Hannah Nordhaus

On pesticides and dying bees

hannah — Fri, 18 May 2012 18:33:24 +0000

Boingboing.net, the fabulous tech and science site, recently asked me to weigh in on the recent studies linking Colony Collapse Disorder to neonicotinoid pesticides, and after poking around a bit, I was, frankly, astonished at how poorly the subject has been covered in the media.

My post, below:

The Honeybees are Still Dying

The eerie mystery of the vanishing honeybees has not been put to rest.

In the last few weeks, three separate studies explored the effect of insecticides on honeybee and pollinator health. One paper linked neonicotinoids, a new class of systemic insecticides that have come into widespread use in recent years, to impaired honeybee navigation; a second noted the effects of low levels of the pesticides on bumblebee reproduction.

The most talked about study, from a Harvard team, found that the colonies fed neonicotinoid-laced corn syrup collapsed in a manner that appeared to mimic the effects of Colony Collapse Disorder, or CCD—the mysterious phenomenon in which otherwise-healthy bees simply vanish from their hives. Neonicotinoids, declared the Harvard team, were “the likely culprit in sharp worldwide declines in honeybee colonies since 2006.”

Dramatic headlines soon followed: “Mystery of the Disappearing Bees: Solved!” announced a Reuters headline. Ah, if only that were true. Even if neonicotinoids were banned tomorrow, honeybees would still be in big trouble.

The recent studies add to mounting evidence that low levels of neonicotinoids may have “sub-lethal” outcomes—long-term effects on pollinators that haven’t been measured in chemical-company testing submitted for EPA approval. What those papers don’t prove, unfortunately, is that “neonics,” as they are called, cause CCD—or explain the troubling colony losses we’ve seen in recent years.

CCD is defined as a condition in which the majority of bees disappear from a healthy hive in rapid fashion, usually within two weeks—leaving behind a queen, ample honey and brood, and little obvious sign of disease that might explain the colony’s collapse.

Since the phenomenon was first named and made headlines in late 2006, however, the disorder has too often been conflated—by the media, and sometimes by beekeepers as well—with honeybee losses in general. “It’s like saying that everyone’s dying of a heart attack,” explains Dennis vanEngelsdorp, the Pennsylvania entomologist who first discovered the disorder. “When in fact we die from all sorts of causes.”

A Matter of Life and Deaths

Bees, too, die in all sorts of ways: they suffer from parasites and fungal and bacterial and viral infections; they starve to death; and yes, they also succumb to pesticides—sometimes when they are mistakenly sprayed and are poisoned outright, and also, perhaps, due to long-term neurological and developmental effects when exposed to lower amounts. Not many of them, however, actually die of CCD.

In fact, though about a third of the nation’s honeybee herd has died each winter since 2007—a number much higher than the 15 percent loss beekeepers consider “acceptable”—few recent losses can be attributed to CCD. In 2008, beekeepers reported symptoms of CCD in 60 percent of colonies that died; in the last year, “I haven’t seen one verifiable case of CCD,” says vanEngelsdorp. Annual winter losses have been just as heavy in the last couple of years as they were in 2008. But “they can usually can be explained by something else,” he says. And that’s true even though neonicotinoid use continues apace.

The recent neonicotinoid studies have also come under fire. Bayer CropScience, which manufactures a number of widely used neonicotinoids, argued that the dosing given to the bees in all of the recent research was higher than what is considered to be “field realistic”—and most of the non-industry scientists I spoke with agreed with this assessment.

The Harvard study—which most explicitly linked neonics to CCD—has earned particular censure: “The study out of Harvard is sort of an embarrassment,” vanEngelsdorp said, noting that the team fed colonies “astronomical” levels of CCD-laced corn syrup, that the sample sizes were way too small, and that the symptoms the colonies subsequently suffered did not, in fact, mimic the symptoms of CCD. Randy Oliver, a biologist and beekeeper in California, provided this in-depth exploration of the study’s weaknesses on his website,Scientific Beekeeping. This study was “fatally flawed,” both in its design and its conclusions, added Scott Black, executive director of the Xerces Society for Invertebrate Conservation.

Chensheng Lu, the author of the Harvard study, had no such reservations. He compared his findings to those of Rachel Carson, whose book Silent Spring, published 50 years ago, linked pesticides to plummeting bird populations and human cancer, and helped launch the modern environmental movement. “The hives were dead silent,” Lu told Wired Newsof the failed colonies in his study. “I kind of ask myself: Is this the repeat of Silent Spring? What else do we need to prove that it’s the pesticides causing Colony Collapse Disorder?”

One Piece of a Bigger Puzzle

What we need, sadly, is better evidence—and so far, it’s not there yet. This is not to say that anybody working with pollinators believes insecticides aren’t a big issue for bee health. It makes perfect sense that systemic pesticides—which are absorbed throughout plants’ vascular systems and into their pollen and nectar, and remain toxic to insects for a year or more after application—might present issues not seen with traditional pesticides. Perhaps chronic exposure to low doses of poisons disorients bees, or interrupts brood-production, or weakens them so that another pathogen—one that would under normal circumstances cause only limited mortality—can finish them off.

In a recent review of neonicotinoid research, the Xerces Society noted that neonicotinoids upended conventional wisdom about safe pest management. This is because pesticides can’t be avoided by relocating hives during application, or by not spraying during the bloom. Still, while the organization advocates a more critical look at these pesticides, especially revisiting the high dosages permitted for horticultural use—“we should have a better sense of the risk before we start spreading poisons around our kids, our pollinators and our farmworkers,” the Xerces Society’s Scott Black told me. The group doesn’t recommend an outright ban, because neonicotinoids are still considered safer for wildlife and human health than the organophosphate pesticides they replaced.

