Bees in America Page 25
So when he moved to the United States in the 1960s, Van Morrison merged the blues and the sensual honey bee imagery with his own Ulster background in “Tupelo Honey.”67 The result is an intense, carefully measured love song that moves as slowly as the liquid itself. Flutist Bruce Royston lulls us into the song. The saxophone solo evokes the sultry swamp atmosphere associated with the Delta juke joints. Although this album was produced during a difficult time in Morrison’s life, the song became a Morrison standard. What is important is what the song is not: it is not strictly blues, and it is not strictly Celtic. It is a bluesy little ditty infused with Celtic flute merging into a powerful saxophone-driven resolution. Its sincerity has its roots in the blues, but it is assuredly Irish as well and makes for a nice foundation of the 1970s music, so much of which was blues borrowed unapologetically by rock ‘n’ rollers.
Morrison wasn’t the only one going back to the agrarian images in his music. A group of black women from Washington, D.C., led by Bernice Johnson Reagon, formed their own a cappella group, Sweet Honey in the Rock. Reagon, the daughter of a Georgia Baptist preacher, was involved in the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee Freedom Singers in the 1960s civil rights movement. Extending the momentum of the movement to the inner city, Reagon uses all varieties of music—spirituals, blues, jazz, gospels, and hymns—to reaffirm justice and freedom. These women maintained the spiritual and gospel tradition but also acknowledged the changing terrain of gospel: it was no longer just a rural art form, but also an urban one. These women were the best proof of the old parable describing the land of Canaan as being so good that honey flowed when the land cracked open. They were and continue to be strong voices of protest, but their music is smooth and soothing, like a balm for the discord they sing of.
The 1970s began optimistically, with beekeepers seeing profits from natural foods markets and the export market to Japan. But the banter about African honey bees continued to create pressure between beekeepers and the public. Commercial pesticides continued to kill bees, and chalkbrood proved to be a new threat. Beekeepers struggled not only to make ends meet, but to save their bees. Researchers prepared to begin artificial insemination on a widespread scale to address a number of challenges to the honey bees in the coming decades. But toward the end of the decade, beekeepers didn’t have political support. When former Wisconsin governor Lee Dreyfus was approached by a well-meaning honey producer, who tried to give him a jar of honey, Dreyfus refused, claiming that his wife Joyce had refused to eat “bee poop” since childhood.68 Dreyfus survived the furor, but the Wisconsin beekeepers were not happy. Even Georgia-born president Jimmy Carter voted against tariffs that would protect beekeepers from honey imports in 1976.
In retrospect, the 1970s served as a warm-up for the major disasters that would come in the 1980s and 1990s when varroa and tracheal mites arrived. Beekeepers would find themselves very much alone, without political protection, media protection, or even legal protection.
The 1980s
Forget the images of African honey bees swarming helpless bystanders. The tracheal and varroa mites were far worse than anything Irwin Allen could have imagined. However, the process of pesticide regulation got a significant boost in 1981. In a case similar to the Wisconsin case in the 1970s, Connecticut beekeepers suspected that their bees had been contaminated with Penncap-M, the same chemical that destroyed Honl’s colonies. The legal process took three years, but eventually beekeepers realized that colony losses had to be documented. The Connecticut group eventually prevailed and the use of Penncap-M was curtailed.
Still, by the 1980s, pollination studies were providing a way to understand how beekeepers could reduce their bee kills. If it is windy, the chemicals can be blown onto target plants. The bottom line: beekeepers had to learn to work with farmers to prevent these kills from happening. But it was often easier said than done.
Congress also revised the honey price stabilization program, which was originally designed to protect pollination services. But as the price stabilization program was utilized during the 1960s and 1970s, the emphasis on pollination evaporated, and honey became its focal point. According to Bee Culture writer Glenn Gibson, when the federal program was put in place, Congress did not understand the problems of the beekeeping industry. Many politicians assumed, for instance, that high prices under the honey loan program resulted in overproduction of honey, which wasn’t the case.
Letting politicians use high honey prices as the deciding factor as to the availability of honey bees for pollination could be a mistake, Gibson asserted, for honey availability doesn’t suggest anything about the number of bees available for pollination. There was so much honey in the 1950s because it was cheaper to let the government buy the honey than sell it on the market, not because bees had produced more honey. However, as a result of unregulated pesticide uses, honey bees were killed frequently. Thus, the hives of bees available for pollination were fewer, although just looking at the abundant amount of honey in the warehouses would wrongly suggest otherwise. Politicians assumed that beekeepers could offset market losses with an increase in pollination fees. Although the idea may be a good one in economic theory, rarely were beekeepers able to raise their pollination prices in practice.
So the government went back to the drawing board. In effect, it wanted out of the honey-producing industry. The Honey Price Support Program of 1986 provided more regulation of the honey industry, especially with loans and buyback policies. If market prices were too low, loans were available for those honey producers who would want to store their honey until the prices were higher. If producers or cooperatives chose to sell their honey, they could repay the loan at below-loan rates.
