The Beekeeper's Lament by Hannah Nordhaus Read Free Book Online

up beekeeping as a hobby in 1861. In 1878, he closed his medical practice and turned full-time to bees, gathering material for Fifty Years Among the Bees , a memoir and practical guide that explained how he had successfully made the production of honey his “sole business.” On the heels of the Gold Rush, an entrepreneur named John Harbison imported thousands of colonies from the East Coast to California by sea, by train across the Isthmus of Panama, and then by steamer to Sacramento, where he sold them for thousands of dollars in profit. Harbison’s success sparked a “bee-fever” that brought an estimated 10,000 hives by the sea-and-isthmus route to California. Harbison kept 2,000 colonies in the sage and buckwheat fields of Southern California, and was, during the 1870s, the biggest honey producer in the world. Likewise, John Miller’s great-grandfather N.E. harnessed a restless nature to emerging technology and a dream of apiary greatness. At his peak, N.E. managed 10,000 hives; 30,000 if you count those owned by his children and the former employees he launched in the business.
    N. E. Miller was born in 1873 in a log cabin in Cache Valley, Utah, the fifth of fifteen children of Mormon immigrant farmers from Germany. As a youngster, he found a hollow tree in the woods that harbored a swarm of bees. It sparked a lifelong interest; in the fall of 1894, at the age of twenty-one, he persuaded his father to allow him to trade five bags of leftover oats for seven colonies of bees owned by a neighbor. He discovered that he had a gift for handling bees, and his apiary grew rapidly as he captured swarms and purchased colonies wherever he could find them. In 1904, after a disappointing grain harvest, he extracted four five-gallon cans of honey from ten colonies of bees and made twelve dollars—the best day’s pay he had ever received. The next day he did it again. He soon concluded that the production of honey could be more profitable than farming, if only he could keep enough bees to produce it in quantity. He quit his job on a wheat-threshing crew to focus exclusively on beekeeping, and in 1906, with three hundred hives under his management, he moved his growing family to Logan, Utah, to be closer to shipping routes. He placed hives on local farmers’ land throughout the area and northward toward the Idaho line.
    In 1907, he heard that a California beekeeper had developed a promising new method for processing beeswax. “So in December, 1907 I borrowed $107 from Orval Adams at the bank in Hyrum, Utah, and went to Southern California,” he wrote. (His stories were collected in Sweet Journey , a biography by John Miller’s great-aunt Rita Skousen Miller, who married N.E.’s son, Woodrow.) In California, N.E. saw that the bees were still flying and gathering nectar long after those in Utah were huddled in their hives against the cold. Until that point, he had placed his hives in cellars for the Utah winters, covering them on three sides with straw and dirt to protect them, but he lost dozens of colonies each winter. If he shipped his bees somewhere warm in the cold months, it occurred to him, he might halve his winter losses and double his honey and beeswax production. He might even be so lucky as to double the number of his colonies. The San Bernardino area seemed perfect for winter forage, with vast stretches of flowering orange groves and sage fields and nearby railroad stations that would provide easy access to market. So the following winter, Miller took to the rails with his apian cargo to pursue his endless summer, chasing the blossoms and pollen flows from the clover fields of northern Utah to San Bernardino and back.
    N. E. Miller wasn’t the first migratory beekeeper. In ancient Egypt, beekeepers transported small numbers of colonies by boat up and down the Nile River. Fifty years before N.E.’s first migratory eureka, Lorenzo Langstroth wrote of a man in Germany who moved his stocks throughout the honey