The Beekeeper's Lament Read Online Free Page A

people. Like retirees in Winnebagos, migratory beekeepers winter in warm places—California, Texas, Florida—and in summer head north to the clover and alfalfa fields of the Dakotas and other rural, northern states. Miller likes to call the annual flight of the beekeepers the “native migrant tour,” because he and his colleagues are among the few migrant agricultural workers these days who were born in this country, and he likes to call himself the tour’s “padrone”—because, well, there’s no one within earshot to disagree. If traditional beekeepers are like European bees, single-minded and docile, migratory beekeepers might better be compared to Africanized “killer” bees—itinerant and aggressive, traveling in swarms.
    Miller is not the biggest beekeeper in the United States—South Dakota’s Richard Adee, with his eighty thousand hives, wins that distinction. But like the gentle, dark Carniolan bees he tends, Miller does have impeccable breeding. He is descended from Nephi Ephraim Miller, a Mormon farmer known as the “father of migratory beekeeping.” In 1894, N.E., as he was called, traded a few bushels of oats for seven boxes of bees and parlayed those seven boxes into a Utah beekeeping empire. “He was curious,” Miller says. “He was a gifted man, and he grew to understand the honey bee.” N. E. Miller pioneered the practice of migratory beekeeping, shipping his hives from the clover fields of Utah to the orange groves of California each winter, and he is famed for producing the nation’s first million-pound crop of honey. His sons and grandsons and great-grandsons followed in his footsteps, as have most of today’s commercial beekeepers, hoisting hundred-pound hives onto pallets and pallets onto semis that chase honey flows and pollination contracts north and south across the country.
    Bees organize their lives around seasons of plenty and want. So does Miller. Like his bees, he is frequently on the move, his life a series of numbers- and date-driven bursts of activity. Winter is a time of quiet, of loss, when bees cluster for survival in the hives, some stored near his home in Newcastle and some in leased potato cellars in Idaho, where 40-degree temperatures and well-ventilated darkness ensure a brief period of dormancy for the bees, to reserve their energy for the coming spring. Miller too hunkers with his family over the holidays, preparing for the busy year to come.
    Spring is a time of bustle, birth, rebuilding. It starts early for Miller and his bees. On January 19, he inspects and feeds the 2,700 hives he has stashed in fields and clearings near his house in Newcastle. On January 20, he begins shipping the rest of his bees—7,000 or so hives—from the Idaho cellars to California. From January 26 through the first two weeks of February, he roams a two-hundred-mile range from south of Modesto to north of Chico, placing colonies in almond orchards. During that time, he visits lots of taco wagons. On March 1, the bloom peaks, and from March 9 to 13, almond farmers “release” the bees that have been placed on their property from their contractual obligation, and Miller is free to take them away. He’s got to get them out fast then, or risk their starvation in the now-blossomless desert of the orchards and exposure to the variety of agricultural pesticides loosed on the Central Valley in spring. Pollinating crops is like being a hooker, Miller says: “I come in the night; I wear a veil; they give me their money; a few weeks later they call me and tell me to get out of there.”
    So he does. In late March, he ships 3,000 or so hives home to Newcastle to prepare them to receive new queens; 3,000 travel to Washington to pollinate the pink lady apples; 1,600 go to the cherries around Stockton. On April 2, he divides his Newcastle hives and buys new queens for them; on April 5 the Stockton bees leave the cherries for Newcastle, where they too receive new queens. On May 5 he ships his apple