“One of the biggest concerns,” notes University of Minnesota entomologist Marla Spivak, a Macarthur fellow and tireless advocate for honeybee health, “is that if all neonics are banned, other much more harmful pesticides will be registered.”

And things won’t necessarily get any better for the honeybee. This vital pollinator is suffering “death by a thousand paper cuts,” as beekeeper John Miller, about whom I wrote a recent book, The Beekeeper’s LamentThe Beekeeper’s Lament, once described the malady of the honeybee.

Pesticides and other chemicals may provide a nasty gash, but so do the stresses of long-distance pollination to which many commercial beekeepers must subject their bees to stay afloat, and poor nutrition, and all varieties of pests and pathogens that have accompanied the globalization of modern agriculture and apiculture.

Indeed, in places where neonicotinoid pesticides have been banned, such as France, Italy and Germany, there’s no evidence that honeybee populations have rebounded. And in Australia, which has among the healthiest bee herds in the world and has never reported a case of CCD, neonicotinoids have been in widespread use for over a decade. Australian agriculture isn’t as industrialized as in the U.S., where beekeepers make a living by dragging their hives from monocrop to monocrop, feasting their bees on one single nectar and pollen source, and then moving them on to the next. “The only situation in Australia where honeybees used for pollination are strongly restricted to one crop,” Australian bee pathologist Denis Anderson told me, “is in the pollination of almonds. However, we don’t see losses among those colonies, even though neonicotinoids are used in the almond industry.”

The other thing they don’t see in Australia—but do see everywhere else in the world—is the varroa mite, a nasty, tick-like creature that latches onto a bee’s exoskeleton and sucks the life out of the bee, and then the colony, and the apiary, and eventually, the entire beekeeping outfit. Since varroa was first found in the U.S. in 1987, American beekeeping has changed dramatically—inalterably. Indeed, this tiny mite has been the major cause of honeybee mortality across the United States. The nation’s CCD losses pose no comparison. For most beekeepers and bee scientists, it is the varroa mite, not CCD, that occupies most of their worrying hours.

Here are the conclusions of another recent bee study—one that hasn’t seen nearly as much play in the press. The paper, published in the Journal of Apicultural Research, puts it this way: “In many cases, bee mortality appears to be the product of many interacting factors, but there is a growing consensus that the ectoparasitic mite Varroa destructor plays the role of the major predisposing liability. We argue that the fight against this mite should be a priority for future honeybee health research.”

Until we deal with that problem, all the pesticide bans in the world won’t make it right with the honeybee.

Are Neonicotinoids Killing Bees? [xerces.org]

In-situ replication of honey bee colony collapse disorder [harvard.edu]

Neonicotinoid Pesticide Reduces Bumble Bee Colony Growth and Queen Production[sciencemag.org]

A Common Pesticide Decreases Foraging Success and Survival in Honey Bees[sciencemag.org]

Posted May 7, 2012

Colorado Book Awards

hannah — Wed, 04 Apr 2012 04:20:13 +0000

Good news! The Beekeeper’s Lament has been chosen as a Colorado Book Awards Finalist in the General Nonfiction Category. The winner will be chosen at the Aspen Summer Words Festival. I’m up against Math for Life, by Jeffrey Bennett, and The Fleece & Fiber Sourcebook by Debora Robson and Carol Ekarius, which appears to be WILDLY popular among the knitting set. Bees, fleece, and math: a rather esoteric group, eh?

There’s a finalist reading on April 19 in Denver, at the Residence Inn Marriot, which is open to the public, and the awards ceremony will be held at Aspen Meadows on June 22. Anyone planning to be in Aspen that week?

Here’s a link to the list of finalists: Here’s a link: http://www.coloradohumanities.org/content/2012-colorado-book-award-finalists. I am thrilled to be part of such a great group of books and authors.

What I’ve been reading…

hannah — Sun, 25 Dec 2011 22:26:46 +0000

Each year the awesome literary blog The Millions asks a diverse collection of writers to weigh in on their reading lists from the previous twelve months. This year they asked me, and here’s how I responded, below:

I am on a memoir kick. In the last couple of months I’ve plowed through Another Bullshit Night in Suck City by Nick Flynn, The Liar’s Club, by Mary Karr, and I recently started — not kidding — a book called The Gerbil Farmer’s Daughter, by Holly Robinson.

I read too quickly, and I often find that what I retain a few weeks after I’ve gobbled a book, is an image or moment that somehow encapsulates the work — the essence that stays behind when everything else fades. Suck City is a resonant, haunting story of how an abandoned son comes to accept the hugely flawed humanity of his skid-row dad. The image I hoard from that book is of the author walking down a Boston street with his “gnomelike,” almost comically diminished father — “cross-eyed, stiff gait, smaller and smaller.” I can’t stop thinking of it: the father—so grandiose, so damaged—tottering crookedly down the sidewalk, taking credit for the trees that line the street and the steps that anchor his building.

