The Beekeeper's Lament Read Online Free Page B

bees from Washington to Gackle, North Dakota, his summer home, for the honey season. On May 10 he flies there, too, and plants a garden in the backyard of his summer home. As he plants, he assesses the promise of the northern spring: the subsoil and topsoil moisture levels, how warm the dirt is, the blooming of the lilacs next to the garden, the early health of the honey locust and apple trees nearby. He notices if the spring wheat has been sowed on surrounding farms, and for how long. This tells him how much supplementary feed he may need to keep his bees alive until the clover starts blooming in late June. By then all of his bees will have arrived in North Dakota. He will stay there for the summer, with brief visits home to see his wife in California.
    The summer is a season of bounty, harvest, work. The honey-producing season begins June 20. The first crop is yellow sweet clover, whose flow typically coincides with the first big mosquito hatch. When the mosquitoes become obnoxious, Miller knows the clover is set to bloom. Yellow sweet clover usually blooms a few days before the alfalfa and peaks around July 4, when, if the weather has been auspicious, it can be truck-mirror high. The white sweet clover peaks ten days later. The dairy guys cut down their first alfalfa crop before the end of June; beef guys, looking for more tonnage, wait until the first week of July. Miller likes beef guys, because he prefers flowers over shorn and useless stalks. If the rains are good and the stars align, there may be a second crop of alfalfa, peaking from late July to August 4—but a smart beekeeper should never bank his honey crop on a second alfalfa bloom, because there’s no guarantee that by July 15 the flowers won’t be scorched. After the clover and alfalfa go, there’s buckwheat and gumweed, which make darker honey, and goldenrod.
    August 20 marks the end of honey production. In a good year, Miller may wait until after Labor Day to begin “robbing” his harvest boxes, which are shallow wooden rectangles stacked two or three high above the main body of the hive. Those harvest “supers” contain all of the honey bound for sale. The stores in the double-deep main hive chamber at the bottom of the stack, where the queen lays her eggs, are for feeding future bees—that honey is always left alone. Bad years, he may start stripping the harvest boxes as early as August 15. The goal is to have all the salable honey off the hives between September 25 and October 5. By the autumnal equinox, around September 21, the first hives will be loaded into trucks bound for Idaho, where they will sit in big holding yards and wait until daytime temperatures drop to around 45 degrees. It takes eight weeks for Miller’s crews to get all the hives out of North Dakota. By November 25, they’re all in Idaho, where it’s finally cold enough for the bees to go “to bed”—hunker down in the climate-controlled potato cellars. A smaller batch of bees is sent to Newcastle, where they get another feed before dormancy. And then, on January 25, the almonds begin to bud and the year starts again.
    This annual bee migration isn’t just a curiosity; it’s the glue that holds much of our agricultural system together. Without the bees’ pollination services, many of our nation’s crops would produce only a small fraction of the harvest they generate with the help of the honey bee. Farmers depend on honey bees to pollinate ninety different fruits and vegetables, from almonds to lettuce to cranberries to blueberries to canola—nearly $15 billion worth of crops a year. Although wind and wild insects pollinate some plants on a small scale, only bees promise the levels of production needed to meet the needs of the nation’s grocery shoppers. Like every aspect of American agriculture, beekeeping has, by necessity, joined the global economy of scale. Bees are pollination machines, and many of America’s farmers need them just as much as they need their