The Beekeeper's Lament (14 page)

Finally, Johnson contacted Merced County’s agriculture department, which in the spring sends inspectors to keep beekeepers from bilking almond growers with empty hives or bad bees. He sent a description of his missing hives (wood, rectangular, painted white, branded Johnson Apiaries on the side) and the department faxed it to six or seven counties. Lo and behold, a couple of months later Johnson got a call from a county inspection agent who had come across his bees, along with those of seven or eight different outfits, in an almond orchard. The hives had come from Merced, Fresno, Madera, Stanislaus, and Tuolumne counties, and from Oregon, Washington, and Montana. They had all been stolen by Suarez, who had signed pollination contracts to place three hundred hives in the orchard. Of those, perhaps a dozen belonged to him. That’s when Swiggart got called in—and as sheriff’s deputies began matching brands in Suarez’s collection to hives that had been reported missing, they solved thefts up and down the valley.

Here was where Suarez had made his mistake. Every beekeeper has his own way of building and painting boxes. A smart bee rustler is aware of that and obliterates identifying brands, or, better yet, places the stolen honeycombs in different boxes. But Suarez was only half smart. He reused the same pilfered boxes, as Allred had, and though Suarez did a more thorough job of painting over the previous owners’ stenciled or burned-on brands, he did so while they were still on the truck with which he had stolen them, using a paint roller to go over the boxes. But the brands that had faced inside remained. The police also reported that when they arrested Suarez, they found dead bees in his vehicle (though if that were the threshold for crimes against bees, every beekeeper in the country would be found guilty). Still, the evidence was overwhelming. Suarez was sentenced to nine months in jail, though because of prison overcrowding and the relatively inconsequential threat that a bee thief poses to society at large, he never served a day. Johnson asked the judge to ban Suarez from beekeeping for life, but the judge would not agree. Suarez is, as far as Johnson knows, still keeping bees.

Even a few years before, Johnson’s hives wouldn’t have proved such a tempting target. As with all crime waves, the targets of agricultural transgressions tend to ebb and flow with commodity values. Bee thefts rose in tandem with pollination prices, which rose in tandem with almond prices and bee deaths. Almond thefts rose, too. When the wholesale price of the nuts skyrocketed from one to three dollars a pound, thieves made off with a number of semis containing hundreds of thousands of dollars’ worth of almonds. When diesel prices went up a few years ago, tractors across the Central Valley mysteriously ran out of fuel. When metal prices rose—to where a four-inch brass valve was worth twenty-five dollars in a recycling yard—nearly every brass irrigation valve disappeared from the region; they are all plastic now. Someone even made off with a thirty-foot-tall, thousand-pound windmill, presumably to recycle for metal. The same fate befell agricultural chemicals, all-terrain vehicles, heifers: when demand went up, commodities went missing. People who steal in the agriculture industry do so only when they can find ready buyers; in theft, as with everything in agriculture, the laws of supply and demand very much apply.

On a perfect late March day a few years after Suarez almost went to jail, and a couple of weeks after the waning bloom had blanketed the Central Valley with petals deep as snow, Detective Roy Tighe of the Modesto County Agricultural Crimes Unit took me for a drive in his government-issue pickup. Tighe is the clean-cut, broad-set, forty-six-year-old cop who succeeded Frank Swiggart in his rural crimes job after Swiggart was promoted to sergeant. He was dressed like a farmer—jeans, work boots, a green serge shirt, cropped graying hair, and a neatly trimmed mustache. He had worked narcotics and fugitive apprehension before taking on farm crime, but his father was an almond grower, so Tighe was comfortable in the rural realm. He liked it: instead of wearing a uniform and chasing urban thugs, he could drive around in farmer’s mufti searching for siphoned diesel, kidnapped calves, illicit cockfights, methamphetamine labs, stolen tractors, stolen almonds, and stolen hives.

A few weeks before I visited, Tighe had recovered his very first batch of stolen hives. A farmer had placed an order through an almond-hauling organization for thirty-two hives. But the farmer’s son had offered to find him bees for less money and had gone ahead and dropped some hives off at the back of his orchard. The dad hadn’t canceled the contract with the bee broker, however. When the bee guy went to deliver the hives, he noticed the bees in the orchard. He noticed, furthermore, that the hives belonged to people who didn’t know their bees were there. Tighe wasn’t surprised to learn that the people on this particular farm were up to no good. They lived just a few farms down from his father’s house. Although they were Mennonites—the father had a long beard; the wife wore a bonnet—the son who had stolen the bees was a known meth addict and a longtime problem in the community. (“I’m always trying to nail that kid,” Tighe said, although the “kid” was probably fifty years old.) The son lived in a trailer near his father’s blond-brick ranch, and before his alleged foray into bee theft he had most recently been linked to a scheme to grow marijuana between cornstalks in a nearby field, stealing a neighbor’s irrigation water to keep the product green.

