“If you should ever leave me
Though life would still go on believe me
The world could show nothing to me
So what good would living do me
God only knows what I’d be without you”
—Brian Wilson & Tony Asher, “God Only Knows” Capitol Records, 1966
The week before this past Christmas I found myself whizzing madly down two-lane Napa Valley roads in a Vanagon, along with numerous bee passengers and renegade beekeeper Rob Keller, their most fierce and passionate advocate.
While taking jiggly notes, waving the occasional bee away from my face and holding a bouncing coffee Thermos between my feet, I realized my “spend a day shadowing the creator of the Napa Valley Bee Company” concept had just bought me a ticket to fly into another world. The best part was, the more Rob talked, the more I realized that in this new world we didn’t need to “save” the bees, the mantra of so many of late. The bees just might save themselves, and us in the process.
After dropping off a forgotten backpack to his son at school, Rob and I head towards the Children’s Museum of Sonoma County where he is consulting on the construction of an observation beehive. On the way, we stop at one of his apiaries (a place where honey bees are kept, usually in a collection of two or more hives) in Carneros, located in what was once the dream of a licorice farm. We pull roots up from the muddy path, brush them off and chew as we approach the hives and Rob regales me with the story of the man who was almost the licorice king.
It’s a cold, drizzly day, so we won’t be opening hives, just checking for any moisture buildup, always a serious issue. He observes the bottom trays where all the debris from the hive falls down and explains, “With some understanding of bee biology you can read the tray like a book. There are all of these clues that will tell you exactly what is going on.”
As he works, he refers to the hives by name: the “library hive,” the “hospital hive,” and I realize these are swarms he’s hived or wild hives he’s removed from places including a library and a hospital.
“So Rob, when you say what you practice is local, sustainable beekeeping, I’m assuming you mean organic and therefore you don’t have the same issues with Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD) and disease like the huge commercial guys,” I ask. “I understand it’s kind of death by a thousand paper cuts with pesticides, poor nutrition, lack of diverse forage, stress and those guys spreading disease as they move their hives all over the country to pollinate for the big farms.”
Rob turns to me and replies, “All the bees are in trouble, including wild bees. We can’t seal them off from what is happening. When you have 75% of all of the beehives across America showing up for the almond harvest in California every year, then our bees are exposed to every disease or pest they carry. Being sustainable means being treatment free. Even organic allows you to treat the bees in your hives. We have to stop raising bees that can only survive with chemical help. We need to raise local survivor stock that is genetically strong and resistant, and advocate for others to do the same in their local areas. Bees are uniquely suited to adapt their genetics for survival. We have to stop damaging their innate ability to evolve and let the ones who can’t survive die and work with the ones who live.”
Yikes, that answer was unexpected and more jarring than the Vanagon ride, I think to myself.
“Wait a minute, you mean organic/biodynamic/permaculture enclaves don’t protect bees from mites and viruses and ailing genes and other ills, and might actually make things worse?” Being introduced to the “Bond method” of beekeeping (as in the James Bond movie Live and Let Die) wasn’t the uplifting sustainable solution I expected to hear.
According to a report published by the White House this past June, there were approximately 6 million colonies (hives) of “domesticated” bees (meaning not “wild”) in the United States in 1947. Currently, there are around 2 million. A sharp decline by any measure. Much of the attrition can be attributed to the dramatic change in American farming practices since the end of World War II, namely the introduction of synthetic fertilizers, pesticides and fungicides and monoculture cropping, all creating food deserts for bees. And then there’s CCD.
Rob Keller clearly believes that the age-old bee/human covenant needs some serious work.
“I’ll name three ways we humans have hustled the bees. Back in the day, honey was our only option for sweetness—so we robbed their hives. Thousands of years later we still hustle their honey by doing things like using artificial wax and plastic foundation forms in the hives with cells larger than the bees would build in order to force more honey. Then, as agriculture shifted we hustled them to pollinate on demand and began moving millions of hives around the country, feeding them artificial food and subjecting them to enormous stress. The third hustle is working the bees for publicity and sales—‘save the bees’ as a reason to buy something or support some policy or person or idea.”
