The Beekeeper's Lament (21 page)

I
T TOOK ONLY A FEW MILLENNIA FOR HUMANS TO FIGURE
out how, exactly, bees reproduce. The ancients believed they were born out of rotting meat—specifically, said Virgil, “from the putrid blood of a slaughtered bullock” who is beaten to death in a narrow shed until “his innards collapse,” then laid on beds of thyme and fresh rosemary, until

. . . it ferments, and wonderful new creatures

Come into view, footless at first, but soon

With humming wings; they swarm, and more and more

Try out their wings on the empty air, and then

Burst forth like a summer shower from summer clouds

Or like a shower of arrows from the bows

Of Parthian warriors entering the fray.

Until the seventeenth century, people believed that the hive’s ruler was—naturally—a king. It was the British beekeeping authority Charles Butler who concluded that the large bee that controlled the hive was in fact a female—though he believed it was the worker bees who did the egg laying. Later in the seventeenth century, Dutch biologist Jan Swammerdam determined that the queen laid all the eggs in the hive. He postulated, however, that the queen was impregnated not by drones but by an “odoriferous effluvia” he named “aura seminalis”—in other words, by airborne sperm. Finally, in 1788, the blind French scientist François Huber, with the help of his sighted servant François Burnens, discovered a queen leaving a hive chased by a throng of lusty drones and returning filled with semen. He concluded that the queens were fertilized not inside the hive but on the wing, during a brief “virgin flight.” (Slovenian beekeeper Anton Janscha had published the same findings fifteen years before, but his account had gone largely unnoticed.) In 1760 a German priest named Adam Gottlob Schirach had observed that queenless hives produced new queens by enlarging the cells of young worker larvae and feeding them a different diet; and in 1888 an American beekeeper named G. M. Doolittle commercialized artificial cell cups that allowed beekeepers to graft queens—and sell them—on a large scale.

Breeding bees is a science, but also an art. Unlike, say, cows, whose pedigrees and partners can be closely monitored, even the most methodical and Koehnen-like operations can’t control a concupiscent queen once she takes flight. The queen is not discriminating; she’ll mate with any drone wily enough to catch her. The best that most breeders can do to shape the genetics of their brood is to put the queen cell of their choice in a nuc, flood the area with drones of their choice, and hope the queen mates with the right ones (a process not all that different from raising a teenager, come to think of it). To shape brood genetics more deliberately, you must mate a queen in a lab. Way back in the eighteenth century, Huber attempted to paint drone semen onto a queen to encourage her to reproduce. That didn’t work. In the late nineteenth century, an aptly christened German clockmaker and beekeeper, William Wankler, used his toolmaking skills to construct a silver, bee-sized “artificial penis” to deliver semen. That didn’t work, either. Nor did efforts by USDA scientist Nelson McLain to hold the queen’s sting chamber open with wooden clamps while using a hypodermic syringe to inject drops of semen into her vagina. In 1926, a bee guy named Lloyd Watson tried inseminating queens with a capillary syringe, forceps, a stereomicroscope, and a lamp; he achieved occasional success, but the method was not consistently reliable. Nor was a similar process developed by USDA scientist W. J. Nolan. Finally, in 1944, a USDA scientist named Harry Laidlaw—who is considered the father of modern queen-rearing (“He was the pope to anybody that raises queens. To have shaken his hand is an honor,” says Heitkam)—discovered the valve fold, a tonguelike obstruction in the queen’s oviduct, and designed an instrument that was able to bypass the fold and inject the sperm into anesthetized queens.

Successful insemination allowed bee scientists and queen-rearers, and ultimately beekeepers, to exercise more control over the types of bees they could produce. Bee guys had long been aware that certain bees behaved better—were gentler and produced more brood and honey—than others. Until the nineteenth century, for instance, most bees in the United States and northern Europe were descendants of the mean-tempered black bees brought over at the time of the nation’s founding. But during the Napoleonic Wars, a Swiss army captain stationed in northern Italy noticed that the yellow-striped honey bees he saw there were not only a different color than the ones he’d grown up with but were also less easily riled, more prolific in their brood production, and less sensitive to cold. He had some brought to his home in Switzerland, and from there they quickly spread throughout Europe. Word of the Italians’ superior behavior and temperament traveled to the United States, and Lorenzo Langstroth was an early convert: “Its introduction into this country will, it is confidently believed, constitute a new era in beekeeping,” he wrote. In September 1859, after a number of failed efforts to ship Italian bees across the Atlantic, Langstroth succeeded in importing one Italian queen, which he found amid thousands of carcasses when he cut out the combs of a surviving hive. “I never handled anything in my life with such care,” he wrote.

