Keepers Fear Parasite May Infect California Hives : Mite Threatens to Sting Bee Industry

The man in a green uniform was bouncing in a pickup truck toward a ranger station at Bear Divide, about 2,000 feet above Lake View Terrace.

From a spot on the mountain road, the activities of mankind were spread below. Los Angeles, the San Fernando Valley, millions of parts, humming busily together in a complex and irreducible whole.

It suggested, in fact, the world toward which the man in the uniform was driving: the world of bees.

To enter the world of bees with Michael Pearson, the county’s bee inspector, requires only a few simple tools, starting with a mesh veil, a tough cotton outfit, leather gloves and a device to blow smoke on the bees to calm them down.

More important, though, is a fertile imagination.

For who would think, after all, that a puff of smoke from a smoldering piece of burlap would pacify a colony of 60,000 bees while their hive was being opened and rearranged by a man in a veil?

Or that bees find their way around their hives by dancing but travel across the country by truck?

Or that bees can use their social skills to seduce men in their own backyards?

Or that bees are vulnerable creatures whose prodigious creative powers are in jeopardy because of a parasitic disease?

Probably not many would think that. And that may be why Pearson was the only applicant for his job when it opened up two years ago after being unfilled for some time.

Pearson, a curly haired and easy-going man of 35, had been seduced by bees in his college days at Cal Poly Pomona. So he was ready for the job, even the obvious part about getting stung.

“If you work with bees, you’re going to get stung,” he said. One day he was stung 13 times.

The cold, damp days of winter usually are rough on people who work with bees, Pearson said. The bees spend much of their time indoors, clinging together in a ball around their queen and flexing their wing muscles to generate warmth. In such a state they don’t take kindly to intrusion.

Pearson therefore would usually be in his office in El Monte at this time of year. He would be catching up on the paper work generated by the county’s 40,000 beehives.

This year he has been sent to the field out of season. He is scouting for a disease that looms as threatening to bees as AIDS is to people.

It is caused by a parasite called acarapis woodi , commonly known as the acarine mite. Seen under a microscope, the mite is an ugly thing with long whiskers and pinchers angling out of its body. It measures only one-fiftieth of an inch across. The mites are small enough to settle into bees’ windpipes and rear their young.

Although the effects of the mite are debated, one scientific report issued last year painted a dismal picture. It said infested bees “shun work, abandon field duties and consume honey reserves which leads to starvation. . . . The queen may stop laying eggs and the colony becomes broodless.”

So far the mite is just a scare in California. Not a single one has been found.

But many beekeepers think it’s on its way.

It has already showed up in 10 states after working its way up through South and Central America.

Should the mite arrive, it would threaten not only the honey crop but also the strength of agricultural staples such as almonds, alfalfa and melons. They rely heavily on bees for pollination.

In California, 900,000 beehives a year are trucked to the fields of the San Joaquin Valley, at about $25 a hive. That makes beekeeping a multimillion-dollar segment of the state’s agricultural industry. It is why Pearson was out looking for mites.

His job is to visit beekeepers and spot-check beehives. He catches two bees per hive and mails the bees to Sacramento. There a laboratory technician with the Department of Agriculture pins the dead insects to a dissecting board and cuts their windpipes open to look for mites.

Sometimes the hardest part of Pearson’s job is finding bees. A lot of beekeepers don’t particularly like inspectors. They also often move their bees to new food sources or plants in need of pollination.

Following a Lead

Pearson was working on a lead that day. He had found a beekeeper who was evading registration with the county and had extracted the information that his bees were near the ranger station at Bear Divide.

Pearson drove there but didn’t see any bees. He got out of his truck and talked to a ranger who hadn’t seen any bees, either.

Pearson took the setback in stride. There were plenty of bees to be found. He drove back down the mountain road, followed Sand Canyon Road a few miles. Then he turned onto a dirt road. After about a mile he stopped in a clearing where 300 gray boxes were neatly placed in rows.

Dressing for Part

Pearson put on his uniform. It consisted of white coveralls, leather gloves with long elastic gauntlets that clung to his elbows and a mesh veil fitted atop a pith helmet. He pulled the veil down, tightening it with long strings that wrapped around his waist.

Thus outfitted, and looking more like an astronaut than an inspector, Pearson picked up a long, slender net and a kitchen spray dispenser filled with alcohol. He marched into the bee yard.

He didn’t use the smoker in the back of the pickup. The day was still cool. The bees were inside their hives, clumped around their queens. He had to kick the bottoms of some of the hives to get them going.

