This fine book is available now at our bookstore....

Bad Beekeeping

by Ron Miksha

302 pages; quality trade paperback (softcover); catalogue #03-0997; ISBN 1-4120-0627-9; US$25.50, C$29.50, EUR21.00, £15.00

This beekeeper's memoir follows the life of a young man from Pennsylvania as he drops into the bald prairie badlands of Saskatchewan. He buys a bee ranch, keeps a billion bees and makes a million pounds of honey. And then he quits.

Read more!

about the book      about the author      excerpts      catalogue info

About the Book A million pounds of honey. Produced by a billion bees! This memoir reconstructs the life of a young man from Pennsylvania as he drops into the bald prairie badlands of southern Saskatchewan. He buys a honey ranch and keeps the bees that make the honey. But he also spends winters in Florida swamps, nurse-maid to ten thousand dainty queen bees. From the dusty Canadian prairie to the thick palmetto swamps of the American south, the reader meets with simple folks who shape the protagonist's character - including a Cree rancher with three sons playing NFL hockey, a Hutterite preacher who yearns to roam the globe, a reclusive bee-eating homesteader, and a grey-headed widow who grows grapefruit, plays a nasty game of scrabble, and lives with four vicious dogs. Encompassing a ten-year period, this true story evolves from the earnest inexperience of the young man as he learns an art and builds a business. Carefully researched natural biology runs counterpoint to human social activities. Bee craft serves as the setting for expositions that contrast American and Canadian lifestyles, while exemplifying the harsh reality of a man working with and against the physical environment.

---

About the Author Ron Miksha had 2,000 hives of bees twenty years ago. He produced over a million pounds of honey in Saskatchewan and sold thousands of queen bees in Florida, one of only a handful of people to have kept bees in both countries, hauling hives thousands of miles every year. Ron's interest in beekeeping stretches back to his childhood and his family's farm in the eastern USA. As a teenager, he was the youngest apiary inspector for the state of Pennsylvania. Ron kept bees there, but soon moved his hives to Florida, where he raised queens to sell to other beekeepers. A chance meeting led him to Val Marie - a desolate, windy prairie town in Saskatchewan, Canada, where he bought a small honey farm and expanded it into a large business. He produced queens in Florida during the winter and extracted honey in Saskatchewan during the summer. The adventure lasted ten years. Then a series of hot dry summers, small crops, and low prices convinced Ron to sell the farm and retire - at age 32! After his beekeeping career ended, Ron decided to try university. He chose Earth Sciences as his second career, won seventeen excellence scholarships at the University of Saskatchewan and graduated with honours in Geophysics. Now Ron Miksha is president of a seismic geoscience company. Ron is a father, a scientist, a member of Mensa, and a licensed engineer. Ron still keeps bees - as a hobby. His fifteen hives are on a grassy meadow in the Rocky Mountain foothills near his home in Calgary. Today, Ron is president of the Calgary Beekeepers' Association. A well-known and controversial figure in the beekeeping industry, Ron Miksha writes extensively for bee journals around the world. Bad Beekeeping is his first book. Ron can be reached through his website www.badbeekeeping.com.

---

Excerpts

excerpt from Chapter 1: Arrival

Bright summer afternoon. Alfalfa and wild clover blooming. An excited young bee lands at the entrance of a hive. The bee's tummy is full of nectar, its small pollen baskets dusted with yellow powder. Confused, a novice, the young bee has landed at a wrong hive. It happens. Bees get lost. But the guard bees of this hive, overwhelmed by the sweet scent of fresh nectar becoming honey within the walls of their nest, ignore the mistake. Besides, the lost bee is bringing pollen and nectar. The new bee becomes a member of the hive. From now on, it will build new combs and store honey and pollen to profit the adopted colony. Life goes on for the bee and for the hive.

The same guard bees, on a windy day in late autumn, would not be so tolerant. With winter coming, they would drag old drones from the hive to their deaths. On a bad day, guards would reject a young lost bee as a thieving opportunist. They would grab the innocent insect, shred its wings and legs. And discard the mutilated body.

