Bees Are My Business

By Harry J. Whitcombe and John Scott Douglas

When Harry Whitcombe was seven years old he persuaded a not very enthusiastic father to let him have a hive of bees. From that day on, bees were his business. It was often a precarious business, but it was to prove its worth more than once during the depression, when Whitcombe, still in high school, helped balance the family budget by selling five-gallon cans of honey to a local grocer. Later the sale of his apiary, grown to a hundred colonies, helped pay his way through college.

As time went on, Harry Whitcombe found that his real interest lay in the part beekeeping could be made to play in replenishing the soil through pollination of crops. There were many lean years, but Harry Whitcombe persisted, and he became one of the largest shippers of package bees in the world. He was the first man ever to ship bees by plane and his bees were flown all over the United States and Canada and to Europe, India, Korea, Guam and Israel.

This heartwarming human success story is told against a background rich in information of vast importance to all of us and of practical value to beekeepers. With amazing clarity the authors describe the science of beekeeping from elementary facts about hives and swarms, to the science of pollination. It is the only book of its kind that relates the story of the beekeeping industry to agriculture. It tells the story of modern commercial beekeeping and vividly describes how bee pollination contributes to man’s dinner table in meat, milk, butter, vegetables and fruits. It explains how the application of insecticides, such as DDT, kills both beneficial as well as injurious insects and how the honey bee has taken over pollination for continued production of many crops.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Muriwai Books
• Release date: Dec 5, 2018
• ISBN: 9781789126563

Harry J. Whitcombe

HARRY J. WHITCOMBE was born on October 21, 1915 in Corona, California and studied at the University of California College of Agriculture and the University of California. He moved to Davis in 1934 to begin his career as a beekeeper. He met his wife Marie and the couple had three children. During World War II, Whitcombe headed a successful program in conjunction with UCD to use active pollination to increase crop yields. He was elected to the Davis City Council in 1954 and served on the City Council from 1954-1958. He was later appointed to be the Davis Police Commissioner. He died on October 11, 1987, aged 71. JOHN SCOTT DOUGLAS, a native of California, has contributed to many magazines and collaborated on numerous books. He was the author of The Secret of the Undersea Bell (1951), The Story of the Oceans (1952) and Summits of Adventure: The Story of Famous Mountain Climbs and Mountain Climbers (1954). He met Harry J. Whitcombe after reading a piece in The Reader’s Digest on Mr. Whitcombe’s business. Himself an enthusiastic beekeeper, John Scott Douglas subsequently suggested collaborating on the present book, Bees Are My Business, which was first published in 1955.

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Text originally published in 1955 under the same title.

© Muriwai Books 2018, all rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted by any means, electrical, mechanical or otherwise without the written permission of the copyright holder.

Publisher’s Note

Although in most cases we have retained the Author’s original spelling and grammar to authentically reproduce the work of the Author and the original intent of such material, some additional notes and clarifications have been added for the modern reader’s benefit.

We have also made every effort to include all maps and illustrations of the original edition the limitations of formatting do not allow of including larger maps, we will upload as many of these maps as possible.

BEES ARE MY BUSINESS

BY

HARRY J. WHITCOMBE

WITH JOHN DOUGLAS

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Contents

TABLE OF CONTENTS 3

DEDICATION 4

Chapter One—MY CUSTOMERS ARE ALWAYS RIGHT 5

Chapter Two—ONE WAY TO BECOME A BEEKEEPER 19

Chapter Three—COLLEGE BEEKEEPER 39

Chapter Four—WE STAKE EVERYTHING ON NEVADA BLOSSOMS 51

Chapter Five—BUILDING MY BEE BUSINESS 72

Chapter Six—HER MAJESTY, THE QUEEN 80

Chapter Seven—BEES IN THE WAR EFFORT 87

Chapter Eight—POISON FROM THE SKIES 96

Chapter Nine—BEEKEEPER IN THE FARMER’S MARKET 106

Chapter Ten—FLYING BEES ON MAN-MADE WINGS 118

Chapter Eleven—IT’S AN OLD EGYPTIAN CUSTOM 133

Chapter Twelve—POLLINATION MYSTERY 145

Chapter Thirteen—BEES REPLENISH THE GOOD EARTH 153

Chapter Fourteen—BRIGHT FUTURE FOR KEEPERS OF THE BEES 161

REQUEST FROM THE PUBLISHER 170

DEDICATION

THIS BOOK is dedicated to the late George H. Vansell, whose name appears so frequently in its pages. A Government research scientist, he devoted his life to the progress of beekeeping. Were it not for his foresight and years of painstaking work, we might still be seeking a practical means of pollinating the all-important legumes, and the chapters herein, telling of his great contribution to this effort, could not yet have been written.

