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 Bonheur I 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 Scene presented 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.
The Johnsons take the pests and other problems in stride, and don't seem to give a thought to abandoning their enterprise. Housing and retail development are beginning to fill in the once rural landscape surrounding the farm. When I asked Ed whether he foresees any conflicts with his new neighbors, his response—"We're grandfathered in here"—had a note of just-try-and-budge-us defiance. Paula expects that she and her siblings will keep the place going when the mastermind steps down. "It's just such a good, pure product," she says.
In the fourth century BC, Democritus, known as the "laughing philosopher," credited honey for his long and healthy life—and he laughed his way through 109 years. —Stephen Buchmann, Letters From the Hive
The foods of the hive—honey, pollen and royal jelly—have been touted for millennia as healers, beautifiers and aids to longevity. The beekeepers I've met are all enthusiastic consumers of honey, and it seems to be keeping them in great condition. (The outdoor work and calm attitude that beekeeping requires might have something to do with it, too.) Ed Johnson may not be hauling around backbreaking supers full of honey as he once did, but he still goes dancing every Friday night. "He gets mad when the young guys cut in on him," jokes Paula, whose lovely, unlined skin is a fine testimonial for her recommended honey-and-cucumber facial. Tarcila Fox is a pretty, petite woman with a figure that a 20-year-old would envy. I was shocked when she told me she's 56.
Ed himself is a big believer in bee pollen, or, as he calls it, "natural Viagra." Bees groom flower pollen from their bodies during foraging flights, and the resulting mix of pollen and bee spit is stored in their legs for the trip home; beekeepers gather it by using screen traps that shake off a portion as the bees enter the hive. I can't speak to pollen's virtues as an ED treatment, but I started using it long ago as an allergy remedy. (It's supposed to work as a desensitizer, a natural alternative to allergy shots.) It seems to help, but in any case it's surprisingly good-tasting, and I am now thoroughly hooked on my morning spoonful. There is something vaguely drug-like and addictive about the stuff. I felt compelled to carry a supply with me on a trip to Sweden a few years ago, despite my fear that the sniffer dogs would bust me for bringing in an agricultural product. In her book, Robbing the Bees: A Biography of Honey, the Sweet Liquid Gold That Seduced the World, Holley Robinson describes what happened when she got a little carried away with it during a long road trip: "After eating about half a cup, I didn't feel hungry anymore. I did feel elated, sick, stoned and manic, as if I had had about twenty cups of Smiley's coffee. My pupils in the rearview mirror seemed huge, and my hands on the wheel were shaking."
Royal jelly, a glandular secretion of worker bees that's fed to the hive's future queens, is popular in Asia as an aid to virility, and touted in the West as a cosmetic wonder. In Letters From the Hive: An Intimate History of Bees, Honey and Humankind, entomologist Stephen Buchmann pooh-poohs health claims for both royal jelly and bee pollen, but he's a big advocate of eating bee larvae, which he insists are both nutritious and delicious. Buchmann also has respect for bee venom therapy. Bee stings have long been thought to relieve arthritis, and they're also used as an alternative treatment for multiple sclerosis. You just put the bee where it hurts and let her do her thing. According to Paula, guitar players occasionally show up at the farm asking for stings to treat stiff fingers.
The premise of biophilia is the existence, in all of us, of genetically based physiological and neural structures that respond to differing habitats and various animals and plants in selective ways. Biophilia formalizes a human experience that goes all the way back to prehistoric times—namely, our deep, sustaining, almost sacramental relationship with the natural world. Simply put, biophilia means the love of life—all life. —Stephen Buchmann, Letters From the Hive
Any apiarist you talk to, whether it's a rank beginner or a veteran like Ed, is very quick to rattle off a list of the pleasures and benefits of bee products, and the usefulness of bees themselves. They want others to understand the importance of what they do. David Young, president of the Nashville Area Beekeepers Association, puts it most directly—"I feel I am making a contribution to society"—and it's really no exaggeration. The pollination provided by bees is essential for most of our major food crops. The loss of feral bees means that "pollination service," in which apiaries rent out their bees to farmers, is increasingly important.
The vast majority of Tennessee's 1,000-plus beekeepers aren't trying to make a profit, and couldn't if they wanted to. (David Young: "How do you get to be a millionaire in the beekeeping business? Start with $2 million.") All their lauding of the practical virtues of their hobby is really just cover for the fact that beekeepers love bees—truly, madly, deeply love them.
When asked why she wants to put beehives on her property, Tarcila Fox's first answer is a practical one: she's planting fruit trees on her place and wants them to do well. Then her voice takes on a wistful tone as she begins to talk about her childhood memories of bees. "One of the fun things to do in the summer was to catch honeybees. We'd have contests to see who could catch the most." Now bees evoke a deeply felt nostalgia. "The humming of the bees...it's almost like a romantic thing. It connects me to that little girl running through the clover."
The romantic attachment to bees is particularly strong in women, who love the image of the queen bee and her house full of daughters. (All bees are female, except for a small number of drones whose sole job is to mate with the queen.) Paula Morton refers to them as "Mama and her little girls." Sue Monk Kidd's wildly popular novel, The Secret Life of Bees, with its black beekeeping goddesses and tidbits of bee lore, clearly touches something in the emotional lives of women who have never been near a beehive. The selfless dynamic of a bee colony, where there's a place for everyone and everyone is in her place, somehow evokes our fundamental need for connection, both to each other and to the rest of nature.