My truck rolled to a silent stop next to three wooden huts. I was a few feet - a metre? - inside Canada. Two thousand miles from home. Home was green - forests of oak, maple, hickory. This place was also green. Sort of. But where were the trees?

At my window stood a tall man in a blue uniform, short blond hair. Big smile. I scratched my face, felt the stubble of three day's growth, and wished I had bathed and shaved before arriving for inspection. Would the border guard know I had slept on the seat of the truck last night? Would he care?

"Untie the tarp." The man pointed at the back of my truck. He called over a second officer, a younger man with very short black hair. I should have had a hair cut. Canadians wear hair short. I got out of the truck, fumbled with the rope securing the tarp.

"Did you tell Officer MacKenzie that you have a job waiting for you in Canada? You have a work permit, a visa?" Officer MacDonald asked.

"I don't exactly have a job waiting for me. My friend had a business, I bought it from him..." How much should I say? The truth. Just the truth. What did they see? A hippie? A deadbeat? Could they tell I was nervous? Officer MacKenzie asked another question.

"I'll be here all summer," I said, both hands gripping the tarp, holding it up so they could see my jug of drinking water, extra radiator fluid, steel tool box, a bee smoker and veil.

"If you're coming into the country as a visitor, you can't be paid anything... Wait here."

"I won't be getting paid anything. I bought a honey farm." I'm not sure they heard me. The guards were walking back to the door of their customs' house. A small white building. In a sea of grass. No trees. I looked up. Bright clear sky. The officers, not far from me, still outside their office. I saw MacDonald looking at my Florida license tag, wrote something on a clip board, kept talking to MacKenzie. I couldn't hear them. They were back in a moment, smiling.

"You're from Florida?" asked MacDonald.

"Not really. Pennsylvania. The family farm is in Pennsylvania. That's where I'm from."

"Your truck has a Florida tag."

"Yea, I live there in the winter. But I spend summers in Pennsylvania. And Wisconsin. Keeping bees." I was talking too much.

"Wisconsin?" said the second officer.

"OK," said MacDonald. We're not going to stop you from giving your friend a hand on his farm. But if you're buying a business, you'll need a visa to run it. Don't stay longer than six months. Remember, those speed limits are in kilometers, not miles, per hour. Have a nice day."

The truck started the first time I turned the key. I slipped the clutch, it rolled forward. I was in Canada. Past the border guards. And after the rough dusty gravel trail out of Montana, I was glad to be on a paved road...

* * *

To reach my new bee farm, I followed the road north from the border. I drove past smooth hills of prairie grass, broken occasionally into brown soil awaiting spring seeds. I reached a stop sign. Left, west, looked almost the same as east. Short pale grass with bits of fresh green stretching from the crowns of plants. No houses. Some fields confined behind fences. Far to the east, I could see rugged badlands. Seventy Mile Butte's bald and haggard face was dark against the cloudless blue sky. I drove east, towards the buttes, the badlands. Towards Val Marie.

I traveled high on a plateau, though it was not obvious until the road curved from east to north again and plunged into the Frenchman River Valley. The bottom land was wide, smooth, black. Folks called it the flats. Full of plowed and terraced earth, planted in broad fields of clover and alfalfa. Two roads met at the valley center, with the town of Val Marie at the junction. From the plateau, before descending, I could see three white grain elevators., a red brick school, and the Bryan Trottier Arena. Big structures, surrounded by small wood frame houses.

Mid-morning. The April sun was strong. Before I reached the flats at the valley's bottom, half-way down the hill, I slowed the truck, turned off the road. The summer before, Frank had put thirty hives of bees behind a thick caragana hedge. I was almost there, my first beeyard. Everything else - my little house and shop, the Hutterites, the farmers and ranchers I'd met the summer before - would have to wait. I wanted to see my bees.

