicknamed “The Mean Scarecrow,” who hung out in the ravines bordering Tontz’s beehives. The hermit came from Tennessee and spoke with an accent. To defend his place, the Scarecrow had devised “a hundred sorry beehives … filled with attack bees (short-fused black bees)…. Ropes were attached to the guard hives which were set on loose stones.” If anyone were to visit without warning, the Scarecrow could rock the hives and thus set loose a storm of bees on the victim. The Scarecrow was self-sufficient, but the “fruit jars of sloshing liquid brought down from the hills to customers after dark and labeled ‘honey’ had a kick like nothing ever carried in by the most zealous bee,” Tontz said diplomatically.26

  The Scarecrow’s days were numbered. He represented a time when challenges were easily confronted with a rifle, when boundary lines were clearly drawn—provided he was holding the rifle. But atomic weapons changed how the United States determined power. The hydrogen bomb fundamentally affected how a war would be fought, and the Korean War showed a clear need for diplomacy.

  Because the United States was considered a police power during the Korean War, its role was murkier than during World War II. Although food supplies were rationed during World War II, there were no noticeable interruptions in food staples as a direct result of the Korean War. However, the federal government did control wages and bee supplies. Wages at atomic power plants were considerably higher than at other factories. Thus, bee supply companies had a difficult time finding a labor supply. Bee companies like Kelley’s and Dadant’s and Root Company had hired women much sooner in the twentieth century than other industries. But World War II created a labor shortage. To fill the void, many women entered the bee industry, and they stayed even after the war had ended. Kelley, using a commercial honey packer named Walter Diehnelt in Wisconsin as an example, strongly advocated that women be incorporated in the honey houses across the United States. In an article titled, “Why Not Use Girls In the Honey House?” Kelley vouched for women employees: “We find that the girls are very neat and clean in their work and that their writing is more legible.”27 By the time he had written this article, Kelley had given up trying to maintain a workforce in Paducah, Kentucky, which was building an atomic power plant and paying workers more money. He moved his bee supply company to Clarkson, Kentucky, because he knew he could cultivate a loyal workforce and have cheaper shipping costs.

  Thus, the Korean War represents the beginning of the cold war era in which honey bees do not serve an obvious function in a military endeavor, although beekeepers certainly served, as they had done in previous American military operations. Norman Mitchell, for example, not only grew up a beekeeper in Idaho, he also came from a family of veterans: his father served in World War I and his brother in World War II. Norman served as an aviation engineer during the Korean War.28 When he returned, Norman returned to beekeeping, although he and his brother moved the business to Montana. As previously mentioned, Felipe Garcia, having already served during World War II, went to Korea. In a different form of service, Howard Graff “packed most of the honey that went to the Army Quartermaster in Korea and other South Pacific areas.”29

  The Black Migration

  An equally serious conflict was playing itself out in the United States in clubs, airwaves, and school playgrounds. Since slavery, the black population in the United States had been defined by migration and segregation, according to music historian Mike Rowe. When blacks began to leave the South in the 1940s, they took the most direct routes to the North, which were the railroad lines to St. Louis, New York, Detroit, and Chicago. By the 1950s, blacks would go west to Los Angeles as well. Furthermore, according to Rowe, the migration was “two-dimensional,” because blacks were moving away from farms into cities. The black communities were segregated in these cities, but the 1950s events would fundamentally alter race relations because, at least in the North, the black communities had achieved stability, if not equality. Once in these cities, blacks organized voting blocs, churches, and clubs.

  The blacks brought agrarian images and southern music styles with them. In Chicago, one of the black newspapers was the Bee. This newspaper did a lot to promote black musicians, politicians, business owners, and social calendars. Black musicians sang about the honey bee from the South all the way to St. Louis, to New York, to Detroit, to Chicago, and later, Los Angeles. Because these newly formed urban communities still had links to the South, the urban blacks financed a healthy cultural climate in which musicians developed a rural-based blues genre. Radios offered blocks of time to black musicians, and many musicians were able to profit by this promotion. In their songs, black musicians challenged the Victorian pretenses of modesty and chastity that had been lingering since the Anthony Comstock laws of the 1880s.30 The honey bee served as a metaphor to make bold pleas for love, sex, and affection. These images, combined with a heavy emphasis on the backbeat, fused with jazzier harmonic patterns for a cool new sound, as in a song by Slim Harpo, whose protagonist boldly declares: “I’m a King Bee, Baby / Won’t you spread your love all over me?”

  Harpo’s sexually charged lyrics appealed to both black and white audiences. This song influenced the Rolling Stones, who sang a cover of “I’m a King Bee” when they first played in America. Mick Jagger, befuddled by the racism existing in American rock ‘n’ roll in 1968, asked his listeners at one concert, “Why do you want to hear us when you can listen to Slim Harpo?”31 The answer was literally as plain as their noses on their Anglo-Saxon faces.