Ultimately, though, it wasn’t the theft of bees that nailed the kid. The county’s drug task force was after him, and they ended up making an arrest because, Tighe told me, they “had put together a better case.” That’s not surprising. There are few crimes that are harder to comprehend and apprehend than those involved with bees: “How do you prove that that’s my bee right there?” Tighe asks. “Over there, that yellow bug with the little black stripes on it, that’s my bee.” A bee, after all, can go anywhere it likes. You can’t fence bees in; you can’t keep them out; you can’t guarantee that they’ll return to the hive each night; you can’t track their whereabouts. You can move the equipment in which they live; you can transfer them in netted trucks; you can smuggle queens inside ballpoint pens and little cages. But once your bees are airborne, they no longer belong to you. The law on bee possession is clear—once a bee is away from the hive and out of sight of the owner, it’s considered wild. “The phrase I use,” says John Miller, “is that honey bees are free-flying insects, and though a beekeeper may provide habitation, shelter, or equipment to house them, the beekeeper owns the equipment but not the bees. They can elect to live in the equipment I provide but the door is open and they may come and go as they please.”

Even without malign human intervention, bees change owners without so much as a permission slip. Studies indicate that apiaries miles apart can interchange 3 percent of their bees over the course of just a few weeks. Worker bees lose their way and end up in different hives; bearing nectar and pollen, they are usually accepted by the guard bees at the entrance (though if it is late autumn, when the hive is winnowing its numbers, the newcomer might instead find herself set upon and torn apart, wings and legs shredded, body bits discarded outside the hive). Bees from failing hives abscond en masse to find better homes. Drones, especially, are prone to drifting between hives. (“They’re like men,” says Miller.) Queen-breeder David Miksa participated in a Cornell University study back in 1961 in which researchers painted the drones of seven different bee yards, each a mile apart, a different color. By the end of the summer, the yards boasted a veritable rainbow of different-colored drones. Bees have a great sense of smell, and if they detect honey and pheromones from a big bee yard, they may find the lure hard to resist. Miksa recalls that Horace Bell, who was once Florida’s biggest beekeeper, was hugely unpopular with beekeepers who lived near his home territory because his apiaries were so large that nearby bees would regularly succumb to the Bell colonies’ overpowering pheromonal lure and abandon their hives. Bell could grow his colonies just by being the biggest bee guy around. It was not fair, but it was not theft.

B
EES WILL HURT YOU THAT WAY.
T
HEY DON’T CARE WHO
owns them. They don’t care who loves them. They do what they do. They forage; they build; they leave; they rob; they kill; they die; they sting. Oh, do they sting. This may be the proper—if belated—occasion to confess that before I met John Miller I had never been stung by a bee. I was once nailed on the eyelid by a yellow jacket, which hurt a lot, and while riding a bike I’d had a few things fly down my shirt that caused some burning discomfort. But I hadn’t, to my knowledge, ever experienced a bona fide bee sting, and I wasn’t all that keen on doing so. Miller is a persuasive spokesman for the honey bee, however, and he is well accustomed to comforting the uninitiated: he assured me that I would be well protected in a bee suit and promised he would lend me one, along with thick leather gloves and a veil to protect my face and head. “I provide the bee suits,” he wrote in an email as my first visit approached. “If you are 52XX I need to honestly know, so I have the right equipment.”

I knew both from hearsay and research that a bee left alone will not sting, because the sting kills the bee, and it is then of no use to the hive. When a bee is incited to sting, the twin barbed shafts of its stinger dig into the skin and pump poison into the puncture—but the shafts can’t withdraw without ripping the center from the bee’s abdomen, so it dies to protect its kin, and in so doing emits a banana-like odor that attracts other bees to finish its work. Langstroth believed the honey bee’s sting was proof if any that God intended bees to be domesticated: “If it had been able to sting a number of times, its thorough domestication would have been well nigh impossible,” he wrote. He also noted a number of popular remedies to salve the pain of a sting. Tobacco juice was one; the “ripe berry of the common coral honeysuckle” another. Others swore by the milky nectar of the white poppy, plantain leaves, “spirits of hartshorn,” and even getting another bee to sting you in the same spot. Langstroth preferred a simpler cure: “In my own case, I have found
cold water
to be the best remedy,” he wrote.