The Liar’s Club is also about an unmoored parent and a turbulent childhood, and nobody who has read it can soon forget the terrifying sight of the author’s crazed, wasted, theatrically immoderate mother hovering in her daughters’ bedroom doorway with her “wild corona of hair,” brandishing a shiny kitchen knife. But I think back to a more intimate tableau: of the family eating dinner together each night in the parents’ massive bed, facing opposite walls, “our backs together, looking like some four-headed totem, our plates balanced on the spot of quilt between our legs.” The image is so familiar and sad and touching at the same time, and it says everything about how our weird family arrangements can break us, but also make us who we are.

Families are ecosystems unto themselves, and since I have written a book about bees and humans, I now see signs of symbiosis everywhere — flowers, bees, people, animals, families, all the dependencies that go into making a life. I’m particularly interested in how people coexist with pets, and that’s how I ran across Gerbil Farmer’s Daughter. It is also about, yup, a kid coming to terms with her unusual childhood, though as far as parental pathologies go, you could do worse than suffering through your father’s gerbil-husbandry fixation (the author’s Navy-commander father decides to stake the family’s future on raising gerbils). It’s a fun book, sad as well, though not so vivid and thought-provoking and lyrical as the two I read before. But then, those books don’t have gerbils: 8,700 of them. Now there’s an image.

What’s in my pantry

hannah — Sun, 09 Oct 2011 15:39:25 +0000

Honey has always been a revelation to me–this magic elixir, made by bees!–but my travels with beekeeper John Miller have taken my affection for the stuff to a new level. On my first visit to Miller in California, he sent me home with four jars: one of California yellow star thistle, his favorite; one of black button sage, a California classic; a jar of manzanita honey and a jar of clover.

At home, I held a tasting with family and neighbors. Star thistle was the hands-down favorite (“like a wall of sunshine in your mouth,” as Miller has described it); sage a close second.

And with that, I became an inveterate honey-collector. Writing a bee book, and being on the record as a lover of the stuff, has only made my habit worse. Now everybody brings me a jar. My mother-in-law, who lives in Florida and has a family home in North Carolina, mails me all sorts of funky southern varietals, like sourwood and tulip poplar. On a recent book signing at the Santa Fe Farmers Market I bought, or traded for books, six jars of New Mexico honey. A friend gave the book to a friend who works with him and also keeps bees; she sent him home with a lovely amber batch for me. Some folks have brought jars to my book talks; one guy brought me green eggs (I know, not honey, but still pretty cool). A reader from my favorite honey-producing ecosystem in northern California (along I-5 south of Chico), recently harvested eight gallons of star thistle honey. That was a lousy haul for him, but he has a superstition that he has to give away at least 25 percent of his honey or the bees won’t work for him next summer. So I happily offered to take a jar off his hands. I am always humbled by the tremendous generosity of beekeepers. Bees give to them; beekeepers give back to the rest of us.

So, suddenly, I have a problem. Thirteen jars of honey in my pantry, crowding out all the cans of tuna and beans and raspberry jam (another weakness)–and I still want MORE. We go through lots of honey in our household, but even at our rate of consumption, I’ve gone overboard. Here’s the list of what’s in my pantry right now:

- High altitude wildflower honey from northern nm/southern Colorado — high means dry!
- Boulder county creamed wildflower honey — creamy honey is the best for spreading on toast
- Northern Colorado clover honey
- Rio Lucio thistle/clover honey from the mountains just above Santa Fe
- Tropical mangrove honey from Florida, nearly extinct, flows only every few years–a very unique, smoky taste
- Wind River alfalfa and clover honey from Larry Krause (John Miller’s longtime bee buddy) in Riverton, Wyoming
- Raw wildflower honey from the San Juan Pueblo, along the Rio Grande outside of Espanola New Mexico
- North Carolina creamed honey
- North Carolina basswood honey
- Boulder County wildflower honey from the woman at the homeless shelter
- Santa Fe wildflower honey from the president of the Sangre de Cristo Beekeepers Association
- North Carolina tulip poplar honey
- Florida fireweed honey — really good stuff
- And a freshly-harvested bottle of Northern California star thistle honey

I fear somebody’s going to hold an intervention.

Good news, ladies: female promiscuity helps avoid inbreeding (among red flour beetles, anyhow)

hannah — Tue, 04 Oct 2011 22:05:53 +0000

Finally, an evolutionary explanation for short-shorts and half-shirts.

From Kim Flottum of Bee Culture:

Female promiscuity can rescue populations from harmful effects of inbreeding

Females in inbred populations become more promiscuous in order to screen out sperm from genetically incompatible males, according to new study by the University of East Anglia (UEA).

Published in the journal Science, the findings help answer the puzzling evolutionary question of why females in most species mate with multiple males – even though a single male can provide full fertility and promiscuity can carry fatal risks for the female.

Using the red flour beetle as a model species, the researchers investigated the reproductive benefits of female promiscuity – or ‘polyandry’. Polyandry, where a female’s eggs are fertilized by multiple fathers, is the norm in most species, from chimpanzees to chickens, salmon to sea urchins. While biologists have recorded significant costs to females of this mating pattern, even death, these new findings show there can also be genetic benefits.

The UEA team found that the reproductive success of females in populations that were not inbred was identical, whether mating with one or five males. In inbred populations, females mating with just one male showed a 50 per cent reduction in the number of surviving offspring they could produce. However, inbred females who mated with five males managed to rescue their reproductive success back up to the levels of the non-inbred populations. The researchers checked to see if this could be explained by male infertility, but inbred males are just as fertile as non-inbred males. The effect was therefore due to genetic incompatibility between males and females, which is prevalent when a population becomes inbred. Importantly, the results show that females possess mechanisms that allow them to filter in the genetically most compatible sperm to produce more viab le offspring.