Chapter One—MY CUSTOMERS ARE ALWAYS RIGHT

MARIE and I sat down to a late luncheon, too tired and hungry for conversation. While she ate, my wife flipped into different stacks the letters that had come in the morning’s bundle of mail. Letters with foreign postmarks went into one pile, those from beekeepers whose names were familiar into another, personal correspondence into a third, and all others in a fourth. Turning from the mail, I looked out upon the swimming pool in our patio, flanked at one end by a guest cottage, and shimmering silver in the brilliant California sunlight. I wished there were time for a dip, for my hands were tender from bee stings, and the water would have been soothing. But that was their normal condition in late spring, when I filled thousands of packages with bees and worked without gloves to save precious hours.

It was the package-bee season when we shipped light crates of bees and queens from our Sacramento Valley apiaries to beekeepers throughout the western states and to many foreign lands as well. Since dawn I’d been at work at a stand in a prune orchard, shaking bees into two-to five-pound packages. Every package was screened on two sides to allow free circulation of air, and in the lid of each was an inverted can of sugar syrup with a wick which seeped out the syrup slowly to feed the bees on their journeys.

Marie had meanwhile gotten the children off to school before driving to our warehouse in downtown Davis to direct a crew placing queens in packages of bees brought in the previous afternoon. To protect the queens from harm, they were lodged in tiny wood-and-wire cages and suspended from the tops of the crates. With that done, Marie pasted shipping labels on the packages of bees before taking them to the station.

My wife is small and blonde, and her Scandinavian-blue eyes have a way of reflecting her swiftly passing moods. They were sober now, her fair brows puckered as she hesitated over one letter. As she read it, her eyes widened and darkened—a sure sign that something was wrong.

Twenty packages lost! she wailed. And three-pound packages, too!

What twenty packages? I asked.

Oh, you know, Harry—the ones we sent the Fort Bragg rancher two weeks ago.

When Marie’s train of thought goes hurtling by, you’re lucky to catch the last car. I couldn’t even do that now. Fort Bragg is a lumber town on the forbidding rocky coast north of San Francisco, and I could not recall any customers there. Nor did the signature on the letter Marie passed across the table jog my memory.

How long have we shipped bees to this man Harley?

This was his first order, said Marie. Remember? It came the day you were packaging bees in Woodland. Suddenly she brightened. But you got in late that day. Guess I shipped the order before you saw it.

I grinned and shook my head. After more than a dozen years of marriage, Marie’s thought processes still baffle me.

But now she was off again: Twenty three-pound packages of bees would buy a sweater for Johnny, a new coat for Nancy, shoes for Kenny— And she enumerated several other things that might be bought with the returns from the lost bees.

Marie still finds it difficult to adjust to the idea that the disappearance of a shipment of bees is no longer a calamity. We hire out our bees to pollinate a million dollars’ worth of crops each year, and our queens and package bees are purchased by beekeepers in many of the western states and on four continents. We have a lovely brick home, and live as well as successful college classmates who followed paths more conventional than beekeeping. But it was not always that way. We chose a strange path with an uncertain ending, and because of our choice Marie experienced more hardships than girls raised in comfortable circumstances generally know anything about.

She can remember years of low honey prices when we spent each Saturday in a stand in San Francisco’s Farmer’s Market, exchanging five-pound cans of honey for dollar bills. She can still recall the crumbling shack beside a swamp where we were tormented nights by mosquitoes and at dawn by bees, while extracting another beekeeper’s honey on shares. Nor can she forget the time we leased a Nevada apiary and it rained each day that June; or the bears and buckeye poisoning that destroyed many of our own bees left behind in the Sierra Nevadas while we were there. Most painful memory of all those years was the day she went alone to the hospital to have her first baby. Because our bank account was bare, I had to remain behind, extracting honey night and day to pay hospital and doctor.

Yet, looking at my wife now, I could see few signs that the years or the hardships had touched her. She has a sprightly quality that enables her to laugh off present troubles and face the future with an abiding faith. She was like that when she resigned her position as gardening editor of Sunset Magazine, at a time when jobs were scarce, and enrolled in the College of Agriculture at Davis. She was sure further college training would make an opening for her with the country’s leading house-and-garden magazine. At college dances Marie’s eyes always glimmered with excitement like those of a young girl at her first party. Today that zest is undiminished. To see her skittering across the court to win a tennis championship at our Palm Springs club, you’d never suspect her of a serious thought.