Bees are resourceful when it comes to stinging: they like the face best, but they’ll go for any flesh they can find—a hole in a glove, a minuscule gap in the zipper of a bee suit. For a budding beekeeper, the first sting is something of a crucible—it determines whether you are cut out for beekeeping or whether you should find some other line of work, like selling insurance or writing software. Miller had explained to me that there are two types of people: the kind who shy away when the hive is first opened, and the kind who lean in. Miller gets so excited when he opens a hive, he nearly jumps in, so eager is he to see how the bees are faring. And when he takes someone new to visit a hive, he observes them as carefully as he does his bees. He informed me—flattered me—that the first time I opened a hive with him, I leaned in, too.

Then one day, while visiting an operation run by a friend of Miller’s, I leaned in too far and a bee flew up—like that!—and stung me fast on the face. I hadn’t put on a veil, because we hadn’t planned on bothering the bees. It turns out that
most
bees won’t sting when left to their own devices; occasionally, though, an ornery one decides you’re annoying her and goes out in a blaze of glory. Mine was one of those. The ancient Roman writer Columella cautioned that bee-going folk “must avoid such things as offend” bees, like being “unchaste or uncleanly; for impurity and sluttiness . . . they utterly abhor”; along with “smelling of sweat, or having a stinking breath, caused either through eating of leeks, onions, garlick, and the like” (he suggested quaffing a cup of beer to make it go away); or being “given to surfeiting or drunkenness”; or being too loud or sudden in one’s movements. “In a word, thou must be chaste, cleanly, sweet, sober, quiet, and familiar; so they will love thee, and know thee from all others,” he wrote. Maybe I wasn’t. Bees tend to go for dark spots, for eyes and ears and nostrils. This one aimed for my eye, and she stung me unprovoked on the brow, and it hurt. It really hurt. I had assumed that bee stings would be less painful than those of more aggressive insects like yellow jackets and wasps, but I was wrong. My first bee sting did not resemble the mild spreading burn of the things that had flown down my shirt. It hit like a wallop, a tiny but powerful battering ram, a deep, pounding pain. I jumped up and back, and then I bellowed. My eye swelled shut, my face swelled around it, and it stayed that way for two days.

In 1984, an Arizona entomologist named Justin Schmidt invented a “sting pain index” that rates the relative pain caused by various insect stings, ranging from zero for stings that cause no sensation to four for those that cause “absolutely debilitating” pain. Schmidt is the author of the holiest text of the insect-sting field:
Insect Defenses: Adaptive Mechanisms and Strategies of Prey and Predators
, a 482-page tome on “defensive ensembles” and “predatory strategies.” But he’s better known for his simple index, which dissects, in the evocative language you might associate more with a wine-besotted sommelier than an entomologist, the sensation of getting stung. The index was derived from personal observation: Schmidt became interested in social insects and how they defend themselves and their communities, and because of the nature of his research on venomous insects and arthropods, got stung a lot. At present count, he has sampled the venom of more than 150 species of insects. He rarely does it on purpose—such contrived encounters might not produce normal amounts of venom—but, he says, if you hang around with stinging insects, “sooner or later you’re going to goof up and get stung.” When it happens, Schmidt pays meticulous attention to the type, intensity, and longevity of the pain, describing it in vivid personal detail.

There are two ways that insects defend themselves, Schmidt explains. The first is simply to kill or impair the attacker: four to five bee stings, for instance, provide enough toxin to murder a mouse. It would take more than a thousand stings to kill a healthy adult human, unless that adult happens to be allergic, in which case he could die from circulatory or respiratory collapse in minutes from only one sting. No insect can kill a nonallergic human with one sting, although Schmidt has described stings that made him lie down and scream for a few minutes before the pain subsided, and stings that left him quivering in peristaltic waves of agony for an entire day. The second, and arguably the most common, reason that insects sting defensively is to scare menacing creatures enough that they’ll think twice before trying it again. Menacing creatures particularly like to bother bees, because their primary food source is so irresistible—and their larvae and adults are pretty tasty, too. Thus it is more than reasonable that bees have developed a way to defend their community that inflicts pain on creatures of both malign and innocent intent. As Miller says, “There’s a reason it hurts.”