NOTES FROM THE BEEYARD

bees besieged

Read any good books lately?

If you would like to buy this book contact:

429 S. Willard Street

Burlington, VT 05401

(802) 863-4938

$25.00

by Tom Theobald

When I returned to Colorado in June of 1965 I was a nobody; just a kid, fresh out of college, no job, a young wife, in a well worn 1959 Volkswagen Bus filled to bursting with all our worldly possessions. On the trip out I remember stopping on a hilltop in the rolling hill country of western Nebraska where Old Highway 30, the Lincoln Highway, undulates across the landscape for miles on end.

We had stopped to watch a blue-black bruise of clouds, lightning and rainbows from a magnificent afternoon thunderstorm on the southern horizon down toward the Platte. In the foreground the land fell away in a golden glow of late afternoon light, the spring-green Nebraska prairie made even greener by the recent rainfall.

A handful of raptors circled in the distance, on the lookout for a careless prairie dog, mouse or snake sunning after the storm. By sheer coincidence, America The Beautiful had been playing on the radio. We stopped, opened the doors of the VW Bus, turned the radio up and just watched, awed by the natural spectacle and the beauty of it all. Both Barbara and I were moved by that magic moment, and it has remained imbedded in our memories for 40 years. Both literally and metaphorically, nothing but the future lay before us.

I was lucky enough to land a good job with IBM that fall, just as our limited resources were running out and we were beginning to go in the hole. It was a happy and fortuitous coincidence, I just happened to come back to Colorado the same summer that IBM arrived. It sustained us for a decade.

It was a great job; I met some really interesting and intelligent people, learned a lot, and grew up (I think). I probably had about as much freedom and flexibility as anyone there, but it was still too confining for me and I longed to be outdoors, chasing thunderstorms and rainbows. I finally made the jump not really knowing what might come, but it wasn’t two months before beekeeping leapt out of the bushes and captured me, and I’ve been a happy prisoner of the craft ever since.

I started writing because I could foresee the day when beekeeping operations such as mine would become increasingly rare, at least along the Front Range where urbanization was running amok, and I wanted to try to document it before that happened. I was just going to take the readers through a year of beekeeping, get it in print, have something to hand down to the grandchildren, notwithstanding that there weren’t even any grandchildren yet. Sure I was. Once I got started it was hard to stop, there was always another story, another season.

That was 16 years ago, and I don’t see any immediate end unless I get canned or you readers get bored. I’m a stray dog that’s been fed one too many times.

Some readers have been with me on the journey from the beginning, while for others this may be the first column you’ve ever read. Most of you know though that beekeeping is the main focus of my life; it’s what I do, what I am, what I think, how I feel, what I value. Beekeeping is an expression of me and I in turn reflect it to the outside world.

There are many opportunities for beekeepers to write for other beekeepers, in the trade magazines and such, but I wanted instead to write for those of you who had always been curious about bees but knew virtually nothing about them. I’m reaching an age now when most of the future that lay stretched out before me on the Nebraska plains is now history stretched out behind, and I’ve tried to chronicle the beekeeping part to give the general public a glimpse into a unique relationship between man, an insect, and the rest of the world.

At the same time, like anyone else who feels a deep commitment to something they have done in life - whether they were a bricklayer, a pipe fitter, a carpenter or a cowboy - I was always on the lookout for someone who would tell my story, the story of beekeeping. despite the attempts to tell it myself. As an example this, that same urge must be one of the reasons why cowboy poetry has become so popular I think, because the cowboy poets express a love for a way of life in a way that may escape those who lack the same facility with words.

I’ve come across three books over my 30 years of beekeeping that stand out. The first was The Joys of Beekeeping, a lovely little volume by a well known beekeeper and author, Richard Taylor, who to our great loss passed away last year. In this book Taylor spins a love song to beekeeping, expressing eloquently and simply why someone might be captivated by this ancient calling. I read Taylor’s little book at the beginning of my beekeeping and it formed a foundation for many of my own views.

The second came along in 1991, a larger book by a non-beekeeper, writer Douglas Whynott, who at the time was teaching writing at Mount Holyoke College and at the University of Massachusetts. In Following the Bloom - Across America with the Migratory Beekeepers, Whynott tells the story of migratory beekeepers in the United States, an industry which has grown to even greater importance since the first printing of his book. An opening quote from commercial beekeeper Andy Card sets the tone for the story - “We are the last real cowboys, the last people moving livestock across the United States.” Whynott rides in the cabs of the semis hauling bees and hangs out with the big guys, giving us a glimpse of the unique life of migratory beekeeping.

The last book, and I believe the most comprehensive and informative of all, is a volume published just this spring, Bees Besieged, One Beekeeper’s Bittersweet Journey to Understanding. The author, Bill Mares, is a Harvard graduate, former Vermont State Representative, marathon runner, choral singer, high school teacher and accomplished writer with 10 prior books on a wide range of subjects to his credit. In short, he is an interesting, articulate and accomplished man. Bill is also a hobby beekeeper in Vermont, and as he says in the opening to his book - “In the spring of 1996 all of my bees died.”

As we all have been, he was visited by the mites and the destruction they bring, but unlike the rest of us it set Mares off on an odyssey that covered several years and resulted in the best book I have read on beekeeping. Over that time Bill traveled the country, talking to people in all corners of the industry, from small timers like myself to the owner of the largest beekeeping outfit in the world, Richard Adee of South Dakota.

American beekeeping is at a critical juncture in its history, and the direction it takes is likely to affect everyone, not just beekeepers. In 220 pages Mares captures the story of our problems and promises, sometimes in painfully candid ways, bringing beekeeping to life in a warm and personal telling that is both scholarly and down to earth.

Bees Besieged is an important work for beekeepers and non-beekeepers alike, important enough in my mind that I have made a bulk order of the book so I can make it available to others. If you have a deeper interest in the story of beekeeping or know someone who does, if your curiosity has been piqued by some of the subjects I have touched upon over the years, you owe it to yourself to have this book in your library and in your memory bank.

Happy reading. You won't regret it.