I parked on a slick muddy trail near the apiary. I found my veil, smoker, and hive tool under the tarp that covered the back of my truck. I lit Florida pine needles that were still in the smoker pot, worked the bellows until clouds of cool white smoke drifted from the smoker's funnel. I tramped through the mud, up the hill to the hives that were wrapped in black cardboard. I puffed smoke at the entrance of the first hive and pulled off the winter covering. I put the black cardboard box on the ground and placed two large rocks on it. The sun was warm, the bees no longer needed winter protection.

With the black wrapper off, the beehive stood white against the yellow-brown grass, on dark prairie soil. Along the banks of the river, half a mile away, pussy willow must have been blooming because dozens of bees were flying back to the hive, each carrying big tawny wads of pollen tangled in the hairs of their middle legs. The bees were confused. They were looking for a black hive, but now a white hive stood in its place. They started to fly towards another hive, still covered with its black winter wrapping. I quickly lifted and folded the cardboard from each hive, and as I did, more and more confused bees drifted about, lost at first, but no longer trying to enter the wrong hives. In an hour or two, the bees would forget that their homes had mysteriously changed colour. For the next six months, they would live in white beehives.

I went back to the first colony. I lifted the hive's cover, blew a tiny puff of smoke over the wax racks - the frames - that held honey, pollen and brood. Thousands of bees, fuzzy brown and yellow, danced on the honeycombs. Life was good for this hive. It had a queen that had filled half a dozen big frames with brood. Fresh pollen and nectar surrounded the new eggs and larvae. The entire nest smelled sweet and clean. The bees hummed. They were not disturbed as I slowly shifted frames of honeycomb from side to side, inspecting their prosperity...

excerpt from Chapter 2: Buzz and Mary

A honeybee begins its life as an egg. A creamy white ovoid unceremoniously dropped to the bottom of a wax cell by a busy queen bee.

The egg is ignored by the other bees for three days. Then the egg tips over on its side and a grub, a worm-like larva, hatches from the egg. Adult bees hive notice it immediately. They drop bits of pollen and honey - bee bread - into the larva's mouth. It eats.

The larva ingests so much and so often that she grows a thousand times bigger in five days. Just when the fat and plump immobile larva looks like it will burst apart while begging for still more food, an adult bee wanders by and covers the cell with a wax lid. In darkness, the larva becomes a pupa. It quits eating, molts from a grotesque white worm into a fuzzy baby bee.

Wong's was nearly empty, except for four cowboys sipping coffee at the table nearest the cash register. Harry Wong smiled and the cowboys waved me over to sit with them. They slid their chairs around to make space and Harry brought a chair for me from the table behind us.

"You wanna eat?" Harry hopefully handed me his one page menu.

"Oh yes. I'm starving!" I said.

How 'bout fried rice beef and broccoli. Very good. Or maybe you like hamburgers, gravy and fries?"

I had never tasted Chinese food. I ordered a hamburger. And I had never eaten gravy on fries, so I asked for ketchup. I looked at the cowboys. Real cowboys. I wondered which one was Buzz. The men were all fifty or sixty years old, wore broad-rimmed hats. Real cowboy hats. White, tan, brown, black hats. They drank their coffee with their coats on. Two smoked cigarettes, a package of Players on the table. One of the men was very thin. He had crooked black teeth and he chewed tobacco. Beside him was a big man, his chair pushed far back, his belly bumped the table. His coat was open and a coffee stain drew an arrow between the white buttons of his blue shirt. The youngest man had short black hair and a dark complexion. He sat very still. Looked shy. I was surprised when he spoke first.

"Mary says you should come down for supper tonight." I had just crossed the street from the Credit Union a minute earlier. How did he know Mary had invited me to supper?

My hamburger arrived. Harry Wong leaned forward with the food as he presented it to the table. He nodded. I sensed he was bowing. "You like this, I know," Harry said.

The big man waited until Harry Wong was back in the kitchen. "We'll miss him," he said.

