The Beekeeper's Lament (20 page)

In nature, queens are created in panic or in prosperity. When a queen dies or fails to lay sufficient eggs to keep the colony going, the bees feed royal jelly—a thick, creamy substance secreted by nurse bees—to multiple freshly hatched larvae who would otherwise develop into workers. Although all larvae are fed royal jelly mixed with honey for the first two or three days after they hatch, developing queens are fed royal jelly exclusively and in large amounts through the entire larval period, spurring the formation of the mature ovaries required for queens to lay fertilized eggs. In a failing hive, the bees feed the jelly to larvae in worker cells that they enlarge in the hopes of growing a new queen before the hive falls apart. That’s the panic mode. Then there’s the prosperity mode: if the colony is too successful and all the hive’s cells fill with eggs and honey and pollen so there’s nowhere to lay eggs or store food anymore, the nurse bees go on a royal-jelly binge, feeding the highly nutritious substance to worker-bee larvae in specially built peanut-shaped “swarm cells” to raise a new queen so that the old one can depart with a swarm of young workers in search of roomier digs. In both modes, the workers cap the cells and wait for the queens to hatch. The first to do so eats her way out, then promptly chews through every other queen cell and stings her rivals to death—the queen’s stinger is not barbed like those of worker bees, so she has the capacity to sting multiple times without sacrificing her life. After she has dispatched her sisters, she goes after her mother if necessary (“only room for one mom,” says Miller). She feeds for four or five days, then flies out to mate.

Back in Langstroth’s days they called the queen’s mating flight her “wedding excursion”—though the wedding would resemble nothing a traditionalist would find appealing. A more apt metaphor might be a bordello debut. Her journey into the larger world outside the hive is far less romantic than it is lustful and utilitarian. To find prospective mates, the queen flies from the hive to an area where hundreds or even thousands of drones congregate each day, waiting for a new queen to take wing nearby. Some come from her own colony, but most have traveled longer distances from various colonies, thus guaranteeing a degree of genetic diversity so that the stocks don’t, in Langstroth’s words, “become enfeebled by ‘close breeding.’ ” The queen copulates in the air with as many drones as she can find—typically, eight to twenty fired-up males, who will, if they are lucky enough to fulfill their reproductive purpose, die immediately. Then the queen must find her way home to the hive without becoming hopelessly lost, or getting dashed by a wind gust against a tree or into the water, or grounded by rain, or eaten by a bird or a dragonfly. The queen’s large size and slow flying speed make her easy picking for predators, some of whom make a point of lingering in drone congregation areas.

She must also ensure that she does not return to the wrong hive. If she does, she will quickly be stung or ripped to pieces and discarded. More queens are lost through attempting to enter a strange hive after their mating flights than any other way. This, says Langstroth, “accounts for the notorious fact that ignorant beekeepers, with forlorn and rickety hives, no two of which look just alike, are often more successful than those whose hives are of the best construction”; more meticulous beekeepers “lose queens almost in exact proportion to the taste and skill which induced them to make hives of uniform size, shape and color.” Such mass-produced uniformity, of course, is standard today, so beekeepers scatter nucs in yards with as many landmarks as possible, arranging them in serpentine patterns throughout the yard rather than in straight rows, in order to create better reference points for the queens, and facing the hive entrances in different directions to minimize a queen’s confusion. If she returns successfully, her spermatheca, a pouch in her oviducts, will be filled with about seven million commingled sperm from her various partners, and she will, after five days, drop her first cream-colored ovoid into the bottom of a wax cell. Then she will lay, and lay, and lay. The mating flight is a queen’s only chance to accrue the semen she will use to lay eggs for the rest of her life. When the sperm runs out, so too does her productive life span.