He walked up and down the rows of hives, whipping the net around until he had a clump of bees at the bottom. He squirted them with alcohol to stun them and emptied them into a specimen jar. He labeled the jar with the name of the beekeeper, which was branded on the side of each hive.

Then he got back in his truck and went looking for more bees.

As it happened, the hives off Sand Canyon Road belonged to Jim Dyer, a beekeeper of some note.

Dyer, a 53-year-old Agua Dulce man, is the image of a blue-denimed cowboy in every way except for his vocabulary. It consists of words like “drones” and “brood” instead of “steers” and “heifers.”

Dyer makes his living from bees, as did his father. His son Brian is also in the bee business.

Dyer owns about 1,000 hives. He used to own twice that many, but he gave half his bees to Brian to get him started.

He estimates he has $200,000 invested in bees, including trucks, a warehouse for his honey hives and the roads he has carved by bulldozer to his most remote locations in the Owens Valley.

He says it earns him a respectable living. He is vague about how well it pays.

Just Making a Living

“If it’s too bad a year, you just hopefully keep your bees alive,” he said. “It seems like I have to make at least $60 per hive to make a living and keep all the bills paid and everything else. Then if I make more than that, I’d say I made some money. Otherwise I’m just making my wages and making a living. Of course, I can eat a beefsteak when I want to.”

The income derives from honey and the fees farmers pay him to leave his bees near their fields in the spring.

Dyer travels a lot with his bees. In the spring he moves them to Merced in the San Joaquin Valley for almond pollination. Then it’s the Owens Valley for citrus fruit, melons or alfalfa. He winters the bees near home and brings them back in the summer for the buckwheat honey flow. That’s no vacation, either.

Use of Corn Syrup

Right now he is feeding corn syrup to the bees in all 1,000 hives.

Each hive contains only 20,000 bees. They have lived through the winter, but they are old and worn out. By spring, with proper care, they will have produced 60,000 to 70,000 young, strong bees that will work themselves to death on almonds.

The corn syrup is not presented to the bees as food so much as fake honey. It is Dyer’s belief that the syrup makes the bees think they’re in a honey flow. He thinks this puts the bees into a frenzy of reproduction.

“That’s what I’m trying to make them think,” he said. “It gets them laying a lot more brood. The queen really isn’t the boss of that hive. Nature is. When a queen’s starting to go bad, they’ll get her to supersede, lay eggs in queen cells and raise another queen and get rid of her. It seems like nature is what takes control of the hive.”

One day recently he worked out of an old truck fitted with a large steel tank that contains the syrup.

Dyer wore a veil but didn’t tie it down. When a bee got inside it, he put his hand under the mesh and smashed it with a finger.

“There’s times I have to wear coveralls and everything,” he said. “But I don’t know, wearing gloves and everything is like trying to take a shower with a raincoat on. As long as I don’t get many stings, I’ll just work this way. If they get rambunctious, I’ll dress for them. You work bees long enough, you know how to handle them and keep them under control. It’s a skill.”

Lulling Them With Smoke

To quiet the bees, all Dyer did was to blow smoke at them.

The smoker consists of a tin can with a spout on one end and a hand-sized bellow on the other. Dyer puffed it twice each time he approached a hive, then clasped it between his knees to free his hands. The bees stayed put.

As in most aspects of beekeeping, there is abundant debate about the use of smoke. There is no proven explanation of why it works. One theory is that the smoke deceives the bees into thinking there is a forest fire. Instinctively, they head for their honeycomb and wait it out.

In fact, outfoxing bees is a crucial part of many beekeeper strategies.

For instance, Dyer will divide his stronger hives later this year. He does this by chasing the bees from an upper chamber where there are plenty of eggs. Then he steals the chamber, eggs and all, and puts it on top of a weaker hive.

The bees from the stronger hive accept the loss good-naturedly and set about laying a new brood. The weaker bees accept the new brood as their own and hatch it.

If that makes bees seem stupid, consider that they read rocks and bushes like signposts and key their direction to the angle of the sunlight. When one bee finds a source of pollen or nectar, she tells the others where it is by dancing while they touch her antennae. She dances in a straight line when the food is near and in circles when it is far away.

When a beekeeper moves a hive full of bees from Agua Dulce to Merced, his bees find, in the new locale, that all their old landmarks have disappeared. It is simple enough, however, for them to reorient themselves to new rocks and bushes. But should their hive be moved only a few feet when they are away from it, they will never find it again, returning always to where it used to be.

A central fact about bees is that their complex social habits suggest an order of intelligence and communication that is almost irresistibly appealing. It is commonly noted in books about bees that the beekeeper often sees a reflection of himself in the habits of his bees and can’t help liking them for it.