"He's trying to sell. Wants to move to Swift."

"Yea, you'll miss your poutine. Not him," Buzz said.

The cowboys quit talking. "You want in?" The skinny man with the black teeth was dealing cards.

"No, no. Don't play cards. Don't really know how," I said.

"We've heard that before. You'd probably clean up." Cards were dealt, none were handed to me, I was still eating. And then I had to go. I wanted to check the honey shop, see if I could find frames of honey to use as feed for the rest of the hives I'd be inspecting.

"Don't forget about supper," Buzz said as I left Wong's.

* * *

The Trottier ranch was five minutes south of Val Marie. Buzz had lived in the valley most of his life. He was an Indian, a native-Canadian. His ancestors had lived on the continent for thousands of years. His grandparents taught the English and French how to hunt and live on the prairies. They taught them games, sports. Buzz taught his own children to compete, to be tough, but fair. It was the way of the Indian. I knew nothing of this when I drove out to the ranch that day. Through the irrigated flats, up a butte, past red cows, black horses. I stopped in front of a white house with brown trim.

Mary opened the door. She was dressed in the same red slacks and white shirt she had been wearing at the Credit Union. I could smell a roast. Potatoes? Carrots? Onions? How had she found time to bake a roast? "Buzz'll be here in a minute. He's feeding the horses."

I looked past the kitchen table. A guitar leaned against the wall between the kitchen and living room. A bright mural was on the distant living room wall. I couldn't see it clearly, though it covered much of the wall. It was huge - some sort of drawing, or photo. It looked like a football player, someone in a blue sports uniform, racing across a field. Left of the mural, on the west wall, was an enormous window. Through it, far beyond leafless poplar trees, I could see the river.

Buzz came in. He wore jeans and leather boots, belt buckle and the tan cowboy hat. Buzz hung his jacket on a post by the kitchen door. Over it, his hat.

"Found us?" he said.

He went to the fridge and got us both a Seven-Up.

"What's that?" he asked, pointing to the oven door.

Mary didn't answer, but put the roast in the middle of the round table in the kitchen. As we ate, they asked me about Florida and Pennsylvania. Usually, I was a bit shy. When I was a kid at school, the shyness was painful - my face glowed bright red whenever I had to speak in the classroom. But these people made me comfortable. I chattered through the entire beef roast, told them about my bees, my father's farm in Pennsylvania. I told them how the eastern states were different from Saskatchewan. The big cities. The damp climate. We finished eating and I was still talking. Not very polite. "Mary works at the bank," I said, "You do any other work besides the ranch?"

Buzz rubbed his eyes.

"I worked for the highways," he said. Buzz stacked dirty plates in the center of the table.

"Built some houses. Spent a lot of time getting my boys going at hockey, Brian is playing for the Islanders. Monty, Rocky, they play NHL, too. I used to do some picking and singing. Kathy, our youngest daughter, she and I made a record down in Nashville. But mostly, I take care of the cows."

excerpt from Chapter 10: Beekeeping in Florida

Some bees are scout bees. Path finders. They navigate miles and miles. Across rivers, through forests and fields. They patrol for fresh fields of blossoming flowers.

Scouting is expensive. It ties up a bee that might be tending to the queen, defending the hive, storing honey. It also tires the bee out, shortens her lifespan. And before the bee leaves on a scouting expedition, she tanks up on honey - the fuel she'll need for the long flight ahead. If every bee in the hive were a scout, the bees would all die young and would exhaust the hive's food supply.

The scout bee must also be smart enough to describe the new location to her sisters. Only a few keen bees get to be scouts. Perhaps they take a written exam. The brightest and the best with an enviable sense of direction and formidable memory. And bees don't usually get lost. Expanded to the human scale, their feats match a person carrying lunch in a small backpack, walking five hundred miles, remembering the route, returning home, telling friends how to find their own way.