Having made this discovery, the researchers then went on to create deliberate genetic bottlenecks in populations of flour beetles and demonstrated for the first time that after as few as 15 generations, females began to change their mating patterns and behave far more promiscuously. Females from the previously bottlenecked populations mated with new males faster, more frequently, and for longer.

“By generating inbred populations, we were able to create real risks of high genetic incompatibility between reproducing males and females, and expose the mechanisms that females possess to promote fertilization by the most compatible males and their sperm,” said lead author Prof Matthew Gage of UEA’s School of Biological Sciences.

“These exciting results show how this common but paradoxical mating pattern can evolve if females use it to avoid reproducing with genetically incompatible males. Exactly how females filter the most compatible sperm is not yet understood. They might simply mate more frequently, and allow the ‘best sperm to win’, which would work if winning sperm are from males who have themselves avoided inbreeding depression. Or they might choose to mate most with the less related males, perhaps using olfactory cues, thereby concentrating their sperm stores from those males. We think that the process occurs most likely at the gamete level, because females mate with most of the males they are exposed to and only store for fertilization a tiny proportion of the sperm they are actually inseminated with. We know that sperm:egg recognition systems exist in other system s to avoid fertilization by unrelated species, and here it could run parallel where the system avoids fertilization by males that are too closely related.”

The results could be of interest to those involved in breeding programmes, where providing females or their eggs with a choice might allow more compatible genes to be inherited.

“There’s a telling example here from salmon restocking programs: should you maintain genetic diversity in the population by forcing each female to be fertilized by one different male, as is currently favoured, or should you let the natural mating pattern apply and give the eggs a choice of a mix of sperm? We’re now testing this applied question directly with a project in Norway,” added Prof Gage.

The art, and craft, and weird rituals, of writing nonfiction

hannah — Sat, 16 Jul 2011 05:58:11 +0000

A few weeks ago, Kevin Hartnett, who reviewed The Beekeeper’s Lament for the Christian Science Monitor, asked me to do an interview for The Millions, a wonderful online literary magazine, about the process of writing the book, and the challenges of making nonfiction both true to life and compelling. I was astonished how fun it was to answer his questions. After many weeks of talking bees, it was really refreshing to talk about writing — which is, after all, what I do every day (when I’m not talking about bees) — and to think about what it takes to make a book-length piece of nonfiction hang together.

Here’s the interview:

The Story in the Storm: An Accomplished Author on How to Write Journalistic Nonfiction

By KEVIN HARTNETT, July 12, 2011

In his introduction to The Best American Essays of 2007 David Foster Wallace described the challenge of writing non-fiction like this: “Writing-wise, fiction is scarier but non-fiction is harder—because non-fiction’s based in reality, and today’s felt reality is overwhelmingly, circuit-blowingly huge and complex.”

This spring I reviewed a work of non-fiction for The Christian Science Monitor called The Beekeeper’s Lamentby Hannah Nordhaus that I thought met Wallace’s challenge better than most books I’ve read. It is about migratory beekeeping (and one curmudgeony migratory beekeeper in particular) and the role that factory farmed bees play in the maintenance of American agribusiness. Over the course of the book Nordhaus uses a somber, lyrical writing style to make bees into just about the most fascinating subject you’ve ever encountered while at the same time crafting an elegiac metaphor for the contingency of modern American life.

After I’d finished writing the review I decided to contact Hannah to ask her how she’d produced such a remarkable book. I was curious about everything: how she’d chosen this esoteric vein to mine; what it had been like spending weeks in the field with oddball beekeepers and their stinging swarms; how, exactly, she’d transformed reams of field notes and a mountain of bee trivia into a graceful volume that feels as effortless as a spring breeze. Still, my abundant curiosity aside, I doubted that she’d write back. A day later, she did.

What follows, then, is a veritable how-to for writing a book of journalistic non-fiction in which Hannah talks about everything from selling her manuscript to courting her sources to settling into the one and only position on her couch in which she can actually get any writing done.

The Millions: As a freelance writer you can write about just about anything and everything, and you pretty much have: bees, dildo-art thieves, nuclear weapons, litigious prostitutes. Choosing a topic is a significant commitment (what sounds like several years of your life in the case of The Beekeeper’s Lament). Given that, out of all the ways you might spend your professional time, how do you decide what to write about?

Hannah Nordhaus: First, the subject has to interest me. I’m not terribly successful at doing things that I find boring, which is, I guess, why I’ve chosen to be a freelance journalist who hops from story to story. That said, I am interested in all manner of subjects, including many that would seem boring to most everyone else. Dildo art thieves and litigious prostitutes are easy; but I’ve also dedicated months of my life to documenting the lives of lawyers who draft bills for Congress. And that subject interested me too: What I find most absorbing to write about are the little hidden corners of the human experience, the people who do weird things or scary things or difficult things by choice, and who persist in doing those things even when it’s clear they’d be much better off choosing another path through life.

So that’s how I have chosen magazine subjects, and it’s a formula that’s worked for me—but often, when I’m done with the article, I’m also done with the topic, and I really don’t want anything else to do with it. I don’t want to read about it; I don’t want to hear about it; I certainly don’t want to write about it. In the case of The Beekeeper’s Lament, though, I found that even after I had published a 4,500-word feature on the crisis in modern beekeeping, I still had more to say. Luckily, so did my protagonist, John Miller, who is a wonderfully eloquent, funny, thoughtful, sometimes petulant but always entertaining subject to follow. John Miller’s life was so rich with narrative possibility, and honey bees, the creatures he tends, are so rich with metaphor, that it never even occurred to me that I might get sick of the subject two or three years down the line. And I never did.

