Only one percent of America's beekeepers are full-time professionals, yet they own 50 percent -- or 2 million -- of the nation's hives. Half of these honey farmers, numbering about 1,000 all told, migrate with their bees.
Their hives loaded onto flatbeds and covered with nylon netting, these entomological agriculturalists transport bees with 18-wheelers from blueberry barrens in Maine to citrus groves in Florida, and from cantaloupe crops in Arizona to alfalfa fiields in Montana.
It is the migratory beekeeper, in many instances, who provides the pollinators that make these crops possible. And in so doing, the beekeeper reaps his own harvest of honey.
"They are like the old-style cowboys who herded cattle across the open ranges, except they move their bees by trailer trucks over the interstate highways and county roads," writes Douglas Whynott in his book, "Following the Bloom: Across America with the Migratory Beekeepers."
A teacher by trade and a beekeeper by avocation, Whynott has composed a sympathetic portrait of the apiarian trade, following bee ranchers across Georgia and Oklahoma and North Dakota and Maine, describing a peripatetic lifestyle fraught with accidental depopulations and government regulations, but sweetened with the promise of golden profits.
"Some people think we truck these bees down to Florida, play all winter, bring them up here in the spring, make big bucks, and play some more," a beekeeper from Massachusetts complained. "They don't know I work three thousand hours a year."
Few people realize that so many beekeepers are also truckers and mechanics, and that they need to spend more time on paperwork than they do collecting honeycombs. Most folks are unaware how beekeepers worry over spray planes and bears and even alligators, or that so many bees are traveling the nations highways.
This lack of knowledge worries some beekeepers because as the Africanized "killer bee" spreads north a frightened public may demand a quarantine that will put an end to migratory beekeeping.
Whynott details the history of the Africanized honeybee, describing how Brazilian biologists were trying to breed a better bee for their climate by crossing European honeybees with an African variety when 26 of the imported swarms escaped.
"Honeybees are unique livestock in that, even though they are 'kept,' a colony becomes feral, or wild, as soon as it leaves the man-made hive and takes to a hollow tree," Whynott explains.
The Eurpoean honeybees raised by beekeepers in the U.S. are the product of centuries of selective breeding for gentleness and productivity.
"The process of selection in Africa, however, favored the most defensive colonies, those highly responsive to changes in odor, sound, and movement. African bees are easily disturbed, sting in swarms, and once they have begun stinging and releasing alarm odors, tend to pursue the intruder for hundreds of yards," Whynott reports.
"Following the Bloom" follows the 35-year progress of the African bee's advance toward the U.S. and discusses the various proposals for dealing with the threat.
"I know if I had a hive of African bees, they'd be dead before sunup," says a beekeeper in North Dakota. By depopulating African hives and replacing them with gentler stock, the commercial beekeepers will contain the spread through selective breeding and husbandry, Whynott suggests.
"They are going to put us completely out of business unless we dilute the characteristics of those bees," says a Georgia bee breeder. "In South America they encountered little European stock, but in the United States, with a large European stock, they could be diluted. We wouldn't have to go through what the people went through down there."
The survival of migratory commercial beekeeping is important to U.S. agriculture, Whynott points out. They provide virtually all of the honeybees for pollination on large farms, but their future is by no means secure.
Hit by quarantines and depopulations in response to an outbreak of the honeybee tracheal mite in 1985 and cutbacks in the federal honey support program, commercial bee colonies declined by 25 percent during the past decade.
If the African bee's advance continues and losses to pesticides and spray kills do not abate, the 1990s could be worse.
Just as barbed wire halted the range cowboy, Whynott concludes, all these forces threaten the survival of the entomological cowboy.