  The Rolling Stones also listened to Muddy Waters.32 On July 11, 1951, Muddy Waters recorded “Honey Bee,” a standard that he had written earlier when he worked on the Stovall cotton plantation back in the 1930s. That song also inspired Eric Clapton in 1958; Clapton declared, “I knew I could play guitar if I had mastered Muddy Waters’ ‘Honey Bee.’”33

  These blues players used the honey bee to sing about the heartbreak of unrequited love—or, just as often, about the joys of illicit love, either with a partner who is too young, too married, or too dangerous. According to Muddy Waters’s biographer Walter Gordon, the songs were “about sex with someone else’s wife, sex with someone else’s girlfriend, sex and trouble…. sex was sex, but sex also became an analogy for a kind of freedom, a freedom to serve himse
lf, to damn the torpedoes, the shift supervisor, and the overseer’s big gun.”34 Postwar Chicago was the place for these displaced Southern men; “The Chicago Black Renaissance reflected the impact of [FDR’s] Works Progress Administration on the lives of artists,” according to historians Hine, Hine, and Harrold.35 Chicago offered a huge recording industry for black singers. Fortunately, the British and Irish teenagers didn’t have the same racial prejudices affecting American recording industries; they embraced Muddy Waters, Slim Harpo, and their aggressive bees, which captured the sweetness and the painfulness of life and love in the black world.

  Not all blacks left the Delta or the South. In fact, one even stayed on the farm and kept bees, although unfortunately we don’t know his name. A 1959 American Bee Journal article mentions a very successful black Virginia beekeeper “who [kept] over three hundred colonies. In fact, he is the largest beekeeper in the Southeast and a good one.”36 In Cade, Louisiana, two black beekeepers—Charles Joseph and Frank Decuir—managed Walter Kelley’s queen and package bee industry. Although the company had moved to Kentucky in the 1930s, Frank was in charge of the field colonies used to provide bees for the nucs, and Charles managed the queen-rearing and queen-mating operation.37 Thus, southern blacks maintained an active and important, although barely visible, presence in beekeeping.

  The Appalachian scene seems tame by comparison to Chicago, but honey bees were prominent symbols of sustainability in the literature from that region. In a book targeted to the young adult market, The Beatinest Boy, Kentucky writer Jesse Stuart gives one of the first fully developed portraits of an elderly woman beekeeper.38 In this book, David tries to earn money for a Christmas gift for Grandmother Beverly but finds that he has little heart to kill animals for their skins. David decides to cut down a bee tree and sell the honey. Without realizing David’s ulterior motive, Grandmother Beverly offers her help. She teaches him how to cut the tree, take the honey, and repair the cavity in the tree so that the bees will live in it through the winter. She merely passes on the skills handed down from earlier generations, but this story’s importance in the 1950s illustrates that honey hunting and hunters were still important in the barter-exchange economy in the Appalachians.

  Chicago and Kentucky—the two regions could not be more different. However, in a time known for conformity, suburbs, and social rules, the artists from two regions used the honey bee as a way to express independence, self-sufficiency, and sexuality.

  Even though Karl Showler stated that American beekeeping “pretty much collapsed in 1955,” international forces were at work that would both strengthen and challenge the beekeeping community.39

  The 1960s

  Within ten years, the order and conformity characterizing the 1950s American Dream (a house, a car, two children, and a wife in the kitchen) exploded just as quickly as it had been created by advertisements, television, and government-sponsored incentives to veterans. Suburbs and televisions created a conformist mind-set that many young people wanted to change when John F. Kennedy became president. Women returned to college to explore new roles and careers. Rock‘n’roll, so intimately tied with the black arts movement, introduced the riffs and rills of the southern blues, albeit with electric guitars. International groups such as the Peace Corps sent many beekeepers to foreign countries. These factors, combined with the environmental movement, prompted a cultural shift in values. In the fragments of the fallout, there too were honey bees. The honey bee represented a shift against the industrial countryside that California and, arguably, the United States had become.

  To D. C. Jarvis belongs the credit for tapping into a widespread desire for simpler foods, simpler medicines, and simpler lifestyles. When Folk Medicine was released, little did Jarvis know how popular his book would become. Folk Medicine was a best-seller and prompted a wave of appreciation for bees and honey. Many beekeepers credit the higher honey prices at this time to this book. Although the pharmaceutical industry had long depended on honey as a vehicle in medicines, Jarvis wrote in a folksy tone that was perfect for his audience. Honey was a staple ingredient in many cough syrups. In tonics containing iron, honey could improve the taste. Furthermore, many medicinal liquids could be shaken and their medicinal properties would remain intact if they contained honey. In other words, these liquids had a longer shelf life because honey would prevent microbiological organisms from forming.

