The honey bee is a miracle. It is the cupid of the natural world.
It pollinates crops; making plants bear fruit and helping farmers
make money. But in this age of vast industrial agribusiness, never
before has so much been asked of such a small wonder. And never
before has its survival been so unclear - and the future of our
food supply so acutely challenged. In steps John Miller, or rather
in he bounds. Miller tasks himself with the care and safe
transportation of billions of bees. He is descended from N.E.
Miller, America's first migratory beekeeper, and trucks his hives
from crop to crop, working the North Dakotan clover in summer and
the Californian almonds in winter. He provides the crucial buzz to
farmers who are otherwise bereft of natural pollinators, and does
so for a price. But while there is steady demand for Miller's
miracle workers, especially from the multi-billion-dollar almond
industry (without bees an acre of almonds produces no more than 30
lbs of nuts; with bees, 2,000 lbs), he's faced with ever-mounting
hive losses. In addition to traditional scourges like bears, wax
moths, American foulbrood, tracheal mite, varroa mite, Africanized
bees, overturned tractor trailers, bee thieves, PPB (piss-poor
beekeeping), etc., beekeepers now lose hives in the most mysterious
of ways, when whole colonies simply fly away, abandoning their
combs, in an epidemic known as Colony Collapse Disorder. While bad
news is in constant supply, Miller forges ahead because he can't
imagine doing anything else. He copes and moves on. He works and
sometimes triumphs, all with an inspiring sense of humor. "The
Beekeeper's Lament" tells his story and that of his bees, creating
a complex, moving, and unforgettable portrait of man in the new
natural world.
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