TM: Before we get into the specifics of what went into writing The Beekeeper’s Lament, could you give readers an overview of the stages of the book’s creation from conception to publication?

HN: I first interviewed John Miller in 2004 while researching an article for a natural foods magazine about a honey-based energy gel company in which he is a partner. He told me about his work as a migratory bee guy with thousands of hives, pollinating huge crops all over the West. I was intrigued, so I called him back, and I ended up paying my own way to visit him twice—once in California, once in North Dakota—to learn more about his life and his work. My timing was propitious (for a writer of non-fiction, that is; for a beekeeper, it was not good at all): about a year after I first met John Miller, his outfit suffered a catastrophic collapse, and he lost about 40% of his bees because of diseases vectored by a nasty little parasite called the varroa mite. I sold the story toHigh Country News, a small environmental magazine in Colorado, and just as the article was about to go to press in early 2007, the national bee herd began suffering from a mysterious new problem named “Colony Collapse Disorder,” or CCD.

I was seven months pregnant with my first child when the magazine story ran, and thus in no condition to dash off a quick topical book that would address the CCD mystery. Instead, I took my time, had my kid, got an agent, and took a leisurely year to put together a proposal and write a sample chapter to submit to publishers. In the meantime, a number of other books came out about the honeybee crisis. This didn’t improve my odds for generating a bidding war (there wasn’t one) and netting a big advance (ditto), but I think in the end the more relaxed timeline actually did me a favor. I couldn’t write another newsy, topical book about bees—there were enough of those already. So instead, I pitched a more character-oriented work about humans and bees that would follow one particular human, John Miller, through the seasons and the years of the recent honey bee crisis, and in so doing also explain this weird institution of modern beekeeping.

I sold the book in Dec 2008, took a trip to attend a beekeeping conference with Miller that winter, signed a contract in March; and three days later, while in California doing research on queen breeders, I found out I was pregnant again—with a baby due date that fell about seven months before the book due date. This complicated matters for me majorly, and after running around in circles for a few days wondering how I was going to get it done, I decided that the most important thing was to get something—anything—down on paper while I still had a few powers of concentration left. So I set the goal of writing a terrible draft before the baby came. And that’s what I did. I put my head down and wrote a terrible chapter every three weeks, had the baby, took three months off, and then embarked on the hard but rewarding work of turning a bad draft into a serviceable one. I turned the book in in June 2010. There were a couple of months of relatively painless back-and-forth editing with my excellent editor, Michael Signorelli at Harper Perennial, and then it was off to production.

TM: Of those stages- (i.e. interviewing and field work, research, writing)- what parts do you enjoy the most? Any that you look forward to less than the others?

HN: My favorite part of the writing process is always editing. I love taking this raw mass that is a first draft and then shaping it into something I might actually enjoy reading. I do like the research, though I sometimes dread calling random people on the phone, and I find that research trips can be lonely. And writing a first draft—well, I hate it. The act of corralling information and making it into a cohesive narrative is not a pretty one, and I tend to beat myself up for how bad my writing is. But in the last few years, I have made it a point of pride to write my first draft as quickly and poorly as possible, without consulting my notes or laboring over it. It makes the editing work a little harder, but by writing from memory and not belaboring all the minutiae in my notes, I tend to remember only those facts and points that are most salient to the narrative. And then I can always flesh out the things I missed later, though often I decide the things I forgot in the first draft really weren’t all that important. So now I do much of the heavy-lifting in the editing process, once I have gotten the bones of the story down. That’s when I spend the time agonizing over word choice and rhythm and flow and what information needs to stay or go, over what’s missing and whether it all makes sense. And that is the fun part for me—I love tinkering, and I love finding connections I never saw the first time through.

TM: The main character in your book is a gregarious migratory beekeeper named John Miller. I got the impression that you two spent a lot of time together, and I’m always curious how those types of relationships work- how would you describe the dynamic between the two of you?

HN: John has been an incredibly gracious guide into his life and world. He likes to talk, and to write, and he’s passionate about what he does, which made him a wonderful subject for this book. He’s also very conscious of his failings—as a Mormon, as a husband, and especially as a beekeeper—which adds a sense of poignancy to his story that isn’t always easy for a journalist to find. I couldn’t have asked for a better partner in creating this book.

But of course, he’s still human, and I don’t think any human wants another human, especially one they barely know, following him around for months on end. So I was pretty careful with my visits, trying not to stay too long or hang around too much. I didn’t want to wear out his (quite limited) patience.

Fortunately, John is a prolific emailer—he writes these wonderful, lengthy free-verse odes about his life and his work and anything else that pops into his head. So I asked him, once this project got started, if he could email me regular updates about what he was doing between visits. He did, and if I didn’t hear from him for a while I’d send a quick note asking him what was new or plying him with questions about queens or honey or his new truck, and he always obliged me with a long, detailed, oddball explanation of the current goings-on in the bee industry and the life of John Miller. And those emails formed the backbone of the book, and really helped bring him to life.

