Listen to the Bees
Peggy O'Brien interviews Sam Comfort of Anarchy Apiaries

Editors' Note: For more than a year now, newspapers have been sounding the alarm about the impending breakdown of a vital link in our national food chain: the sudden, inexplicable disappearance and death of millions of commercially-raised honeybees. While food philosopher Michael Pollen has speculated that the affliction, baptized Colony Collapse Disorder or CCD, may be a byproduct of our commercialized food production systems, most scientists and the USDA seem to remain stumped. AboutTown was therefore delighted to learn that the young apiarist and recent Bard Graduate Sam Comfort was setting up a bee education program in our area and we asked local beekeeper Peggy O'Brien to interview him.

Q: So what made you venture into the world of bees?

A: I like to say that I won six hives in a poker game, but it wasn't all that simple and sweet. I graduated as an art major from Bard College in 2003. I was doing installations and performances and was becoming more conscious of the sources of materials, which had me veer toward agriculture and permaculture and all things that thrive and drive the life of dirt. I read Masanobu Fukuoka's book The One-Straw Revolution. He's a no-till rice farmer in Japan who stepped aside to allow a natural system to work. I knew I wanted to be a part of growing food. What is more important that that? Eating it, I guess.

I was thinking about raising sheep or bison, but friends pointed me to bees. After graduation I parked my van behind the honey house at Honey Gardens Apiaries in Vermont. Suddenly I was a farmer (of a very different sort) learning all about how bees made honey—so much honey! That fall I moved to Montana and found a job with a beekeeper out of the phonebook. Five thousand hives on pallets. Big business. Fork lifts, industrial, streamlined. The Belly of the Beast, if you will. I was keeping bees in the most isolated areas of Montana and Idaho, then driving semi's of hives to pollinate almonds in California and apples in Washington. Soon after came the tupelo swamps of South Carolina, the basswood in St. Lawrence County, New York, the avocado and citrus orchards of Florida.

I decided to come back here to cultivate stronger bees on their terms, not to manipulate them the way the commercial keepers do—and to use my brain (to raise queens) instead of my back (to haul tons of honey).

Q: Is the current bee decline a sudden crisis?

A: Despite the recent media attention, the current bee decline has been with us for 150 years. The crisis still festers from our lack of understanding of ecosystems. To heed the bees we can't just talk about bees anymore! The health of bees is the health of the land and our own wellness.

Pollinating bees have been around for 80 million years. For one important species, the honeybee, to be stricken with a sudden plethora of ailments raises suspicion of some deeper causes. The latest proclaimed "cause" is called Colony Collapse Disorder, but sometimes the cause is varroa mites, or tracheal mites, or small hive beetles, or chalk brood or foul brood—you name it. Name any of a dozen reasons, most outfits are losing half to two-thirds of their bees every year. Any large beekeeper will tell you it is constant labor to keep hives alive. They are dividing hives to replace losses and artificially stimulating the bees to make it possible. Large crews are needed to keep it all going. Some deeper problems in bee management are at issue, but the industry is just trying to deal with the symptoms.

Q: So what do you think is the main contributory factor of CCD?

A: The industry has always been in quicksand. The more we think we help, the deeper we sink. I think we've stepped over a boundary and put ourselves into the mind of the hive, and bees don't agree with our intrusions into their home or on the landscape. The sub-lethal effects of pesticides, like the popular systemic imidacloprid, compromise bee immunity.

Q: That's a nicotine-related insecticide widely used in heavily-populated areas, on lawns, for flea control on pets, right?

A: Yes, and it and other systemics—insecticides that affect their victims through the plants they enter—are showing up in all kinds of wild plants adjacent to cropland. While supposedly safer for mammals than the organophosphates they are replacing, the new control methods are destroying insect communities and have a long residual in the soil. It takes only parts per billion to compromise honeybee health. Many chemical miticides—mite-killing chemicals—also do not break down in the comb and add to early queen mortality. Because of breeding to make bees "better" in the eyes of a profit-driven industry, the gene pool doesn't have the depth to cope anymore. The bees are very vocal about all this by means of CCD, mite infestations, bacterial diseases like American foul brood, etc.

Q: How do you think we can help them?

A: Bees know what is best for bees. They've been doing it a long time. We need to step aside again. Go back to what the bees want to do. Do not feed them corn syrup and soy flour. Do not bring your bees to support monoculture farming. Do not treat them for mites.