If borrowers were unwilling or unable to pay back their loan, they could forfeit the honey to the Commodity Credit Corporation (CCC). The CCC was obligated to accept the honey as full payment of the loan.69 These efforts were designed to provide support to beekeepers while helping the government get out of the honey industry.
Mites
Since 1922, when Congress banned the importation of other varieties of honey bees, the Italian honey bee has been the primary bee used in commercial and hobby operations in America. And although there were studies done in the 1940s to breed foulbrood resistance, chemicals were cheaper and easier to distribute. Very little had been done in the areas of disease-resistant bees until both the tracheal and varroa mites arrived in the 1980s and forced the bee industry to acknowledge the need for such research.
The tracheal mite, which arrived from Europe in 1984, affects the honey bee’s tracheal passages, making it difficult for the bee to breathe. The life cycle of the mite works in this way: An adult female mite feeds on the blood of an adult bee’s tracheal tube. The mite lays a male egg and female eggs, and then dies. The male and females will mate inside the tracheal tube. The male dies, and the pregnant females continue to feed on bee blood. These mites thus cause damage to adult bees by impairing performance and piercing tracheal tubes.
Unlike the tracheal mite, which affects adult bees, the varroa mite works from within the brood chamber. A pregnant female mite enters the hive on an adult bee. Once in the hive, the varroa mite will bury itself in the bottom of a brood cell, placing itself in the royal jelly. When the cell is capped, the varroa mite will feed on the larvae. It lays several female eggs and one male egg. These will hatch and mate. When the young bee emerges, the mother and daughter mites are ready to begin the cycle again. However, the bee has been damaged because it has been used as a host for the mite.
Of the two mites, the varroa has had more disastrous consequences to honey bees. The varroa mite first appeared in the United States in 1987 from Asia and caused horrific damage, quickly wiping out thousands of colonies. The mite reproduces on worker bees, thus making hives susceptible to mite damage all year long as opposed to seasonally, which tends to happen with tracheal mites. The mites inflicted such damage that many states imposed quarantines, which mandated that beekeepers stay within their co
nfined areas. In North Dakota, the state authorities imposed a quarantine in October 1986. Those beekeepers who were just finishing their summer harvest and preparing to leave for warmer climates were trapped. Some beekeepers lost so many bees to winterkill that the tracheal mite was an afterthought.
Varroa mites inflicted such damage that the Canadian government closed its borders to American queen breeders by 1986. The effect on American breeders can be summarized in Fred Rossman’s experience: “We were shipping fifty thousand packages and queens until the bottom fell out of Canadian exports in April of 1986,” explains Fred Rossman, heir of a queen and bee package business. But “when you shut off 90% of your business overnight as they did to us, it leaves you with nowhere to go.”70 Rossman adequately summed up many beekeepers’ helplessness when dealing with varroa.
Then there were beekeepers who chose to ignore the quarantines and risk the fines. Driving at night, on backroads, and avoiding public places—these were activities that have a covert ring to them, and in a way, they were covert. Those few who were caught received stiff fines.
Beekeepers and researchers turned their attention to developing resistant bees again. Sue Cobey, having worked with Harry Laidlaw Jr. and John Harbo, polished her skills with artificial insemination to develop a breeding program that would work to select several traits such as disease resistance, good hygienic tendencies, and overwintering. As Cobey explains, normal mating among honey bees can be more complex than people realize because two factors—genetics and environment—make for unpredictable results. In ideal conditions, if a queen bee mates in the air, she would mate with drones that exhibit admirable traits, such as disease resistance, mite resistance, or hygienic behavior. But conditions are rarely ideal, and there are always factors affecting normal mating that cannot be controlled.
It was in the 1980s when beekeepers, especially commercial queen producers, began to take the new stock seriously, and Cobey began to see the potential for developing a good instrumental insemination program for disease-resistant bees.71 So Cobey turned her attention to a new strain, the New World Carniolans, which has shown some resistance to varroa. They have several advantages: they are winter hardy, take advantage of early spring nectar flows, build up strong colonies quickly, produce good honey crops, and use winter honey sparingly. More has yet to be done with this strain, as varroa continues to be a factor in American beekeeping.
During the 1980s, Marla Spivak attended the University of Kansas, “a mecca for social insects,” to use her words. After landing a grant to study how African bees would respond to higher elevations, she went to Costa Rica in 1984. Interestingly enough, in her studies she learned that African bees adjusted quite well to higher elevations and that the Costa Rican people adjusted quite well to the African bees. In fact, the biggest problem associated with the African bee, it seems, is that Costa Rican people did not have the proper equipment such as bee veils and suits.
Meanwhile, a pest management system used in a variety of other agricultural crops and parasite control was beginning to be adopted by beekeepers. Integrated Pest Management (IPM) was developed in order to minimize chemical use for mite control and promote mite resistance in the hive. Briefly defined by Tom Webster, a Kentucky apiculturist, IPM describes the “optimal combination of methods used to fight a pest or disease.”72 IPM differed from previous approaches to hive management because it didn’t rely on a calendar, but rather it promoted using three or four methods simultaneously. Beekeepers were advised to medicate hives only when varroa mites had reached threshold levels. And in lieu of destroying all mites, beekeepers were encouraged to add to their hives’ defense by tolerating the mites until the hives began to suffer from stress.