Yet Marie keeps our books, and during my absences from home she hires the workers for warehouse and field work, computes their wages, and signs their checks. She cooks three meals daily, and with some help from the children keeps a neat home. Rush periods find her helping me to graft bee larvae into queen cells, an operation requiring almost surgical skill. And it is Marie, too, who carries on correspondence with our five thousand beekeeper-customers in the United States and such faraway lands as the Netherlands, France, India, Korea, Australia, Guam, and Israel.

In one way, however, the lean and trying years have left their mark upon her. Warmth and a generous spirit were always hers, but today there’s a greater understanding of others’ hardships. Where once she scurried about finding a dress for the little girl whose ailing father could not work, or shoes for the children of an impoverished Mexican family on the outskirts of Davis, her compassion is now worldwide. She badgers mothers for castoff clothing for a child in Iran, an orphaned French tot, or the six children of Twisted Thum, the Indian trapper and hunter and beekeeper in Canada who orders fifty packages of our bees as regularly as the springs roll around.

What has broadened Marie’s horizon and my own as well is not alone the enlarged scope of our business, but also a realization of its significance. Once we thought of our bees as producers of sweets, but now we regard honey as a by-product. In region after region where poisonous sprays have killed the natural pollinators, such as wild bees, wasps, and flies, there remains only the honeybee to fertilize the blooms of fruits, many of the vegetables, and the all-important legumes that replace nitrogen in the soil. The honeybee, the only pollinating insect man can control, has thus become the keystone in our agriculture and in the agriculture of other nations as well. The dawning realization of our dependence on this insect has brought beekeeping some measure of prosperity, but it has also faced us with heavy responsibilities.

I thought of all this as I glanced at Marie, whose memory of the hard years was still so vivid that she could think of the lost shipment of bees in terms of its effect on our children.

A few packages might be smashed, she said. But how could all twenty of the packages I sent to Fort Bragg disappear?

We’ll probably never know, I answered. But we’ll have to assume our customers never got the bees, and replace them.

As it happened, however, we did learn months later what became of the missing bees. A beekeeper sent me a clipping from an old paper, telling of the trouble they caused. Afterward, I was able to add a few details by talking to several unwilling witnesses to the misadventure.

The twenty packages of bees, it appears, reached the small Northern California town of Santa Rosa by rail twenty-four hours after being shipped from Davis. As ill luck would have it, the Fort Bragg bus was behind schedule that day, and the driver hurriedly loaded mail-bags and packages at the Santa Rosa station without bothering to read the instructions on the bee cases. Had he done so, he might have placed them on top of other baggage rather than on the floor, just inside the luggage-compartment door. Minutes later, when his passengers boarded the bus, he stowed their baggage, including a small trunk, above and behind the package bees.

Somehow this top-heavy cargo remained in place for half a dozen miles, while the bus bounced and swayed along the rough and winding Fort Bragg road. Then the vehicle was jounced by a deep chuck-hole. Down crashed the small trunk upon the package bees. Thousands of the insects were crushed, but many more emerged from their packages in a battle mood.

The bees couldn’t escape from the tight luggage-compartment door, but they did discover cracks into the interior of the bus, at a time when every window was closed against a crisp ocean breeze. There were startled cries as the first bees stung. Seconds later scores of insects were buzzing angrily around the passengers’ heads. With yells and screams men and women stampeded down the aisle. Several bees were by this time hovering over the driver. Distracted in his efforts to avoid being stung, he failed to notice the road curving around a steep embankment until someone screamed a warning. His wrench at the wheel brought the vehicle back onto the road a split-second before it could plunge down the slope. The swerve tumbled passengers across seats or flung them down in the aisle.

As the bus came to a shuddering halt, the driver opened the door and prudently availed himself of the first opportunity to escape. Passengers bolted after him, no one stopping until the last fugitive was a safe distance from the bus. More and more bees worked through cracks from the luggage-compartment and buzzed at the closed windows, but few found their way through the open door, so it proved impossible to resume the journey.

An eastbound lumber truck came upon the cold and miserable party some time later. The truck driver promised to send help, but nearly an hour dragged by before a special bus reached the scene. And then the travelers were obliged to go on without baggage. It was not until the afternoon of the following day that a beekeeper could be found to rescue it from the locked compartment.