Guys, not surprisingly, are more inclined to express a scientific interest, and are a little uncomfortable with too much overt sentiment about the bees. "I'm not a tree hugger," says David Young. "I do it because it's fascinating. You get to work with the science, the genetics." Roland Neronha, a retired contractor who just began keeping bees last year, looked slightly horrified when I asked him if he ever thinks of his bees as female, or if he'd ever considered giving them names.
But a little prodding reveals that the men also have a lot of emotion and nostalgia invested in their relationship with the bees. David Young says he began beekeeping six years ago, inspired by his father's stories about tending bees with his great-grandfather. Now he shares the hobby with his 11-year-old daughter. He speaks warmly of the old-timers who have mentored him in beekeeping, and he loves taking demonstration hives around to schools.
For Roland Neronha, who moved from Massachusetts to a remote property in rural Stewart County seven years ago, the bees have been part of a determined plan to get closer to the land and live a more natural life. He is a devout proponent of the health benefits of bee products, but he has clearly been seduced by the charms of the bees. He lovingly shows them off, clucking over a hive that's not doing well, and is quick to reprimand anybody who swats at the bees that occasionally wander into his workshop. I got in trouble for just waving off a deer fly.
Nostalgia comes into play for him, too. His eyes still get a little wide with wonder as he tells the story of a childhood neighbor, a longtime beekeeper, who let him come along to retrieve a colony that had swarmed into a church steeple. "He got the queen in his fingers...[and the bees] were all over him, following that queen. He carried her down the ladder and snapped her into the tub [in the trunk of the car], no cover on the tub. The whole swarm followed her in. He shut the trunk and we drove home."
The first queen to emerge destroys as many of the developing queens as she can find, eliminating the competition. She does this by chewing through the side of the queen cell and stinging the developing queen pupa inside. Sometimes, two or three queens emerge simultaneously, and they eventually meet and fight to the death, often with help from the workers. —Kim Flottum, The Backyard Beekeeper
A bee colony is model of industry and social cohesion, but it's also ruthless, relentless and unforgiving: worker bees are literally worked to death, a weakened queen will be killed by her daughters, and drones that don't die in mating (the "little death" is synonymous with the big one for bees) are driven out of the hive to starve. And it's not as if bees keep all this unladylike behavior in the hive. Bees that invade buildings can cause substantial damage. When they flourish in the wild, bees tend to hog the nectar supply, to the detriment of native insect species. In the 1950s, the Brazilian government imported a highly aggressive honey bee from Africa, which interbred with the docile European bee and subsequently spread northward, arriving in the U.S. in 1990. Popularly dubbed the "killer bee," this Africanized bee is prone to attack en masse, and has been blamed for more than a thousand deaths throughout Latin America.
If you mention some of these less adorable traits around bee lovers, there is usually a moment of pained hesitation, as if you have tactlessly pointed out the character flaws of a favored child. Bee people feel that their charges are misunderstood in addition to being undervalued. They like to point out that the bee's sting is purely defensive, never offensive, and costs the brave bee its life. Even the Africanized bee is just an unusually zealous guardian of the hive.
Likewise, the swarms that take up residence in houses and get themselves on the evening news are just doing what comes naturally. Colonies "hive off"—i.e., the queen takes a portion of the workers and relocates—whenever things get too crowded in the hive. Beekeepers try to manage their hives to control this behavior, but nature bats last, as they say, and sometimes the bees are bound to go. They'd like to hole up in a nice tree; it's not their fault that we've ravaged the landscape to put up megachurches and subdivisions. The whole thing is a heartbreak for the beekeeper. Sometimes the bees can be retrieved, but many times they are gone for good—often to die at the hands of some bug-phobic homeowner armed with a pesticide sprayer.
Although beekeepers—especially the women—tend to hedge a little if you ask them about it directly, I think they are as attracted by the dark side of bee society as they are by its cuddlier aspects. Bees pursue their own nature in a complete and perfect manner, uncorrupted by any thoughts we might have about them. They're a reminder that the world was not created to suit our opinion. They force us to step down from our lofty notions and just marvel at a miracle that doesn't reference us. This quality is one of the things that people find so soothing about tending a beehive. As Tarcila told me, "It's the way it is. There's a comfort in knowing that some things are just that way."
Suggested Reading
Kim Flottum, The Backyard Beekeeper: An Absolute Beginner's Guide to Keeping Bees in Your Yard and Garden (Quarry Books, 167 pp., $19.99)
Tammy Horn, Bees in America: How the Honey Bee Shaped a Nation (The University Press of Kentucky, 333 pp., $27.50)
Holley Bishop, Robbing the Bees: A Biography of Honey, the Sweet Liquid Gold That Seduced the World (Free Press, 324 pp., $24)
Stephen Buchmann, Letters From the Hive: An Intimate History of Bees, Honey, and Humankind (Bantam Books, 275 pp., $24)
Local Resources
Johnson Bee Farm, 1206 S. Dickerson Road, Goodlettsville, TN 37072. (615) 859-7253
Nashville Area Beekeepers Association holds meetings the second Sunday of each month at 2 p.m., Ellington Agricultural Center. For more information, visit www.hivetool.com/naba/