After I’d finished a polished second draft but before I turned it in to the publisher, I asked John to read the book. And nothing was scarier—not submitting the proposals to publishers; not giving the draft to my editor; not even showing it to my mother. But he really seemed to love it—though he did take exception to me calling him “peevish” (for a month or so afterwards signed all his emails, “Mr. Peev”). This was my first book, and I’m not sure how other people handle that long-term and intense connection between journalist and subject that book-length projects require.

But I guess in the end I felt that we—like bees and flowers, like beekeepers and farmers—were engaged in a symbiotic relationship that seemed to be beneficial to both of us—I got to write a book about a really cool topic; he had a venue through which to get the word out about the importance of bees and beekeepers in these trying times. Like all symbiotic relationships, ours depended on a delicate balance, which I was very careful to nurture: I gave him veto power on anything he felt was too personal, and I also tried to write the book in such a way that he wouldn’t have to exercise that veto. I wanted the book to explore his nature and his character, but not at the expense of his good name. And that seemed to be okay with him. In the end, he asked that I change nothing.

TM: In his introduction to The Best American Essays of 2007 David Foster Wallace wrote, “Writing-wise, fiction is scarier but non-fiction is harder—because non-fiction’s based in reality, and today’s felt reality is overwhelmingly, circuit-blowingly huge and complex.” How does his description of the challenge of writing non-fiction strike you?

HN: To write strong, journalistic non-fiction, you have to do a lot of research. You have to make a lot of phone calls, do a lot of reading, visit as many people and locations as you can, and then try to somehow combine all that undigested information into something that a reader can stomach. But honestly, while reporting is hard and requires a lot of effort and elbow grease and legwork and chutzpah, I think the most challenging thing about writing non-fiction is turning that information into a story. Because if the narrative isn’t unfolding the way you want it, you can’t just change the details to make it better, the way you would when writing fiction. You have to represent the truth.

It’s very hard to be both a storyteller and a chronicler of reality. So to tell a true story that readers want to follow to the end, you’ve got to be very conscious of your craft—of your characters, chronology, pacing, setting, foreshadowing, backstory, detail—all those same elements that are so important in fiction writing. And then you’ve got to make double-sure you’re not making anything up.

TM: Continuing on Wallace’s point, The Beekeeper’s Lament covers a lot of ground—almond farming, a history of the Miller family, the international honey trade, bee pests and contagions. How did you keep all that information organized and accessible as you wrote?

HN: This was a tough book to organize, because there wasn’t an easy A to B to C chronological narrative of John Miller’s life as a beekeeper. There was no “man meets bee, man loses bee, man gets bee back” plot to rely on. His life is seasonal, and there are ups and downs, and though there were lots of good stories scattered throughout, there was not one particular thread that drove the story from start to finish. But I knew I needed to have some sense of time moving forward and to pique reader interest in a way that might appeal to those who aren’t bee fanatics as well as those who are. I needed to give those who looked at the first chapter a reason for moving on to the next one.

So as I started thinking about chapter structure and the overall flow of the book, I tried to pose some questions so that readers would keep turning the page, and I returned to them regularly. Why did so many of John Miller’s bees die in 2005? What’s been killing everyone else’s bees in the years since? Is John Miller’s outfit going to survive? Why has he chosen to remain in such a difficult profession? And I used those questions to keep readers interested (I hope) and string them along from chapter to chapter.

I also approached the individual chapters as more independent thematic units, organizing each one by subject. I [also] tried to touch on some larger themes, like migration, and risk, and symbiosis, and persistence—concepts that make people think on another level, and that, when you boil it down, are what make works of non-fiction “literary,” and not glorified long-form encyclopedia entries.

TM: Writers are always interested in other writers’ writing processes. Where do write? When do you write? Any rituals, tics, frustrations, moments of grace that attend the writing process for you?

HN: Let’s see. Hmmm. Well I dally a lot before I get started on a first draft. I check a lot of email. And google myself. Facebook suddenly seems very pressing. Twitter, too. And then when I can’t find any other excuse, I sit down on the couch and just start spewing. I sit at my desk when I’m writing emails or paying bills, but when I’m composing—when I’m really concentrating—I have to sit on a couch with my legs up and my laptop perched on a cushion on my thighs. I must be semi-reclining, apparently, to get any real writing done.

TM: Are there any non-fiction writers whose work has influenced your writing? And if so, what particular things have you taken from their writing?

HN: There are two books that particularly influenced my approach to The Beekeeper’s Lament: The Orchid Thief by Susan Orlean and Mountains Beyond Mountains by Tracy Kidder. Both have in common their singular focus on one character, who then opens up an entirely new world to the reader. The Orchid Thief isn’t about orchids; it tells the story of one man’s weird obsession with the plants, and in so doing teaches the reader more about orchids, and Seminoles, and Florida, than they ever realized they wanted to know. I love the playfulness of Orlean’s language.

Mountains Beyond Mountains also uses character to open narrative and thematic doors—by examining the life and work of Dr. Paul Farmer, we learn about Haiti, and health care in the developing world, and the medical profession, and the philanthropic world, and human decency. What I particularly love about Kidder’s book is the depth of feeling that he conveys through Farmer’s story. It’s not mawkish at all, but you feel so strongly Farmer’s own depth of feeling—and when all the details of that book have faded away, that feeling still remains. John Miller, like Paul Farmer, carries with him a profound sense of mission, though Miller’s involves bees, not humans, and you would never mistake Miller for a saint as you might Paul Farmer. Both books are so rich in detail, so effortless in their storytelling, so attentive to character, and so smart.