That’s how queens are created in nature; in California, they have help from guys like Pat Heitkam. Heitkam is the genial, thrice-married bee guy who stumbles out to the North Valley Shuttle each morning in the first half of April to ship, for instance, exactly half of the queen cells that John Miller will use in his hives every spring. Heitkam once owned a bike shop in Santa Cruz. He let a friend convince him to trade a beehive for a new bike—and “that,” he says, “was the end of the deal.” He accrued more and more bees and finally gave up on the bike shop, which required a little more human contact than he found entirely comfortable. Heitkam preferred a business where he could “go away by myself.” Eventually he got interested in queens, moved up north to apprentice himself to a queen-rearer, and bought a rural property in Orland, a few miles outside Chico. There he enhived himself in a ramshackle array of aluminum-sided buildings surrounded by piles of boxes, pallets, pickup trucks, and an aggregation of aging Porsches. Heitkam has thick gray-white hair, a broad nose, and large, ungainly hands. He is kind and romantic—hence the three marriages and life’s work in the bee-matchmaking racket. He is so good with bees, despite his oversize hands, that he rarely wears a veil and almost never wears a bee suit or gloves. Some call him a bee whisperer. I can’t disagree, and neither can Miller, who considers him to be a “superb” beekeeper. During the springtime, Heitkam produces 1,000 queens a day, which is by no means a record—C. F. Koehnen & Sons, his neighbors in Ord Bend, just down Highway 45, make 3,000 nucs a day; and another neighbor, Ray Olivarez, who is capitalized by an almond farmer, produces 5,000 queens a day in late March and early April.

Queens in nature are produced through the unpredictable processes of supersedure (replacing a failing or dead queen) and swarming (producing a second one to split the hive); at Heitkam’s place, they’re produced with the help of two nimble-fingered Hispanic women named Esmeralda and Georgina who sit in a shed behind Heitkam’s house. The shed is warm, lined with wet towels to keep things intensely humidified—great for incubating creatures, not so comfortable for humans. Inside, the two women use wood-and-plastic tweezer-like devices to pluck freshly hatched larvae taken from a breeder hive—a colony containing an artificially inseminated queen typically purchased from a university lab. They then “graft” each larva into a plastic queen cell and place it upside down—the royal jelly that was transferred with the larva holds it in place—in a special frame along with forty-four other queen cells. The frame is marked with a date and the type of breeder bee who laid the eggs, then placed along with two other grafted frames into a “cell builder”—a hive that is generously stocked with honey, pollen, and nine pounds of young worker bees. In the absence of their own queen, the worker bees make royal jelly to feed to the developing larvae day in and day out, then cap the plastic cells so they look like little beeswax acorns. Heitkam has, in essence, created an emergency: the workers have no queen, and the hive is working frantically to raise a new one. This method emulates the situation of “panic” whereby hives create new queens. But Heitkam provides lots of supplies to help them do it, also reproducing the conditions of prosperity in which bees prepare to swarm.

The queen cells stay in the cell builder for eleven and a half days (fourteen days after the eggs were laid), and no longer. Should a queen hatch in the cell builder, she would sting all of her competitors to death, ruining all of Esmeralda and Georgina’s painstaking work. So Heitkam must leave the cells in long enough to mature properly, but retrieve them before the queens begin to emerge. Once pulled, some of the unhatched pupae are sold as queen cells for four dollars apiece to people like Miller. Miller buys three thousand cells from Heitkam each year because he prefers to mate the queens with his own drones to ensure the genetic continuity of his stock. The rest are transferred unhatched to one of twelve nuc yards that Heitkam has selected both for their proximity to drone congregation areas and for sheltered, landmarked topography that give his queens a better chance of surviving their mating flight. They are lovely spots along riverbeds and among huge gnarled oaks, brambles, and hedgerows, alive with wild turkeys and bobcats, locations that Heitkam just loves to visit because they remind him that he’s chosen a terribly agreeable way to make a living, even if it’s not the easiest living to make, with twenty employees, six thousand hives, and a rigorous timetable that makes Mussolini’s trains look laggard by comparison.

For about two weeks, Heitkam’s fledgling queens enjoy the bucolic splendor, too, sharing their nuc yard with dozens of other queens, Italians on one end, Carniolans on the other. They mate, and after a few days a crew of Heitkam’s workers returns, examines each hive, and “catches” those queens that have survived their mating flight and begun laying fertilized eggs. Heitkam, with his big hands, grabs queens by the thorax; his more dexterous workers capture them by the wings, which flutter and vibrate insistently, unhappily. Heitkam expects they will catch and sell about 70 percent of the queens placed in the nucs. They slip them into small, rectangular vented cages and ship them, for $15.50 a queen, to customers across California, Oregon, and Washington, and even as far away as France, Mexico, and Jordan. Then, after one to three days’ wait, Heitkam puts new, ready-to-hatch queen cells in his now-leaderless nucs and starts all over again. And just like that, the honey bee perseveres.