Although the honey bee suffered in the real world, it did not suffer in social and cultural usages. Writers, artists, and photographers championed its image, using it occasionally to suggest thrift in an unthrifty society, but also more often peace, domesticity, and political astuteness.
In 1980, Hal Cannon brushed the dust off the bee skep symbol in Salt Lake City. In order to promote its importance, Cannon (a descendant of Brigham Young) arranged for an exhibit devoted to the artistic use of beehives at the Utah Folk Art Museum. The Grand Beehive exhibit provided three different types of beehive-related shows: nineteenth-century artifacts, artistic works, and newly commissioned pieces created for the exhibit. In summing up his experience with this exhibit, Cannon stated: “I found a few people who felt as strongly about beehives as the [Mormon] pioneers did, who always loved the symbol, had beehives in their homes…. It’s a sentimental thing, connected to Mormonism, and I became a little sentimental about the beehive myself.”73
It is impossible not to be. Travel to any museum in Salt Lake City and you can be overwhelmed by the woodwork of Ralph Ramsey, the most famous of the Mormon woodcarvers. A bed made for Brigham Young is replete with beehives on the posts and bottom board. Ramsey’s best-known sculpture is the beehive that sits on top of Eagle Gate, the entrance to the Utah state capitol.
6.2. Utah shell game. Courtesy of the Utah State Folklife Archives, Utah Arts Council. Photo from The Grand Beehive, Brent Herridge, photographer. David Pendall’s sculpture was a political statement, protesting the state’s consideration of moving missiles around Utah. It was part of the 1980 Grand Beehive exhibit in Salt Lake City.
Cannon invited contemporary artists to submit original pieces using the skep as a central image. Sculptor David Pendall, using this invitation to comment on Utah’s proposals to relocate missiles, created “The Shell Game.” In his exhibit, “Three bee skeps, four feet high, with a missile bursting through one of them … comment on Utah’s resistance to the MX missile deployment in the state.”74 This creation was a response to some Utah state politicians, who had considered moving bombs around Utah in an attempt to fool Soviet defense strategies.
The Grand Beehive exhibit was wildly successful. The Smithsonian featured it in the Renwick traveling display in 1981. But more importantly, according to Folk Art Museum curator Carol Edison, the larger goals of the exhibit had been fulfilled. People were reminded of their heritage and the importance of the image when Utah was still a fledgling state. Edison remarked that artists were starting to use the beehive again, and just to prove her point, she whipped out an article on the best pies in the Salt Lake region. In the visual layout of pies in the Utah landscape, the hills were subtly shaped like skeps.75 Even ice cream could be sculpted into skeps.
6.3. Snelgrove’s bee hive ice cream. Courtesy of the Utah State Folklife Archives, Utah Arts Council. Photo from The Grand Beehive, Brent Herridge, photographer. For fifty years ice cream was served in this shape at Snelgrove’s.
Cannon and Edison were not alone in revering bees. In 1985, photographer Richard Avedon decided to capture the New West in an effort to understand how the land and its people have changed since the closing of the open range. “Right from the start, Avedon chose men and women who work at hard uncelebrated jobs, the people who are often ignored or overlooked.”76 There aren’t any clean cowboys in this photography collection. Technology and service-oriented jobs dominate this photographer’s landscape In the West.
So it is somewhat of a surprise to come upon the picture of a beekeeper in the midst of these working-class people in the New West. The portrait “Buddhist” redefines the bee-hunter stereotype in innovative ways. First, Avedon chose a beekeeper named Ronald Fischer who is as bald as the old nineteenth-century bee hunter was supposed to be hairy. Next, Avedon photographed Fischer covered in bees against a white backdrop. The portrait shows a white man, completely without fear, so completely at ease with his bees that one wonders where the bees end and the body begins.77
The In the West photographs, first exhibited and published in 1985, generated controversy. Avedon said, “I don’t think the West of these portraits is any more conclusive than the West of John Wayne.” Some critics praised the portraits’ rugged individualism and pathos, but others hated the exhibit. “This is a s
ick collection that expresses Avedon’s inner fears and terrifying nightmares,” fumed Fred McDarrah, the original photography editor of the Village Voice.
If indeed McDarrah is correct, Avedon’s inner fears seem to be absent in “Buddhist.” The stereotypical bee hunter of the Wild West conjured images of shaggy, bearded men living on the margins of society. But Avedon offers in his photograph the complete opposite: an unrobed man covered in bees. This image of peace, solitude, and a momentary oneness with nature complements the other photographs of raw, gritty, bare-knuckled people struggling to be independent souls. In the New West, only the beekeeper promises an affirmative way to blend the two ideals of work and independence, Avedon suggests.