Italian bees were adopted quickly throughout the United States, and today the familiar yellow-and-black bees dominate the American beekeeping industry. Second in popularity is the dusky brown-and-gray-striped Carniolan, another European subspecies that originated in the Balkans and Eastern Europe. Miller keeps mostly Carniolans, which he prefers because of their extreme gentleness, their superior resistance to some insect pests (although not, unfortunately, the varroa mite), and their impressive wintering-over capacity in colder climates. The hives tend to expand rapidly in the spring as the nectar flows and cut off brood production just as quickly in the fall, thus producing more nectar in the summer and consuming less honey over the winter than Italian bees do. Breeders have also experimented with designer bees, such as the Buckfast, a hybrid bred and patented by a Benedictine monk named Brother Adam, who kept bees at Buckfast Abbey in Devon, England. After concluding that certain breeds of bees—Italians, for instance—survived a notorious 1915–’16 British bee die-off better than the native black bees, Brother Adam traveled the world searching for superior queens, developing a cross of French, Greek, Egyptian, Moroccan, and Turkish bees that combined the traits he was looking for: good honey and brood production, gentle behavior, and disease resistance. Brother Adam is credited with introducing the idea that careful breeding could be used to create bees that were more resistant to disease and pests. The Buckfast is still sold by queen-breeders today.

Typically, bee breeders mass-inseminate their queens, or mate them on the wing in isolation from other breeds, then sell them to queen-rearers, who open-mate them with their own stock in larger numbers. Breeders have always tried to tailor the gene pool to favor traits that make bees easy to manage; now they’re striving just as hard to create bees that resist the varroa mite as well. Essentially they are seeking to mimic the process of natural evolution, in a hurry. Some populations have survived the onslaught of the mite in Brazil, South Africa, and isolated pockets in France, Sweden, New York state, and the American Southwest—though often, when those resistant populations are moved to locations where the mites are more active, they too crash. Bee guys hope that with careful breeding, European bees might be able to develop more successful mechanisms to resist the mites. In 1997, the Honey Bee Breeding Laboratory in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, imported Russian bees hailing from the Vladivostok area and supplied them to breeders. Because the varroa mites first made the jump from Asian to European honey bees in that region of the world, the bees there have, over the 150 years that they have been exposed to varroa mites, developed some resistance. Some beekeepers swear by the Russian bees, though they fare best—no surprise—in cold climates, and their resistant traits tend to be quickly diluted in the gene pool once they are exposed to nearby bees of other breeds.

Since 2001, the Baton Rouge lab has also distributed a line of queens bred specifically for “varroa-sensitive hygiene”—or VSH. VSH worker bees are able to detect and remove mite-infested brood. They do so at some cost, however. The bees are refined so specifically for their varroa-resistant properties—they are so deeply inbred—that they aren’t as good at all the other things bees need to do, like producing lots of brood and collecting lots of honey. The Minnesota Hygienic bee, developed by University of Minnesota entomologist Marla Spivak, is another resistant breed. Spivak developed a line of varroa-resistant bees by freeze-killing brood with liquid nitrogen and raising queens only from productive colonies whose workers detected and cleaned out the abnormal brood within twenty-four hours. She has since worked with queen-breeders across the country, teaching them to test for hygienic behaviors among their open-mated bees. The hope is that as more breeders select for varroa resistance—Heitkam, for instance, has been doing it for years—the drone pool will improve and it will take longer for resistant traits to be diluted through open breeding.

Bee researchers and desperate beekeepers like John Miller hope that these efforts will get a boost from recent advances in the understanding of bee genetics. In 2006, a team of scientists from the USDA’s Beltsville, Maryland, bee lab oversaw a collaboration to decode the honey bee genome. To create the genetic “essence” of honey bee, researchers pulverized a collection of drones from a single colony—all of whom had the same DNA, because drones, which are created from the queen’s unfertilized eggs, are always genetically fatherless. The drones were frozen, mashed into a big soup, and spun in a series of centrifuges that pulled off proteins, fats, legs, wings, and other miscellaneous body parts. What remained were solid crystals of bee salt. These were then ground in pestles, mashed into little plastic tubes, spun again, and washed with various solvents, until all that was left were small pellets of DNA. Those were suspended in water and placed in a thermal cycler, which somehow, inconceivably, provided graphs of each gene and pathogen found in the pellet. When read by someone who understands these things—not, in all likelihood, a beekeeper or someone who writes about beekeepers—the graphs provide all sorts of information about what those bees are like: what they can and can’t do, are good at and bad at.