Apparently the rancher to whom the bees were consigned did not take a local paper. For he failed to mention the mishap when he wrote to inquire about his order. Now, you might wonder why we ship anything as likely to cause a disturbance as package bees. There are two important reasons for the growth of this business. Beekeepers buy these packages to replace bees lost in winter, and also to pollinate fruit blossoms for orchardists who must have bees to produce fruit.

Any colony may die during a severe or prolonged winter. (A colony consists of a queen, the male bees or drones if any, and the worker bees in various stages of development that occupy a single hive.) Heaviest losses are suffered by beekeepers in the north, where bees are confined to their hives for so many months that fifty to one hundred pounds of honey must be left in each hive in the fall to provide winter stores. Even then many overwintered colonies die out if spring is late in coming.

Formerly, northern beekeepers raised their own queens, placing one in each empty hive in spring, together with frames of workers and brood taken from strong colonies. (Bees are known as brood when either in the grublike larval stage, or when encased in a cocoon in the pupal stage.) New colonies formed in this way often failed to reach full strength until the blossoms providing the main honeyflow of the year had wilted and thus they failed to store any surplus honey that could be sold.

Conditions in the south, where spring comes weeks earlier, are quite different. Our bees gather pollen while northern bees are still imprisoned in their hives by chill winds and snow. As pollen is stored in the hive, the queen is stimulated to egg-laying, and our hives are crowded with young bees before the first blossoms appear in the north. Southern colonies increase in such numbers, in fact, that they would swarm if beekeepers either failed to divide large colonies into smaller ones, or neglected to provide extra room in some other way.

Swarming results from overcrowding, and in past decades an unrecorded beekeeper realized that this impulse to swarm could be curbed as well by shaking bees into packages for sale to northern beekeepers as by dividing his colonies. The raising of queens to accompany many of the packages of bees shipped to the north came as a natural sequence.

The first advertisement for package bees appeared in 1913, but the business grew slowly until bee-shippers learned how to package and feed bees on long journeys without heavy losses. Eventually a light frame package with wire sides became standard shipping equipment. Where two or more packages were crated together, an air space was left between them to prevent the bees from becoming overheated. If bees grow too warm, they mill about in a package, generating more and more heat until large numbers die. An inverted feeder can fitted into the lid of each package solved the feeding problem; syrup seeped slowly from its wick for five days.

The queen cage suspended from the lid is largely wire, but it has wooden ends, both of which are bored with holes large enough to admit a bee. One hole is partially filled with an invert sugar known as nulomoline candy. The queen, and ten workers to care for and feed her, are pushed through the other end. Both holes are then plugged with tiny corks.

Upon receiving package bees, a northern beekeeper sprays them with water or sugar syrup to discourage them from taking wing, and then shakes them into an empty hive. The drenched bees crawl down between the rectangular frames, which are either wired with sheets of wax foundation or with drawn comb—sheets of foundation the previous occupants of the hive have built up with wax into rows of cells for honey storage. The cork is removed from the candy end of the queen cage, which is then wedged between two frames. The bees soon eat away the plug of candy to free the queen.

Package bees are a boon to northern beekeepers. They can be installed eight to ten weeks before the main honeyflow in the north, and the small nucleus installed develop into a strong colony in time to harvest a bumper crop of honey. In parts of Canada and in some northern states where winters are severe, beekeepers find it more profitable to take the fifty to one hundred pounds of honey they formerly left in the hives for winter stores and kill their bees in the fall. The extra honey harvested in this way sells for more than it costs to restock hives with package bees in the spring.

Most package bees are shipped to beekeepers, but in regions where they are scarce, we ship bees to orchardists. Interested in fruit rather than honey, they pry the cork from the queen cage, wrap the package in building paper, and drill a hole in one wooden end to make a temporary hive. The bees immediately set forth to gather pollen, and in doing so they carry the pollen from the stamen of one blossom to the pistil of another to fertilize the flowers and set the fruit. Within ten days to two weeks after the makeshift hives are placed here and there in trees in the flowering orchard, the first spraying begins. Poisonous sprays kill not only the injurious insects for which they are intended, but the bees as well. Before they are destroyed, however, the bees have assured the orchardist of a crop.