TM: Any particular advice you’d relay to writers beginning to work on an extensive non-fiction project?

HN: I guess my main piece of advice would be to give yourself the time to be deliberate when you craft the book. It’s not enough to organize it chronologically and then go; you need to think about how you’re going to keep readers interested, about the major themes that you want the sprinkle throughout the book, about how you are going to keep it tight. So many books lose their focus, and you’ve got to be really conscious throughout to keep the reader coming back to the reason you’re writing the book, the story you’re telling, and the questions you’re asking and that you plan, in due time, to answer. You’ve got to be ruthless with yourself. People don’t want to read every word that emerges from your brain just because you’re brilliant and you wrote it; there has to be a reason behind every chapter, every paragraph, every sentence. Every word you write should serve your overall narrative and thematic structure. That doesn’t mean you can’t go off on flights of whimsy—I certainly did, and I can’t say that I succeeded uniformly in keeping the book as tight as I am recommending that others do—but you do need to know, ultimately, where you’re going, and not lose sight of that.

And then, at some point, when your deliberation has run its course, you’ve got to stop agonizing, stop doing research, stop aiming for perfection, and just sit down and write the damn thing.

On gardens, and avalanches, and death, and yes, bees

hannah — Thu, 02 Jun 2011 20:59:45 +0000

I was working in my garden when I learned that my friend Joel had been killed in an avalanche. I had just dug a hole and was preparing to place a daylily inside of it; my children were playing with the compost next to me. My daughter was “helping” by tossing it into the hole as quickly as I could dig it out, my 18-month-old son was mixing it into a glass of orange juice and drinking it. It was a lovely morning.

A mutual friend had called to tell us, and this new fact that Joel was gone was so incongruous—on this warm spring day, the orange avens and Siberian peashrub thrusting into bloom, the weeds temporarily subdued—that it took more than a few seconds for the news to sink in. In the mountains, it was still winter, and Joel had been skiing on Mt. Torres, a 14,000-foot peak, during a gusty blizzard. He had gotten disoriented in the whiteout—at 14,000 feet, there are no trees and few landmarks to find your way when the visibility is bad—and dropped into the wrong chute, which broke like a pane of glass as he made his first turns. He tumbled steeply with the careening snow for 1200 feet, over rocks. He survived the fall, but because of the poor conditions the rescuers couldn’t bring in a helicopter. They had to travel instead by snowmobile and foot to fetch him, and after many hours in the cold waiting for help, he died of his injuries on the way out.

It was not entirely a surprise to me that Joel ended his life in the mountains. He lived for the mountains, and he loved them, and he probably didn’t have quite enough fear of them. He had been involved in a number of close calls—I had been caught in an avalanche skiing with him, as had another close friend. But still, he was so young, and he had always been so kind and buoyant and engaged with the world, and the news ripped a jagged hole in the morning. It is a cavity that remains, and won’t soon be filled.

It was an unreal moment, there in the garden, so green and domesticated, and it all seemed, suddenly, so counterfeit: this pretty life we build around us. We tend to our homes and plant our gardens and we insulate and put up screens and try to keep the ugly things out. But they find their way in. They creep through the small holes we can’t plug; they fly in on the backs of those we trust, much the way varroa mites—those pestilential parasites that have collapsed bee colonies around the world and reshaped modern beekeeping—ride into a hive on the backs and abdomens of foraging bees. In comes death, reminding us—as if we needed to remember—that this manicured life we build around ourselves is so painfully temporary.

My bee guy, John Miller, understands this. He is close to death in a way most of us choose not to be. He sees it every day—thousands of bees die each day as a matter of course. In the good years, hundreds of his colonies fail—because of bad weather, or a bad queen, or a weird fungus, or a nasty mite. In the bad years, it is carnage. But he picks up and restocks and keeps going, because that is what you do. This ragged life of bees and humans entails a losing battle against entropy and decay. But we fight it anyway.

I will miss Joel. I will keep skiing and I will find ways to remember him and celebrate what he loved—the mountains, his friends. When Joel died, the world stopped for a moment—but this is life, and death is part of it, and so I put down the phone and went on with my planting. The kids were still playing, the daylily waiting for its new hole, the lawn freshly cut.

Apple’s iBooks selected TBL as one of its “Best Books of May.”

hannah — Mon, 23 May 2011 19:40:54 +0000

Here’s what they said:

An engrossing profile of beekeeper John Miller, who wages a one-man battle against a mysterious epidemic devastating bee populations across the globe.

Cell phones? Not again…

hannah — Sat, 14 May 2011 21:13:04 +0000

As a new iPhone owner, I completely understand the argument that cell phones distract honey bees. I have, in the month since I bought my phone, done lots of stupid things, like sending emails while driving and updating my facebook page while reading stories to my children (“Good night, uh, hold on, damn, wait, sorry. Moon.”). A couple of weeks ago, I even got lost walking the baby in the stroller thanks to a particularly engrossing email (good thing there’s a GPS app to help me find my way home).

Cell phones, that is to say, have led me astray in countless ways; why wouldn’t they do the same thing to honey bees? As one visitor to a beekeeper chat room joked in the early days of the honey bee’s latest crisis: “You should never let the bees have them. They get distracted talking and never get any work done.”