The lab’s genome group is led by Jay Evans, a lanky, soft-spoken social-insect specialist—his graduate work involved high-alpine ants. Evans and his team use the genome information to compare variations among bees, looking, for instance, at differences between European and Africanized bees and between healthy bees and those sickened by nosema or any of the dozens of ailments that have lately afflicted America’s bee herd. The lab, a brick building set on a labyrinthine complex on the outskirts of Washington, D.C., looks more like an old insane asylum than a cutting-edge genetics facility. It hosts only a few test hives in its backyard; other than that, there’s not much evidence of bugs in the building, just denatured remains. Still, the work that goes on there is anything but antiquated: Evans and his team are also decoding the varroa genome, dissecting varroa brains and extracting DNA samples to understand and, they hope, disrupt the genes that dictate their reproduction, or to find pathogens to which the mites could be vulnerable. Lately, though, they’ve spent most of their time chasing a genetic explanation for CCD: “The main things we have found is that a number of things can kill off honey bees—viruses, pesticides, nutrition,” Evans says. “It’s amazing that they survive as much as they do.”

Someday, it is devoutly hoped, bee genomics—beenomics—will trickle down to the queen-rearing community. Easy tests might someday let any beekeeper create his or her own pest- and plague-resistant local hybrids. For now, however, new breeds of bees tend to be created at universities and in bee labs, not out in the field, and the resistant traits developed in those labs are all too quickly diluted when they enter the promiscuous open-mated world. But even if those lab-created traits were to become dominant, some wonder whether it would be a good thing. After all, “better” bees tend to create their own monoculture, as Italian bees did in the nineteenth century. The queen-rearing industry then reinforces that monoculture by requeening each year with the same uniform matrons from the same swath of land in California or Florida or Georgia. Productive, gentle, perhaps even mite-resistant, but nonetheless standardized, they may be especially vulnerable to new scourges as destructive as the varroa mite or CCD.

Human selection often has unintended consequences. Before the Langstroth hive came along, beekeepers used to destroy their heaviest colonies to extract honey, thus inadvertently selecting for less productive bees. Thanks to the queen-rearing industry, bees that adapt to their local microclimates are replaced each year with bees from somewhere else. Still, the greatest damage to the national herd’s genetic diversity has been wreaked not by breeders like Pat Heitkam and the Koehnens, but by the varroa mite, which wiped out almost every feral colony in the country. Feral bees had broadened the gene pool by mating with managed queens. Now the vast majority of the nation’s beekeepers rely almost completely on mail-order commercial queens to supply new blood.

A
LMOST COMPLETELY, BUT NOT ENTIRELY.
B
ECAUSE THE NATION’S
bee herd has also acquired an infusion of new genes from another source: Africanized “killer” bees, whose marauding swarms so panicked the nation when news of their depredations first hit the media in the 1970s and ’80s. The Africanized bee is a hybrid between several subspecies of
Apis mellifera
. It was created inadvertently in 1956 after Brazilian biologist Warwick Kerr imported forty-seven queens from Tanzania to Brazil in hopes of combining the best traits of the European honey bee—gentleness and prolific breeding—with those of the scrappy African bee (
Apis mellifera adansonii
), which produced more honey in warm environments than did northern-adapted bees. But before Kerr had a chance to create his superior breed, twenty-six swarms of the Tanzanian bees escaped and mated with local European drones, creating a feral hybrid whose descendants produced ample honey and worked hard, even in the rain and the dark, but were also defensive and easily riled, and thus extremely difficult to manage. The new bees were indeed well suited to life in the tropics—spectacularly so: they mated fast, usurped other bees’ hives, interbred with European bees, and passed all sorts of bad habits on to their spawn. They attacked keepers and family pets and hapless passersby in large numbers and for long distances. They robbed other hives of honey. They abandoned their colonies at the slightest provocation.