  Many young people, now called “hippies,” returned to farms and cultivated agrarian skills such as beekeeping. Honey became cool. The side effects ranged widely. The number of hobbyist beekeepers skyrocketed. Dick Bonney, for example, left the corporate world to raise bees. Eventually, he became the University of Massachusetts Extension apiculturist.

  The back-to-nature movement fueled Bee Culture’s staff writer Charles Mraz to develop his own research in apitherapy with bee venom therapy. Even though the medical community did not embrace these holistic treatments at the time, many people sought Mraz for stings to treat arthritis and other ailments.

  Beekeepers went abroad as part of the Peace Corps or the Heifer Project. Both programs taught beekeeping in third world countries because there was little cost in investment, low impact on the land, and the rewards were many. American beekeepers also gained invaluable knowledge about politics. Many would learn that their knowledge about bees would do little good in any environment unless people had access to bee veils, gloves, and smokers. When evaluating the impact of Peace Corps beekeepers, Bee Culture writer Karl Showler thought that the American beekeepers would get experience in third world countries that would serve them in their own country.40

  Meanwhile, back in the United States, commercial beekeepers realized that the hippie movement could actually be a good thing, although the effects weren’t felt in the 1960s, but rather in the 1970s. Even though honey prices jumped up to fifty cents a pound, as far as the Commodity Credit Corporation was concerned, not much had changed regarding the beekeeper’s fate in America. In Whynott’s Following the Bloom, Horace Bell explains, “For a couple of years, everything stayed the same, queens, foundation, wood. Everything didn’t catch up right off.”41

  Meanwhile, beekeepers were losing bees in major kills from pesticides. When farmers were no longer allowed to use the chemical DDT on their crops, they switched to other pesticides. The most dangerous was Penncap-M. This spray, comprised of tiny pesticide capsules the size of pollen grains, was collected by bees and returned to the hive. Excessive bee kills during the latter part of the 1960s were responsible for many commercial beekeepers going out of business.42 The top four states receiving federal money from the bee-kill indemnity program were Washington, California, Arizona, and Georgia. In fact, bees in Arizona declined almost 50 percent between 1963 and 1977.43

  6.1. Medina Honey Fest float (1959). Courtesy of Bee Culture. This float’s theme, “Free as a Bee,” is emphasized by the women wearing shorts and bobbed haircuts. Bees suspended mid-foraging flight are a nice touch. The A. I. Root candle factory is behind the float.

  Beekeepers found a ready honey market in Japan, another reason why honey prices increased. With a steady export market and a healthy domestic market fueled by alternative lifestyles, beekeepers enjoyed steady prices throughout the 1960s. With forklifts, large trucks, and palletized hives, the migratory beekeeper was the reverse of the back-to-the-land beekeeper. Douglas Whynott explains, “But in the midsixties beekeepers in North Dakota began experimenting with the Bobcat forklifts that had been developed for farm use, machines with sharp turning radii and tilting masts. They developed a hardwood pallet that could hold four to six hives, and lifted the entire unit on the truck. It worked wonderfully, and the beekeeping industry changed in a way it had not changed since Langstroth discovered bee space.”44

  Many women were no longer content to remain inside the 1950s home, however. They wanted to forge new careers and fight for equal rights. Ida Kelley, who had always been a partner in her marriage to Walter Kelley and who had been a home economics teacher before thei
r marriage, volunteered to teach in the local school lunchroom programs that were required to use the surplus honey from the government store-houses.45 It is ironic that during a time known for disorder and chaos, many women chose to wear their hair in a fashion suggestive of stability and order: the beehive. This hairstyle—no rollers, no curling irons—showed that long hair could be sleek and glamorous. This cultural phenomenon freed women from Donna Reed. Just look at the difference between the women who rode on the Medina Honey Fest float and the 1947 Mormon Centennial. Compared with the antebellum hoops of the Centennial, the Medina queens are indicative of just how quickly American culture changed in approximately ten years. The Medina women wear shorts that are, well, short, and ditto the hair. These women are hatless and gloveless—and more power to them.

  The Beekeeper’s Daughter

  The poet Sylvia Plath, born to a respected German beekeeper, gave voice to a general dissatisfaction among women by using bees as a metaphor.46 While her marriage to poet Ted Hughes dissolved, she sought solace in beekeeping and poetry. The resulting masterpiece, Ariel, is considered her finest collection of poems. The title, Ariel, which alludes to Shakespeare’s fairy in The Tempest, suggests charms and magic spells. However, in Plath’s work, Ariel sings a lament, not a magic spell, in “The Bee Meeting”:

  The white hive is snug as a virgin,