Chapter 109: Cute and Terrifying Creatures (3)
TL: Hanguk
After Harold Cooper walked out, Frederick caught wind of the news and rushed over to the beekeeping site.
"What happened?"
A little embarrassed, I explained the situation. Frederick was flustered too.
"R-really? So what do we do now?"
"The contract's already in motion, so the lease will go ahead as planned, but they say it'll be hard to send another manager. Given how things turned out, Brandon's basically going to be managing everything, and the one guy who's left will just assist."
As a rule, 500 beehives are handled by one full-time employee plus one assistant for transporting hives and maintaining equipment. With Harold quitting and storming off, only the single assistant remained. During February and March, when pollination ramps the workload up, we might need one or two more part-timers, but normally this was the baseline setup.
Worried, Frederick looked at his son.
"You think you can handle it?"
"Well... but I'm doing all of this?"
I nodded at the obvious question.
"It looks like a lot, but it's not so much that it needs several people."
"......"
Brandon stared at the beehives stacked up, a staggering 300 once the extra 200 were added, and lost his words. Then he turned back to me and asked.
"And you're saying another 200 are coming on top of this?"
"That's right."
"Haaah... if I've got to do this all by myself..."
"That's just how farming is. You suffer and you learn."
The way I saw it, far better for Brandon to learn beekeeping the right way than to learn it from a beekeeper armed with bad knowledge.
Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD), which began in 2006, refers to the phenomenon where the queen bee and the food stores (honey and pollen) remain inside the hive, yet most of the worker bees suddenly vanish. To weather a disaster that sudden, one had to keep bees with the proper knowledge.
When Brandon hung his head in defeat, Frederick stroked the back of his son's head and grinned. Then he looked at me and said, worried.
"There's bound to be a ton to learn. Can a beginner really pull this off?"
"He learns the basics from the remaining employee, and I'll teach him the beekeeping knowledge."
"But wouldn't it help if that Harold fellow stuck around to lend a hand?"
I shook my head.
"If that man's here, he won't follow Brandon's instructions. He'll sabotage the things Brandon tells him to do, and tell him he's doing it wrong. Then Brandon will get confused and gradually start down the wrong path."
"Yeah, that's true. People with years of experience trust their own experience completely."
"What's more, the bee ecosystem isn't in good shape right now. Of the hives we've just brought in, if we slip up, more than half of them could disappear."
That startled both Frederick and Brandon.
"That... many?"
"Yes. The situation is more serious than you'd think. You can see it just from how sharply hive rental rates are climbing. If things keep going like this, it means more than half the bees we leased could be gone within a year or two."
Frederick, who had taken it at face value at first, now fully understood why I had driven the manager out (?).
"In that case, we follow your word, no question. If those people had the proper knowledge, the bees wouldn't be dwindling this fast."
"That's exactly what I'm saying."
I was thankful that Frederick, at least, trusted me a great deal based on our history together. If he hadn't, persuading him would have been pretty difficult.
Just then, Juan Hernández, who had come along with Harold and now awkwardly found himself the odd one out, edged over hesitantly.
"Um... what should I do?"
"You'll work here with Brandon. Brandon lays out the overall direction, and you, Juan, support him and flag any problems as they come up. That's how you can help."
"Um, Harold left some instructions for a task. Should I keep doing it?"
"What kind of task?"
"We're treating for mites with chemicals."
The moment I heard it, my face scrunched up.
"There are mites?"
"Right now you'd be hard-pressed to find a single beekeeping operation in California, or anywhere, that's completely mite-free. They're everywhere to some degree."
Then again, if they hadn't spread that widely, America's bee colonies wouldn't have collapsed so drastically. By the spring of 2007, it was true that mites had already spread considerably.
"Stop the chemical treatment."
"What? If we stop the treatment, we're in big trouble! You do know what a varroa mite is, right?"
"Yes, of course I know."
The varroa mite (Varroa destructor) is a parasite that latches onto bees and sucks their blood. About 1.5mm in size, a flat, reddish tick-like thing, it clings to worker bees, larvae, and pupae, draining their bodily fluids and spreading viruses through the wounds.
In human terms, it would be like having hundreds of blood-sucking ticks stuck to one's back. How much agony must the bee be in?
What makes it even more terrifying is that the varroa mite is a problem in itself, but it also acts as a vector for viruses: DWV (Deformed Wing Virus), which causes wing deformities and the inability to fly; IAPV (Israeli Acute Paralysis Virus), which causes nerve paralysis and loss of orientation; BQCV (Black Queen Cell Virus), which rots queen larvae black. For a bee colony, it amounts to nothing short of a catastrophe.
"But then why...?"
"Up to now you've been using things like Coumaphos and Fluvalinate, haven't you?"
Startled, he nodded.
"Yes..."
"The more mites there are in a hive, the less effective those are. And you've probably kept using the same chemicals, so just like antibiotic resistance, mites have likely emerged that don't die even when the chemical hits them. In a situation like that, hitting them with the same chemical over and over won't make things better. It only builds up the mites' resistance and stresses out the bees."
Juan blinked and nodded vacantly. It didn't matter if he hadn't understood me. The person who needed to understand was someone else.
"You got that?"
"I guess... but then how do we get rid of them?"
"I'll tell you starting now."
I got up from my seat and walked over to where the hives were gathered, and Frederick and his son, along with Juan, followed behind.
"First let's put on protective gear. Brandon, write this down in your notebook."
Once everyone had pulled on rubber gloves, boots, and even mesh veils, I opened a hive. Small and cute yet terrifying creatures came into view, squirming and clustered together. I'd opened the hive with confidence, but it seemed the knowledge in my head and instinctive fear were two different things; without realizing it, I kept pulling my face back as I lifted the frame.