George called me at the radio station and requested A Satisfied Mind. A song about a man who loses everything, but "is richer by far with a satisfied mind." It was old, from 1955, but my father had a Porter Wagoner album, so I knew the song. I found it on a lower shelf and queued it up.

While the song played, I chatted with George. He asked me about the bees. George asked me to come to his homestead. He gave me directions - off a clay road south of Clermont, through a pasture planted in timothy, to a brown cypress house with a tin roof and a wide front porch.

I parked in the grass. A frail gentleman with leathered skin and thin gray hair was poised near a small wooden barn. He was standing amid stacks of beehives, paint brush in hand.

I sat in my truck a moment, got out and walked towards him. Angry bees swirled in the air between George and me. Nasty bees were robbing George's honey barn - the door was open wide.

I watched thousands of bees fly in and out of George's barn. Frenzied bees, wild and vicious. Occasionally, they paused to attempt to sting. We picked nasty bees out of our hair, off our shirts. These bees were visiting from neighboring colonies, hives belonging to other beekeepers and kept in the surrounding swamps. The bees had discovered an open back door to George's honey barn. The floor of his shed was sticky with dirty honey and burnt wax. The robber bees had come to clean the floor.

I introduced myself. George waved his white brush at the bees.

"How ya get them to stop?" asked George.

"Well, start be keeping the door shut," I replied.

"Can't," George said. "If I shut the door, can't hear the radio while I'm painting."

What radio? The drone of the robber bees was louder than George's country music.

George had been painting hive boxes. He'd piled tall stacks of rectangular boxes in his yard behind the old barn. Homemade equipment, cut from local cypress. He smeared oily white paint on everything. Some errant bees hit the boxes as they flew past to rob the shed, their little bodies became glued to the wet paint. "You've got to shut the door," I said.

"Only been open half an hour. Where you reckon they come from?"

Beekeepers kept thousands of hives of bees in the groves and swamps near George's farm. With few flowers blooming in late January, the messy shop with spilt honey was an irresistible invitation to the bees of the neighborhood to steal what they couldn't honestly gather from plants. We closed the door, then set up a garden sprinkler on the end of a leaky green hose. The water soaked the siding and the closed door; saturated the sand in front of the shed. Party over, but it would take days for the wet bees to forget about this picnic spot.

"Want ice tea?" George asked. He had a glass gallon jug sitting on the steps of his house.

Ten bags floated in the water, sunshine pushed the tea out of the bags, into the warm water. He came out of the house with two tall plastic glasses. There were a half dozen ice cubes in each glass. We poured warm tea from the glass jug. "Hold these," George said.

He ambled back into the house, returned in a minute a sugar bowl and one spoon. We poured several spoons full of sugar in with the brown tea. The ice melted quickly.

"Sun tea. Good, huh?" George drank quickly and refilled his glass.

We sat in the shade and watched the water spray against the barn door. Robber bees were still coming, but not as many as before.

"You think I'm a bad beekeeper?"

"How long you been keeping bees?" I asked George.

"Been messin' with bees coming on forty years now."

"You never had any other job?"

"No, sir."

Only a few bees were flying around the honey barn now. George said he was tired. I left.

George thought he was a bad beekeeper. As I struggled with old trucks, poorly built equipment, and weak hives, I knew I was. And so were many of my contemporaries. But after thousands of years of recorded beekeeping history, I recognized we didn't invent bad beekeeping in our generation.

---

Catalogue Information

---

About Trafford Publishing:
Our books are manufactured one-at-a-time to fill individual orders -- part of an innovative process we invented, called "on-demand publishing." Authors and organizations from 120 countries are using Trafford for their publishing needs.
If you (or your company) wish to list a title for sale to the public, contact the nearest office or select "publishing offices" from our bookstore pages for details.

Canada • USA • UK • Republic of Ireland Contact Us URL http://www.trafford.com © 1995-2005 Trafford Publishing, a division of Trafford Holdings Ltd. Trafford's Privacy Policy: Client information will never be provided to anyone outside of Trafford and its subsidiaries except where required by law.