The package-bee business has grown rapidly in the last two decades, particularly since 1940. Today half a million two-to five-pound packages of bees are shipped to beekeepers and orchardists every year. In California this business has assumed such proportions that from March fifteenth until May fifteenth the Southern Pacific couples on an extra car to a northbound train each night solely to move package bees to Oregon, Washington, Idaho, and Canada. Locally it is known as The Bee Express. In the late ‘forties even more bees moved by rail; two and sometimes two and a half express cars of package bees were made up at Davis alone in a single night. Increased railroad rates have diverted much of this transportation to trucks, which carry a thousand packages of bees directly from the warehouse of a southern beekeeper to the bee yard of a northern keeper, and do the job more cheaply than the railroads. The peak of this business is from April tenth to twenty-fifth. During this two-week period our apiaries normally ship thousands of dollars worth of package bees—for the most part to northern beekeepers.

I learned to rear queens while studying apiculture at the College of Agriculture at Davis, and while still a student, I sold both queens and package bees to a bee-shipper and to a few private customers. I continued to supply these customers and acquired others after my graduation from college. But the growth of this phase of my business was nevertheless extremely slow. It did not reach sizable proportions until 1940, but it has continued to grow steadily, in part due to articles about our work in Collier’s in 1938 and in The Saturday Evening Post in 1944, and in part because of a spectacular stroke of luck.

In 1948 the bee-shipper supplying Sears, Roebuck customers with package bees was forced to retire because of ill health. Sears carried a complete line of bee equipment, and because its sale could be stimulated by the handling of package bees, the company considered it imperative to find another supplier without delay.

A Sears purchasing agent called on several bee-shippers. None could take additional business, but as luck would have it, they all recommended me. The company representative began to make discreet inquiries about my qualifications and dependability.

One day Marie washed her hair, wrapped it in a towel, turban style, and had just started a split-pea soup when a large, fair-haired man appeared at the door. He introduced himself as Bill Allen, Sears’ Western Farm Supply purchasing agent. Expecting me home at any moment, Marie invited him to sit down. She kept up a lively conversation with the stranger while she continued to stir the soup.

When I came in, she said, This is Mr. Allen of Sears, Harry. Let’s have the soup while it’s warm. You can talk later.

She carried three bowls out to the patio table. While we sipped our soup, I became increasingly aware of Allen’s friendly though careful scrutiny. I’m tall and dark, with a thick mop of black, wavy hair, and the physical exertion of moving thousands of hives of bees has held my weight down so that I’m almost as slender as I was in college. Perhaps I looked too youthful for the responsibility Allen had in mind, but if that was the case, he must have decided to give me a chance.

After his second bowl of soup, he pushed back his chair and grinned. Harry, your competitors tell me you’re the man to supply package bees and queens to all our beekeeper customers west of the Mississippi River. Can you do it?

The unexpected opportunity left me temporarily speechless. I looked at Marie, with the towel wrapped turbanlike about her head. Her lips were parted and her eyes wide with astonishment.

Recovering in a moment, I said eagerly, I’d like to try.

Good! Allen said, laughing. Now, I’ll tell you how we operate....

Sears’ western apiary department was an innovation, and the first year’s business was small. It has grown so steadily, however, that their customers now purchase thousands of packages of bees from us each year. Their orders and repeat business from old customers take all package bees we can spare from our own colonies, so that for a number of years we’ve found it unnecessary to advertise. Indeed, we can promise bees to new customers only when their orders reach Westacres Apiaries well in advance of spring.

The package bees I supply customers are made up in the field. To draw them from the hives requires much travel, because my bee farm is a mythical entity with no fixed location. During the winter my hives—which in different years have varied in number from a few hundred to as many as 3,800—are scattered miles apart to provide the bees with whatever pasturage can be found. Late in the fall, I move them to winter stands in the almond groves near Winters, Esparto, and Capay, to collect the first pollen of spring. As bees return to their hives with bulging pollen baskets, the queen is stimulated to egg-laying. This starts the growth of colonies so necessary when surplus bees are needed for early package shipments.

From a wintertime low of 10,000 bees, the colonies swiftly increase to 30,000, 40,000 or even 50,000 by mid-March. Colonies with outstanding queens might soon grow to 80,000 bees if I did not reduce their population at this time. With a helper, I visit each stand. The helper places a scale on the ground and an empty package on it. Into the hole where the feeder-can will later go, I slip the narrowed base of a large funnel which is fitted with a grid of parallel wires on its lower end. Then I remove the cover of a hive, lift out frame after frame clustered with bees, and shake the insects into the funnel my helper is holding. Worker bees slip easily through the parallel wires of the grid, trickling in a thick, brown stream into the package. The grid strains out the larger drones, as well as the queen, if I have missed her.

From a single hive, I shake off the 10,000 bees needed to