Rob tells me his fellow renegade beekeeper, Sam Comfort, says, “It’s not CCD, it’s PCD: People Collapse Disorder.”
For Rob and other like-minded beekeepers, the solution to the crisis facing our bees (and us, since bees and other pollinators pollinate a third of the food we eat) lies in our own backyards, specifically with indigenous, locally adapted “survivor” bees, not chemicals. Sure, going treatment free means loss in the beginning—not easy for any beekeeper. But this group of “beeks” (a term of endearment referring to beekeeper geeks) believes the bees can “fix” themselves, if we just get out of the way.
Why are honey bees particularly stellar at genetic adaptation and evolution? I clearly needed the bee part of “the birds and the bees” spelled out for me.
Every honey bee hive consists of three types of bees. The queen is the only bee with fully developed ovaries. Up to 50,000 female worker bees, produced from the queen’s fertilized eggs, also inhabit the hive. Drones are the only males in a hive. They’re the product of the queen’s unfertilized eggs and have only her genetic material.
There are usually several hundred drones in a hive during mating season and they take daily flights to mixed drone congregational areas waiting to spot a virgin queen on her mating flight. The drones spread their queen’s DNA by impregnating these virgin queens on the fly. Each virgin queen mates with on average 12 drones and stores millions of their sperm in her body, her lifetime supply. Accordingly, her female offspring (the worker bees) have fathers of completely different genetic origins. This natural process brings genetic diversity and, with it, resilience to the hive.
That said, beekeepers just have to hope that the strange drones their hives’ queens are mating with are healthy. Because drones can fly up to four miles from their hive, no matter how good the care you take with your own bees, what other beekeepers are doing to their bees is of real concern.
If, like Rob and his fellow naturalist beekeepers, you are working towards locally adapted, disease- and pest-resistant bees, it is counterproductive to have chemically dependent drones from treated hives mating with your queen. According to them, it’s also a negative if other beekeepers in your area are buying queens and hive starter kits from outside of your local area. These bees are not adapted to the conditions they will face in their new world, and are accordingly less resilient here.
Why would anyone need or want to import bees for local hives? The surge in backyard beekeeping, while welcome in many respects, has outstripped most local bee supply outfits’ ability to raise a sufficient number of queens locally.
Enter Rob and the Napa Valley Bee Exchange. With funds raised in the summer of 2014 through fellow Napa resident Eileen Chiarello’s Kickstarter-esque Barnraiser (see the Summer 2014 issue of Edible Marin & Wine Country for a feature on Barnraiser), Rob has created the Napa Valley Bee Exchange, a community-based, sustainable beekeeping hub and queen-breeding facility that links seasoned beekeepers who have bees with locally proven genetics to new beekeepers just starting their apiaries. The Exchange offers bees, classes, workshops and individual instruction. He plans to create a model program to share with other bee communities throughout Northern California.
“This is why we need more of us,” Rob says as he waves an errant bee back into the van and we head to our next stop, the St. Helena Montessori School, where Rob is relocating our fellow bee travelers. Rob teaches beekeeping as a vocation at the school and oversees the apiary he created here. Alex Heil, program director of the school’s Adolescent Program (see the Spring 2012 issue of Edible Marin & Wine Country for more on this program) says, “What we are doing here is all about connectedness—to other people, the environment and the world at large—and there is no better animal to teach this than the bee. Rob exemplifies this, he’s like a forager bee buzzing around the county bringing so many different people and resources into our orbit.”
The young people we meet as we make our way around the school are excited to see Rob and to learn that I’m writing a story about him and sustainable, local beekeeping.
A couple of weeks later I join Rob again on an outing with his inner circle of treatment-free beek tribe members: Serge Labesque, an iconic guru to beekeepers throughout our area and a revered teacher of beekeeping at Sonoma State University; Cynthia Perry, who captains the Marin Beekeepers Split Squad (a group of beekeepers experienced in dividing hives, which is sometimes done to prevent the bees in a too-large hive from swarming (leaving the hive), to re-queen a hive or produce additional queens); and Christine Kurtz, former president of the Sonoma County Beekeepers’ Association.