The effect has swept men out of normal lives into the world of bees.

How Keeper Got Hooked

That’s what happened to Dick Harker, sales manager of the Aviation Book Store in Glendale.

He chanced to discuss bees with a neighbor, who kept them to pollinate his oranges. Within months the neighbor had helped Harker acquire several hives.

“Of course, each year hives will normally swarm,” Harker said. “The swarm will take off looking for a new home. They’ll usually land in the nearest tree or fence post. It was easy for me to capture these swarms and start another hive.”

Harker also got his daughter involved. She’s now Miss California Honeybee.

Harker hasn’t done as well as his daughter. Last year’s dry winter reduced his yield of honey. The heat and ants wiped out all but two of his hives in the summer.

But Harker said he’s hooked for good.

“Not only is it a way to get free honey, which I enjoy very much, but it is so relaxing to work with bees,” he said. “It’s like stepping into another world for a couple hours, getting close to nature.”

Another Smitten by Bees

Bruce Steele, a graduate in biology from Occidental College, was hit even harder. Steele didn’t know exactly where his life was taking him until he encountered bees in his Highland Park house one summer evening eight years ago.

“I was sitting in my backyard, and I heard this incredibly loud noise,” Steele said.

It was a swarm. He didn’t try to catch that one. But it got him thinking.

“I started doing some reading. At the end of the next year I had a couple of colonies in my backyard.”

Too Much of a Risk

Now he has 150 hives. He harvests his own honey using two $700 field extractors. But that isn’t enough to put him in business, he said.

“Being an agricultural industry sort of, it’s the kind of thing I would never want to depend on for my income,” Steele said. “There are so many negatives to beekeeping. It’s a little bit beyond my risk category now that my wife and I are planning a baby.”

Rather than depend on his own bees for a livelihood, Steele decided to work as a “ranch-hand beekeeper.” His employer is Don Null, an acoustical physicist who keeps about 500 beehives on the side and operates a honey extraction plant at his Topanga Canyon home. Null was seduced much as the others.

“I answered an ad in the newspaper for a free hive of bees in someone’s backyard,” he said. Now he is president of the Los Angeles County Beekeepers’ Assn. and sits on the California Honey Advisory Board.

Null is getting involved in the politics of bees.

The American beekeeper’s future is looking glum, he said, because Americans don’t consume enough honey and low-cost foreign imports from China and South America are undercutting their product.

He is also brooding about the mite.

“What could conceivably happen is that it could wipe out a lot of commercial beekeepers, and a lot of backyard beekeepers would just give up,” he said. “What will probably happen is that we’ll have to come up with bees that are not susceptible to the mite by selection of queens.”

In the meantime, Null is encouraging beekeepers to cooperate with Pearson.

Null said many beekeepers are antagonistic toward inspectors and will go to extremes to conceal their hives.

“Across the country some bee inspectors are very callous and very officious,” he said. “They come across as stupid individuals. It is hard to have a rapport.”

Null said

Pearson is different and “comes across as a very reasonable person. The whole reason for the bee inspector is to try to hold down disease.”

Speaking of diseases of the bee, inspector Pearson had good news.

Altogether, he has visited 45 yards, taking 11,000 bees as samples, he said.

The bees went to Sacramento and were dissected. No mites were found.

But that is hardly all there is to say about the world of bees.

There are many more fascinating things, such as the way bees manufacture their honey by evaporating nectar.

On a warm summer night, they position themselves in legions at the entrance to their hive. They flap their wings in unison to pull dry air in. The evaporation also helps to keep the hive cool. Dyer calls that “the original swamp cooler.”

And there are deeper mysteries too, such as the mating of the queen.

That occurs only once in the two or three years of her reign. It happens during her maiden flight, which will be her only flight, unless she later leads a swarm. The young queen flies out in search of a drone.

Drones, who serve no purpose except to fly about looking for a queen, are the only males in the hive. To keep them in shape for their single duty, the worker bees, who are all females, wait upon the drones lavishly and require no work in return.

That slovenly life comes to a sudden end for the one drone that the queen attracts on her maiden flight.

Queen and drone meet in a midair collision with a deadly impact. The drone literally explodes himself, implanting his sexual organs in the queen’s abdomen. His carcass falls to earth, and the queen returns to the hive. She stores his sperm for the rest of her life, dispensing it to fertilize one egg at a time as she lays 1,000 to 3,000 eggs a day. She never needs a drone again.

The books on bees don’t say whether the beekeeper sees a reflection of himself in that.