Q: But then won't they just die?

A: A balance is actually reached after a period of healing. I have experienced it. For the past 150 years the bee industry has been controlling the structure of the hive. A very detrimental "advancement" has been the oversizing of wax comb—the typical "bigger is better" mentality. It takes the bees several generations to return to their preferred cell size, but when the queen is not forced to lay into an oversized comb, the smaller bees can cope with mites and secondary diseases. I am amazed by the morale and vigor in smaller cell hives. Dee Lusby in Arizona was the first to question large cell size in the mid 1980s, as the varroa mite began chewing up bees across the country. Her work has enlightened many to keep bees with no treatments whatsoever.

A locally adapted, genetically diverse hive is also a key to their survival. Right now queen bees are supplied by only a few, maybe a dozen, large queen providers, all in the south, and they are all mingling their bees' genetics and breeding a bee that meets the industry's demands—mainly California almond pollination that requires an unnaturally huge hive in February. In New York, a huge hive in February means starvation. To feed bees all the time makes them rely on it like a crutch. I never feed my hives unless they are just starting out or in an emergency, in which case I use honey—never cane or beet sugar, soy or corn.

The US started importing Russian bee genetics about a decade ago. These bees thrive in the cold, groom mites off each other, love to make honey, and perhaps succeed because they haven't been meddled with as much as the bloodlines in this country. Many people are having success with these bees. When I say many I mean a few, because there just ain't many beekeepers, period.

Q: Tell me about your queen-rearing endeavor. Why are you doing this?

A: I'm doing it so that new beekeepers will have another option besides bees from the southern states raised by and for industrial bee farming. Queen bees used to have a life span of about eight years. Many non-commercial queens still live from three to six years. The Florida Department of Agriculture gives the average life span of a queen as six months, and seldom does a queen live a full year.

Encouraging local stock and daughter queens to mate with drones from surviving bee families enhances mite and disease resistance, winter hardiness, gentleness and honey production. I think of queen raising as a transitional step—to rediversify the gene pool until bees are stable enough to be allowed to raise their own queens in their own neck of the woods. Future beekeeping, I hope, will not have to meet the same demands from commercial ag.

Q: So what are your plans, now that you're back in the area?

A: Well, to bee all I can bee in spreading the wisdom. We've lost so much knowledge over the past few generations. Very few know how to keep bees alive anymore, even while the interest in growing local food is booming. I'm working on starting a bee program at Bard to get more bee-people out there. There are a couple of graduate and undergraduate students working with me and I am keeping ideas rolling.

Since I'm not interested in migratory pollination anymore, I am looking at alternative hive designs, thinking outside of the box, as a cluster of bees is round. One type of hive that I will be producing is called a top bar hive. It is inexpensive and easy to maintain so that more backyard beekeepers can get started and enjoy this hobby. Backyards used to be full of bees and veggies. Beekeeping has become so esoteric and removed from daily life that it's a mystery to most, and the big bee industry has the only answers right now. After looking at the health of the hives out there for five years, I think we need a whole new set of questions.

The Hudson Valley is historic bee territory. Fruits, berries, and produce all need the pollination. Perhaps what we need even more is a new relationship with bugs that will put us back in touch with what we're walking on, how we walk, who we are. A generation and a half ago, nothing was wasted as there wasn't a whole lot to waste. That knowledge is quickly disappearing, so those of us who live to take care of living things are getting together. Sure, beekeeping is not for all, but it is for some. There is lots of radical action here, along with interest in making communities more resilient. Because of our long history with bees, they may be the best guides we have in communing with a landscape again. They make life sweet.

Q: Any other thoughts you'd like to share?

A: Support local agriculture, including beekeepers. At least limit, and better still eliminate the use of chemical pesticides and herbicides around your home and neighborhood. This is where we all live! Stop treating so many beneficial, useful plants as "weeds" or "invasives." The ecosystem is always changing. The most invasive plants in the world are corn, cotton, and soy.

Plant willows, maples, locusts, poplars, lindens, fruit trees, nitrogen-fixers, pollinator gardens. Support diversity of all kinds.

Grow your own food.

Bee the change.

To get in contact with Sam Comfort or learn more about the Bard Bee Program, contact him at anarchyapiaries@hotmail.com or 406-396-8357.