In discussion over coffee, tea and honey at Rob’s before we pile into the Vanagon, I ask what, if any, actions these beekeepers take when they see one of their hives begin to struggle. Serge offers that you could alter the pool genetics of the hive by pulling the current queen and raising a new one.
“If you change the queen,” he explains, “you change the colony and its genetics. The success of the re-queening depends on the time of year, the degree to which the colony is struggling and where they are nutritionally.”
The overarching tone of the conversation is that these beekeepers allow the bees to operate in the most natural situation possible. By their own admission, 10 years ago these four beekeepers were considered heretics and “irresponsible freaks” in the beekeeping community, but there is rapidly increasing growth in the naturalist movement these days.
Later that morning I accompany the beekeepers as they inspect the apiary Rob manages at the thriving and visually splendid French Laundry Culinary Garden in Yountville. World-renowned chef Thomas Keller of the Michelin three-star French Laundry and his head farmer, Aaron Keefer, specifically chose Rob to keep their bees. When I spoke to Aaron about this choice, he shared that “Rob’s philosophy with the bees matches what we have here for the garden, which is to let nature take its course and that starts with the genetics. Our bees are locally adapted and extremely healthy. His approach is passionate and he cares so much about the bees and our farm as their home. Not only do the bees act as pollinators for us, our chefs say the honey from these hives is the best honey they’ve worked with.”
Walking into the garden, it’s as if the four beekeepers have entered a church: There’s stillness, focus and looks of wonder. Christine kneels and puts her ear to the hive to “hear” what the bees have to say. Others gently nudge the debris in the bottom of the trays with bare fingers, searching for clues.
The connectedness with the bees that Rob and crew have bestowed upon me feels primal and transcendent at the same time.
There’s a gasp of surprise as Cynthia notices a drone outside the hive in this first week of January. She picks it up to show to me: “See how big and fuzzy he is?” I notice his large wraparound eyes (all the better to spy a nubile virgin queen with) as she gently turns him over; his abdomen is full and round. “He doesn’t have a stinger; he’s all about spreading the DNA. I don’t know why he would be out here in January, there won’t be any virgin queens flying around for him to mate with,” she observes. Serge chimes in, “The bees always surprise you, always.”
The early spring behavior of the drone, in early January, leads to a discussion about how climate change overall and our particular drought are disruptive to the bees. Rob, Serge, Cynthia and Christine are all pretty sure the bees will figure it out. And they make me believe it, too.
At a Marin Beekeepers’ meeting I attend the following week with Rob and Cynthia, I hear Thomas Seeley, PhD (recognized as the world’s leading expert on bee behavior) confirm what I already felt: The bee colony is a sentient superorganism, but it’s also thousands of independently sentient organisms working with each other for the highest good of the colony.
Bees have highly evolved communication skills and the way they share data (pheromones and thoracic vibrations, the “drugs and rock ’n’ roll” of the bee world—having already described the “sex” part) and make decisions allows them to amass and access intelligence greater than the sum of themselves. Of all the apocalyptic news we receive on a daily basis, it’s the threat of the disappearance of bees that seems to have awakened many of us. I’m hoping we’ll let them teach us to be better humans and remind us that our own superorganism is this planet.
As the bees’ champion, Rob Keller, says, we don’t need a silver bullet, we need a mindset reset. Sustainable folks don’t need to “save the bees” by treating and, for honey’s sake, we don’t want Monsanto and its ilk using the “shocking, unexpected bee collapse” spin as an excuse to play more genetic roulette by developing additional chemical “helpers.”
Thanks to the efforts of Rob and others like him, the word is out. When it comes to bees, Mother Nature does know best. In fact, she always has.
NapaValleyBeeCompany.com
Barnraiser.us
SonomaBees.org
MarinBees.org
