Hearing the news as Harold Cooper was leaving, Fredrick hurried to the apiary.
“What happened?”
I explained the situation, slightly embarrassed. Fredrick was flustered as well.
“R-really? Then what do we do?”
“The contract is already in progress, so the rental will go ahead as planned, but they said it’s difficult to send a replacement manager. Since it’s come to this, Brandon will effectively manage everything, and the remaining person will just assist.”
Basically, five hundred hives were handled by one full-time employee and one assistant for hive transport and equipment maintenance, but with Harold quitting and walking out, only the assistant remained. During February and March, when work increased for pollination, they might need one or two additional part-timers, but this was the usual baseline.
Worried, Fredrick looked at his son.
“Will you be okay?”
“Well… but I have to do all of this?”
At the obvious question, I nodded.
“It looks like a lot, but it’s not something that requires several people.”
“……”
Brandon looked at the hives stacked up to a whopping three hundred—with another two hundred on the way—and was at a loss for words. Then he turned to me and asked.
“You’re saying another two hundred are coming here?”
“That’s right.”
“Sigh… If I have to do all of this alone…”
“That’s just how farming is. You learn as you suffer.”
I thought it was far better for Brandon to practice beekeeping with proper knowledge than to learn from a beekeeper armed with wrong knowledge.
Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD), which began in 2006, referred to the phenomenon where most worker bees suddenly disappeared while the queen bee and food stores (honey and pollen) remained inside the hive. To overcome this sudden disaster, one absolutely had to practice beekeeping with proper knowledge.
As the discouraged Brandon hung his head low, Fredrick smiled wryly while stroking the back of his son’s head. Then he looked at me and spoke worriedly.
“There’s a lot to learn. Is it possible for a beginner?”
“He just needs to learn the basics from the remaining employee, and I’ll teach him the beekeeping knowledge.”
“But wouldn’t it be better if that Harold person helped out?”
I shook my head.
“If that man stays here, he won’t follow Brandon’s instructions. On the contrary, he’ll obstruct Brandon’s orders and teach him that they’re wrong. Then Brandon will get confused and gradually go down the wrong path.”
“Yeah, that’s true. People with long experience trust their own experience completely.”
“Moreover, the bee ecosystem isn’t in a good state right now. If things go wrong, more than half of the hives we brought in could disappear.”
Fredrick and Brandon were startled by my words.
“To… that extent?”
“Yes. The situation is more serious than you think. You can tell just by looking at how hive rental fees are rising sharply. The fact that this situation continues also means that more than half of the bees we rented could disappear within a year or two.”
Fredrick, who had initially simply accepted my words, now fully understood the reason I had driven the manager away(?).
“Then we have to follow your words unconditionally. If they had possessed proper knowledge, the bees wouldn’t have declined so drastically.”
“That’s exactly what I’m saying.”
I thought it fortunate that Mr. Fredrick trusted me greatly based on his experiences so far. If he hadn’t, it would have been quite difficult to persuade him.
At that moment, Juan Hernández, who had come with Harold and been left alone awkwardly, approached hesitantly.
“Um… what should I do?”
“Work here with Brandon. Brandon will set the overall direction, and you, Mr. Juan, should assist him and let him know if there are any problems.”
“Um, there is some work Mr. Harold instructed before he left. Should I keep doing that?”
“What kind of work?”
“I’m doing chemical treatment because of mites.”
Upon hearing that, I frowned deeply.
“You have mites?”
“Currently, including California, you’d be hard-pressed to find any beekeeping operation with absolutely no mites. Everyone has them to some degree.”
Indeed, if they hadn’t spread that much, America’s bee colonies couldn’t have collapsed so drastically. It was true that by spring 2007, the mites had already spread considerably.
“Stop the chemical treatment.”
“Excuse me? If we stop chemical treatment, we’ll be in big trouble! You know what Varroa destructor is, right?”
“Yes, of course I know.”
Varroa destructor refers to a parasite that attaches to bees and sucks their blood. About 1.5mm in size, it is a reddish, flat tick-shaped creature that clings to worker bees, larvae, and pupae, sucking their bodily fluids and transmitting viruses through wounds.
Imagine a person with hundreds of blood-sucking ticks on their back—how painful must that be for a bee?
What is especially frightening about this Varroa destructor is that it is not only a problem in itself but also acts as a vector transmitting viruses: DWV (Deformed Wing Virus), which causes wing deformities and flight inability; IAPV (Israeli Acute Paralysis Virus), which causes nerve paralysis and loss of directional sense; BQCV (Black Queen Cell Virus), which causes queen bee larvae to rot black, and so on. These are nothing short of disasters for bee colonies.
“But why…?”
“You’ve been using things like Coumaphos and Fluvalinate until now, right?”
Surprised, he nodded.
“Yes…”
“The more mites there are in the hive, the less effective those become. And since you’ve been using the same chemicals continuously, mites that don’t die from the chemicals would have appeared, just like antibiotic resistance. Continuing to apply the same chemicals in that situation doesn’t help; rather, it only builds up the mites’ resistance to the chemicals and stresses the bees.”
Juan blinked and nodded blankly. It didn’t matter if he didn’t understand my words. There was someone else who needed to understand.
“You understand?”
“I kind of do… but then how do we catch them?”
“I’ll show you from now on.”
I got up and walked over to where the beehives were gathered, with Fredrick’s family and Juan following.
“First, let’s put on protective gear. Brandon, take notes.”
After everyone donned rubber gloves, boots, and veils, I opened the beehive. Small, cute yet frightening creatures wriggled and swarmed before my eyes. Though I had opened the hive confidently, perhaps because knowledge in one’s head and instinctive fear are different things, my face kept pulling back unconsciously as I lifted the frame.