Since 2007, when bees started disappearing in weird and unsettling ways, lots of people have surmised that cell phones might be to blame for the honey bee’s problems. Though an April 2007 German study suggested that mobile signals confused foraging bees, making it difficult for them to find their way back to their hive, subsequent research has found no such link. But a recent Swiss study has again raised the cell phone question. Says PC World magazine:

“A study by Swiss researcher Daniel Favre shows that mobile phone-generated electromagnetic fields may contribute to Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD), a condition that causes worker bees to desert the hive. In most cases, the queen bee is left with eggs, immature bees, and a lot of honey. The colony survives for a short time, but soon dies out without its workers.”

The article goes on to explain Favre’s methodology:

“The researcher recorded sounds produced by bees in five healthy hives in two Switzerland locations between February and June 2009. The study recorded the bees’ sounds with active mobile phones in the hive. Two mobile handsets (900MHz GSM) were chosen at random.

The bees were also recorded during their normal activities, both with and without inactive mobile phones.

With the active devices, the first handset was triggered to call the second phone in the hive. A connection was made after 5 to 10 seconds of ringing.

Sound analyst shows the bees weren’t disturbed by inactive or standby mobile phones. However, active cellphones confused the bees, creating ‘worker piping,’ or a signal to leave the hive.

The findings suggest that ‘the behavior of the bees remained perturbed for up to 12 hours after the end of the prolonged mobile phone communication,’ Favre writes. ‘This observation means that honeybees are sensitive to pulsed electromagnetic fields generated by the mobile telephones.’”

Okay, okay, cell phones ringing in beehives are disturbing to bees. I don’t think anyone would argue with that supposition. But, come on. How often, in nature, do you find cell phones–much less fully charged, ringing and connected cell phones–inside of a hive. Um. Never?

And for that matter, how often do beekeepers use their phones right next to a hive? I imagine it happens sometimes, but I have tried recording conversations while working in a bee yard, and it’s awfully hard to hear anything on the phone in a veil with hundreds of angry insect buzzing around your head. Besides, given how frequently beekeepers complained about poor cell signals in their bee yards, I wonder how often bees are exposed to cell phone radiation at all.

So yeah, ringing phones in hives disturb bees. A ringing phone under my pillow also disturbs me. But I’m not sure it requires rigorous scientific methodology to figure that out, and I’m even less sure it tells us anything new about why bees have struggled so much in recent years.

You Scratch My Back…

admin — Tue, 29 Mar 2011 06:01:12 +0000

Writing a book about bees and their humans has gotten me very interested in the subject of symbiosis on both literal and figurative levels. In The Beekeeper’s Lament, there’s lots of codependency. There are flowers and bees—bees depend on flower nectar for sustenance; flowers depend on bees to reproduce. There are bees and beekeepers—beekeepers take care of bees and give them shelter, water, and an express ride to the best flowers around; beekeepers get honey, and money. There are bee guys and almond guys—bee guys help almond trees get pollinated; almond guys’ big pollination paydays keep beekeepers in business. And yes, there are bee guys and bee writers—bee guys elicit publicity for a worthy cause; bee writers get, well, someone to write about.

And now I see symbiosis everywhere. For instance, we just adopted a new puppy, Rowen. This was not necessarily the brightest move, given that we also have a three-year-old daughter and a 15-month-old son, but, well, there it is, we did it, and there’s not much we can do about it now. It has been a tough adjustment—Rowen was six months old when we got him, with lots of new teeth and even more anxiety about moving to a strange new home. The first week, which happened to be the coldest week of a very cold winter, he diarrheaed on every horizontal surface in our house.

That epoch passed—too slowly, but it did—but he’s still got plenty of other behavioral tics. When a new person walks in the door, Rowen pees on the floor. He jumps on us; he jumps on the counter; he jumps on the table. He wakes the baby every morning at 4:30 am. Yesterday, he knocked the baby down the stairs. And since Rowen has joined our family, he has destroyed, in no particular order: a windowsill, a doorstop, two dog beds, three soccer balls, eight or nine pairs of socks, twelve or thirteen crayons, every wooden baby toy in the house, a screen door, our back gate, my daughter’s snow boots, and just today, my husband’s Birkenstocks (good riddance I say).

What seduces us to care for these creatures that complicate our lives so? Dogs are soft. They snuggle. They sit at our feet. They play with our kids. They greet us when we come home. They look at us with those deep, needy eyes. They bark when scary people approach. They take us for walks. And in return, we schlep to the pet store every month or so and drop 40 bucks on a 30-pound bag of kibble, so that, instead of having to keep themselves alive by dint of primordial instinct, they get two meals a day, a full, clean bowl of water, a handful of interprandial dog treats, a pat on the head, and a warm, safe place to sleep. Not a bad trade-off.

So it goes in the world. We all seduce each other, for various reasons. In the animal kingdom, symbiotic relationships help fulfill material needs: food, shelter. For humans, though, the reasons are not so obvious. Why, just weeks after my baby started sleeping through the night, did I decide we had to have a puppy? (In my defense, I requested an adult female; the Border Collie Rescue People sold me on a six-month-old male.)

I suppose I did it because a pet fulfills a deeper need. Our little dog Roxie had died in May; she left behind a hole that not even a brimming, boisterous household could fill. Rowen needed someone to care for him; I needed Rowen to love. It is not a rational quid pro quo; but humans aren’t always rational creatures, are we?

In the book, I write this: “Nectar seduces bees to pollinate flowers; bees have seduced humans to take good care of them for millennia.” I often muse about the fact that bee guys are “not reasonable people,” that they pursue their daft, one-sided passion—caring for bees—for reasons that defy all logic and economic sense. But perhaps they’re not the only ones.