The Secret Life of Beekeepers

All over Europe, bees were known to keep domestic peace, for they would not produce honey for or stay in a family that was quarrelsome, dysfunctional, or unhygienic. If the atmosphere didn't suit them, they would sting and leave. —Holley Bishop, Robbing the Bees

It's a bad idea to wear perfume around bees, so maybe it was the Muguet de BonheurI absent-mindedly spritzed on before I left the house; or maybe it's true, as many beekeepers insist, that the little critters can sense fear. Whatever the cause, I apparently failed to pass muster with the bees on a recent visit to Ed Johnson's bee farm in Goodlettsville. Ed's son Robert escorted me and Tarcila Fox, an aspiring beekeeper, out to visit the dozens of hives, housed in white pine boxes called "supers" that are kept stacked on trailers in an unmowed field. It was a steamy day, and I was sweating buckets in my borrowed bee suit, gloves and veil. Robert opened a hive and pulled out one frame after another, looking for the queen, while Tarcila, rapt, leaned in to get a closer look. I kept a fraidy-cat's distance, but it wasn't long before feisty little kamikazes started hurling themselves at me, making angry pings against the netting of my veil. I felt a couple of them bop against my shoulders. It took some serious willpower not to start flailing away at them, a faux pas that I knew could provoke a mass assault. Robert and Tarcila seemed to be completely exempt from the bees' wrath. A few peaceable bees whirled around them, making no contact.

"I think she's a little scared of them," Robert murmured to Tarcila, glancing my way.

No kidding. Clearly, there are bee people and non-bee people, and I didn't make the cut. It seemed a little unfair, since I've been buying Johnson's honey and bee pollen for years. When the editors at the Scenepresented me with a stack of newly published bee books for review, along with a charge to go talk to some beekeepers, I welcomed the excuse to visit the farm and meet my suppliers.

Slightly embarrassed but thankfully unstung, I walked with Robert and Tarcila back to the house, where Ed, daughter Paula Morton and the bee dogs Daisy and Buddy greeted us with glasses of ice water and an eagerness to talk about bees.

Be warned though: Keeping bees can be addictive, and there's no known cure. But then, no one has ever looked for a cure. No one has wanted one. —Kim Flottum, The Backyard Beekeeper

When I asked Paula to explain what's so great about beekeeping, she cheerfully lobbed my query right back. "The question is, what's NOT great about beekeeping?" That pretty much sums up your typical apiarist's approach to life. Bee people are true believers, and positive thinkers. They have to be: it's been a tough couple of decades for them. Although the burgeoning interest in alternative health and nutrition has been good for the market in honey and other bee foods, American apiaries have been hit by one blow after another. Beginning in the 1980s, a series of imported pests, including the varroa mite from Asia and the tracheal mite from Europe, have killed or weakened thousands of colonies. According to Gray Haun, state apiarist with the Tennessee Department of Agriculture, the mites destroy about 10 percent of the state's colonies every year, and have essentially wiped out the population of "feral" bees. (Honey bees were brought to North America from Europe, but before the mites arrived, there were thriving colonies of escaped bees in the wild.)

Moreover, the honey business has gone global along with everything else. What was once a local delicacy, produced and distributed on a small scale, is now a faceless commodity. That cute little bear you pull off the shelf at Kroger contains a homogenized blend of honey from hundreds of producers, and much of the honey in the U.S. market is dumped here at rock-bottom prices by China, Mexico and Argentina.

But none of that discourages Ed Johnson, a tall, fit 79-year-old who has been caring for bees all his life. Paula and Robert are now running many of the day-to-day operations of the farm, but Ed is still, as Paula puts it, "the mastermind." His grandfather brought the first hives to the farm in 1918, concurrent with a big wartime boom in beekeeping described in Tammy Horn's book, Bees in America: How the Honey Bee Shaped a Nation. World War I created a sugar shortage, so the demand for honey was high and prices were good. The government even promoted beekeeping among returning veterans. Trench warfare left many of them with shell shock and disfiguring facial injuries. Beekeeping was regarded as a form of rehabilitative therapy as well as a source of income, and disabled vets were provided with free bees and equipment.

Johnson worked most of his life as a produce peddler, selling fruits and vegetables from a fleet of four trucks around the Nashville area. He has concentrated on the bees in recent years, adding hives as other old-timers, many of them discouraged by the mites, have gotten out of the business. He sells his honey and pollen at stores like Wild Oats and The Produce Place, but you can still buy it at his farm on the honor system. There's a lock box and a stack of bottles on a shelf in back of the house—you just drive by day or night, drop in your money, and take your pick of clover, wildflower or the orange blossom that he gets on exchange from a Florida apiary.