The bees huddled together clinging tight, and I could see small red dots attached to them.
“Look here… Varroa mites lay eggs and breed inside bee eggs and larvae, but they prefer drone (male bee) cells over worker bee cells. So we’ll deliberately create drone cells that the mites like, and when the mites flock inside, we’ll remove the whole thing.”
Juan, watching from behind, muttered.
“Now that I think about it, that seems right.”
This method of deliberately creating drone frames to lure mites and then removing them when the larvae are sealed is called drone brood trapping.
“And if mites are attached to the bees, put fine powdered sugar in a mesh and sprinkle it evenly over the frame. Then the bees will groom each other, and the mites will fall off.”
“Oh—really? That would be a great method if it works.”
Brandon, who was listening, opened his eyes wide.
“That’s right. And sugar particles stick to the mites’ adhesive feet, weakening their grip. So the mites naturally fall to the hive floor and die or get pushed outside. That’s why it’s good to lay sticky boards on the bottom before sprinkling powdered sugar.”
Everyone nodded at my explanation, and Brandon continued taking notes clumsily with his rubber gloves on.
“The advantage of sprinkling powdered sugar like this is that it’s harmless to bees and doesn’t contaminate honey or pollen. So repeat it two to three times a week.”
“Wow… to do all the hives like this…”
“You’ll have to be very diligent, won’t you?”
“Y-yeah. But I’m curious—do we harvest all the honey that comes out of here?”
I suppose that was another thing he had been curious about.
“You can’t for the next two years, but it’s possible after we take them over. However, since this is a farm for pollination, the profit will be much lower than a honey harvest farm. And if we harvest all the honey, it’s not good for bee growth, so we must always leave about thirty percent behind.”
As Brandon nodded, I continued the explanation.
“Now, the most crucial thing in catching mites is artificially causing brood interruption. Since mites can only breed where there are larvae, we stop egg-laying for a certain period to starve the mites to death.”
Juan, listening, let out an admiring sound with his mouth rounded.
“Ooh—that’s an amazing method. Because mites only breed in sealed brood cells.”
“Exactly. If you temporarily isolate the queen bee elsewhere for about seven to ten days, all existing larvae will hatch, and the mites’ breeding cycle will end. Right at this time, we can carry out powdered sugar treatment or chemical control together, but you absolutely must rotate the chemicals. That’s the only way resistance won’t develop.”
“Okay. Got it.”
Brandon nodded and diligently took notes.
In fact, besides this, there is also a method called hygienic behavior breeding. Some bees can detect by smell when mites have invaded a brood cell, uncap it, and throw the larva out. This was a method of selecting and breeding these smart bees so that the colony could control the mite population on its own.
There was also a method of exposing the hives to high temperatures for a certain time since mites are weak to heat, but this required an expert who could properly gauge the timing and the bees’ stress, so I didn’t tell Brandon since I couldn’t trust him with it yet.
Only after meticulously sharing knowledge one by one and confirming that Brandon and Juan had studied hard could I escape from the hell of bees.
A few days later, when I returned to the almond farm to check how things were going, surprisingly, Brandon was working quite skillfully. He moved his hands quickly without fear of the bees, looking like someone who had been beekeeping for several years.
“This is unexpected?”
Mr. Fredrick, who had been watching with satisfaction from beside me, spoke.
“That brat grumbles a lot, but he studied hard trying to learn what you taught him. He did his best with his thick skull.”
Actually, there wasn’t an enormous amount of content taught. It was at a level that Mr. Fredrick could memorize quickly if he learned a bit. Still, the fact that Brandon, who had done nothing but think about playing, was doing this much was probably largely because he didn’t want to hear me nag.
“It seems he doesn’t have much fear of bees?”
“He got stung a lot for two days after you left. I was worried because he only used to get into fights when he was young, but in that regard, he surprisingly has a bit of toughness.”
“I’m glad he at least has that.”
“That’s what I’m saying. Even now, he probably gets stung once or twice when finishing up, but he doesn’t seem very scared.”
“If he keeps doing this well, this year’s almond harvest will be problem-free.”
“But you know…”
Mr. Fredrick tilted his head slightly and spoke in a low voice.
“If almond prices keep rising bit by bit… it means processed almond products are doing well too, right?”
“Yes, they are doing well.”
“Hmm…”
“Why? I didn’t recommend venturing into the processing industry.”
“Yeah… I know… Just thinking.”
Whether that old man had found vitality in his old age, he seemed constantly absorbed in business plans.
At that moment, I received a call from Christopher.
“Hello?”
“Brian! Remember I told you before? That this year we should enter a different competition instead of the San Francisco Chronicle Wine Competition.”
“You did.”
Having previously won a major award in California, he had suggested aiming directly overseas, so this year Aesulon and Sylphid had not entered wines in the San Francisco Chronicle Wine Competition.
These were wines that had already received Double Gold. While getting a higher rating there would be good, Christopher had suggested entering an international wine competition since the 30th anniversary Judgment of Paris retasting had raised the prestige of American wines. I hadn’t cared either way, so I had let him do as he pleased.
So Christopher must have been agonizing and analyzing which wine competition would be advantageous to enter.
“Sylphid is with me, so that’s no problem, but I don’t have Aesulon. Is it at the winery by any chance?”
“Not much, but about half a case…”
“Perfect. That much is enough. Then I’ll come get it.”
I asked him before he hung up.
“But which competition is it?”
“The Decanter World Wine Awards (DWWA). The world’s greatest wine competition held in England.”
(Insect image warning)
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{@PIC:801467}