P
EOPLE BEGAN SELLING QUEENS EN MASSE AS A WAY TO REPLACE
winter losses. To repopulate empty hives in time for the first spring flows, northern beekeepers would send away for three pounds of bees and a queen—a “package” of bees that had been “shaken” from a populous hive into a screened box. The first beekeeper to try shipping bees was the famed innovator A. I. Root, who in the 1880s conducted experiments showing that bees and queens could survive for a couple of weeks on such light, shippable honey substitutes as sugar syrups and soft candy. He convinced the postal service to handle live bees and developed a lightweight, ventilated cage in which to ship them—to this day, the U.S. Postal Service is required by postal code to deliver bees through the mail. He couldn’t quite get the food supply right, however, and more often than not, his bees starved to death before they could reach their destination. It took until well into the next century for beekeepers to discover that bees could survive on a small, inverted pail of sugar syrup poked full of holes. The syrup drips for a few minutes and then forms a vacuum, flowing only when a bee sticks her proboscis into one of the punctured holes.

Not just anyone can raise queens for a living. Queen-breeders must live somewhere warm—southern states like Florida, Georgia, Texas, and California—where the pollen flows early enough that the hives are close to full strength when northern customers’ bees are just waking up. Many northern beekeepers prefer to receive bees from as northerly a location as possible, seeking shorter travel times and more cold-adapted breeds. The upper tip of the Central Valley, around Chico, is the epicenter of queen-rearing in North America. At least sixty operations are based there, because it was, for many years, the farthest north a queen-rearing operation could be located and guarantee sufficient warm and dry weather during the early spring for successful mating flights. This is where Miller gets all of his new queens. Half come from Heitkam; the others are provided by C. F. Koehnen & Sons.

The Koehnens are an august outfit—C. F. Koehnen was a commercial catfisherman who moved into beekeeping in the early part of the last century, buying twenty acres along a bend in the Sacramento River. Along the way he acquired more land for forage, and, eventually, orange orchards, and then walnuts and almonds. His sons and grandsons now run the business. The family got out of the honey racket in the early 1970s when they discovered that they could make far more money raising queens and nuts. Now that’s all they do. They do it well. For a hundred days in the early spring, the Koehnens and an assembly line of workers labor seven days a week to graft, cage, and package queens to ship all over the country. They sell a quarter of a million queens each year. The Koehnens’ property is as orderly as Heitkam’s and Miller’s are not, with beautiful wood-clad offices and a spic-and-span punchcard room for the dozens of Hispanic workers who graft, nuc, and catch for them each spring.

In 2007, one hundred years after Koehnen bought the first twenty acres, the family held a party to celebrate the company’s longevity. John Miller was there, along with thirteen hundred of the Koehnens’ closest friends. “We walked to check-in tables, where names were verified, and name tags were dispensed,” Miller wrote.

We were then confronted with three enormous tents with white tablecloths.

After a few minutes of socializing,

we were escorted to the serving lines,

eight serving lines, and 1300 people were served in less than an hour.

Prime rib, and chicken and all the fixings.

Class act.

They ate on china; Miller’s parties usually feature paper plates. There were two bars and an Elvis impersonator band. Tributes followed, with “mercifully short speeches.”

Bob and Bill, the padrones, were gifted side by side shotguns,

engraved, and admonished to “go shoot them a lot.”

Darkness settled. Fireworks erupted to the west. Miller took Jan to see the grafting shed, where half of his new queens are produced each spring.

We reviewed the 2007 work-sheet,

and totaled about 240,000 cells, not grafts, but cells that actually took,

and marveled at the family’s success.

What a deal.

Glad I went.

As with worker bees producing royal jelly, queen-rearers today create queens in situations of prosperity or panic—panic for most beekeepers, who are losing their bees at such alarming rates; prosperity for the queen-rearers, who are replacing them. Half the hives in the United States now go through twice the queens they used to, and varroa mites and CCD have created even more demand. But queen-rearers are beekeepers in the end, and they aren’t in it for the money—if they were, they’d go into almonds. So they haven’t raised prices to take advantage of the increased demand; that would be mean. There are already enough beekeepers going out of business.