The bees were packed tightly together, swarming over it, and on those bees I could see little red dots clinging.
"If you look here... the varroa mite lays its eggs and breeds inside the bees' eggs and larvae, and it especially favors drone cells (cells for male bees) over worker cells. So we're going to deliberately create drone cells, which the mites love, and once the mites crowd into them, we remove the whole thing at once."
Watching from behind, Juan muttered.
"Now that you mention it, that does seem right."
Deliberately creating a drone frame (a comb frame just for drones) like this to lure the mites in, then removing it once the larvae are sealed, is called Drone Brood Trapping.
"And when there are mites clinging to the bees, put fine-grained powdered sugar in a sieve and dust it evenly over the frame. When you do that, the bees lick and groom themselves, and the mites fall off."
"Oh, really? If that works, that's a great method."
Listening in, Brandon's eyes went wide.
"That's right. And the sugar particles stick to the mites' adhesive feet and weaken their grip. So the mites naturally drop to the floor of the hive and die, or get pushed out. That's why it's good to lay a sticky board on the floor before dusting on the powdered sugar."
Everyone nodded at my explanation, and Brandon, rubber gloves still on, kept clumsily taking notes.
"The nice thing about dusting on powdered sugar like this is that it's harmless to the bees and doesn't contaminate the honey or pollen. So you just repeat it two or three times a week."
"Wow... doing this to every single hive is going to be..."
"You'll have to be plenty diligent, won't you?"
"I... guess so. But I'm curious, do we sell all the honey that comes out of here?"
I suppose that had been bugging him too.
"Not for the next two years, but after we take over, yes. The thing is, this is a pollination farm, so the revenue will be much lower than a farm meant for harvesting honey. And harvesting all the honey isn't good for the bees' growth, so we always have to leave about 30% of the honey behind."
When Brandon nodded, I continued my explanation.
"Now, the most crucial part of getting rid of mites is artificially inducing Brood Interruption. Mites need larvae to reproduce, so we stop egg-laying for a set period and starve the mites to death."
Listening along, Juan pursed his lips and wore an admiring expression.
"Oho, that's an ingenious method. Since mites only reproduce in sealed brood cells."
"Exactly. If you isolate the queen bee somewhere else for about a week to ten days, all the existing larvae hatch out and the mites' breeding cycle ends. This is precisely the time to combine it with powdered sugar treatment or chemical control, and you absolutely have to alternate the chemicals. That's the only way to keep resistance from developing."
"Okay. Got it."
Brandon nodded and busily wrote it down.
Actually, beyond this, there's another method called Hygienic Behavior Breeding. Some bees detect mite-infested brood cells by smell, tear off the cappings, and toss the larvae out. The method involves selecting and breeding these clever bees so the colony regulates the mite population on its own.
There's also a method that, since mites are vulnerable to heat, involves exposing the hive to high temperatures for a set amount of time. But that has to be done by an expert who knows how to gauge both the timing and the bees' stress levels, and since I couldn't trust Brandon with it, I didn't tell him about it.
After that, I carefully shared the knowledge piece by piece, and only once I'd confirmed that Brandon and Juan had studied hard did I manage to escape the bees' hell.
A few days later, I went back to the almond farm to check whether things were going well, and to my surprise Brandon was working quite skillfully. He wasn't afraid of the bees and moved his hands quickly, looking like someone who'd been keeping bees for a few years.
"This is unexpected."
Frederick, who had been watching beside me with a satisfied look, spoke up.
"That kid grumbles, but he put in a real effort studying what you taught him. Worked hard with that thick skull of his."
The truth was, what I'd taught wasn't an enormous amount. It was the kind of thing even Frederick could memorize in no time with a little learning. Still, for Brandon, who used to think of nothing but playing around, to take it this far, the odds were good it was mostly because he didn't want to get nagged at by me.
"Looks like he doesn't have much fear of bees?"
"After you left, he got stung plenty over two days. He fought all the time as a kid, which had me worried, but in that respect he turned out to have a commendable amount of grit."
"Good thing he's at least got that."
"My thoughts exactly. He'll probably come back with a sting or two when he's done today, and he barely flinches."
"If he keeps doing this well, this year's almond crop won't be a problem."
"But you know..."
Frederick tilted his head slightly and said in a low voice.
"If the price of almonds keeps creeping up... that means processed almond foods are doing well too, doesn't it?"
"Of course, they're doing well."
"Hmm..."
"Why? I didn't recommend going as far as breaking into the processing industry."
"Yeah... I know... I'm just thinking."
It looked like the old man had found a new lease on life in his later years, the way he stayed absorbed in dreaming up business ideas.
Just then, Christopher called.
"Yes?"
"Brian! Listen, remember what I brought up before? That this year we should enter somewhere other than the San Francisco Chronicle Wine Competition."
"I do."
Since we'd won a big award in California, he'd suggested aiming straight for overseas, so this year we hadn't entered Echelon or Sylphide in the San Francisco Chronicle Wine Competition.
These were wines that had already taken Double Gold, and earning an even higher rating there would be nice, but Christopher had proposed that since the 30th-anniversary re-tasting of the Judgment of Paris had raised the prestige of American wine, we should put them up for an international wine competition. It made no difference to me, so I'd gone along with whatever he wanted.
So Christopher would have been mulling over and analyzing which wine competition would be most advantageous to enter all this time.
"Sylphide I've got, so no problem there, but I don't have any Echelon. Is there any at the winery, by chance?"
"Not a lot, but about half a case..."
"Perfect. That's plenty. I'll come pick it up, then."
As he was about to hang up, I asked him.
"So which competition is it?"
"The Decanter World Wine Awards (DWWA). The world's top wine competition, held in England."
*****
Join our Discord for announcements or to report any mistakes.