Varroa

Colony

Chapter 11: Varroa

The mite was the size of a pinhead. Reddish-brown, oval, flat, eight-legged, visible to the naked eye if you knew what you were looking for and invisible if you did not, the way most parasites were invisible, the way most things that fed on you were invisible, the things that attached and drew sustenance and weakened you by increments so small that the weakening felt like aging, felt like tiredness, felt like the gradual diminishment that you attributed to time rather than to the thing on your back that was eating you alive.

Varroa destructor. The name was precise. The genus Varroa, the species destructor, the taxonomy honest in a way that taxonomy rarely was, the name saying what the organism did: it destroyed. It had destroyed more honeybee colonies in the past forty years than any other single factor — more than pesticides, more than habitat loss, more than the colony collapse disorder that had made headlines in 2006 and that had turned out to be not one thing but many things, a convergence of stressors of which Varroa was the most significant, the mite being the vector for the viruses that actually killed the bees, the mite piercing the bee's exoskeleton and feeding on the fat body — not the blood, as had long been assumed, but the fat body, the organ that functioned as the bee's liver and immune system combined — and transmitting deformed wing virus and acute bee paralysis virus and a catalogue of pathogens that the bee's compromised immune system could not fight, and the colony weakened, and the colony dwindled, and the colony died.

Meg monitored mites the way a doctor monitored blood pressure: regularly, quantitatively, with a threshold above which intervention was required. The monitoring method was the alcohol wash. She took a half-cup sample of bees from a brood frame — approximately three hundred bees — and she shook them into a jar of rubbing alcohol, and she shook the jar for sixty seconds, and the alcohol killed the bees and dislodged the mites from their bodies, and she poured the contents through a strainer, and she counted the mites in the bottom of the jar, and the number of mites per hundred bees was the infestation rate, and the threshold was three. Three mites per hundred bees. Above three, the colony needed treatment. Below three, the colony could manage.

The alcohol wash killed three hundred bees. This was the cost of the information. Three hundred bees died so that Meg could know the mite level in the colony, could make the decision to treat or not treat, could act on data rather than guess, and the killing of three hundred bees to save fifty thousand bees was the calculus of management, the triage arithmetic that beekeeping required, the willingness to sacrifice the small number for the large, the individual for the colony, the same logic that governed the bee's own sting — the individual dies so the colony survives.

Meg did not enjoy the alcohol wash. She performed it with the efficiency of a person who had performed it hundreds of times, the jar and the alcohol and the strainer and the counting laid out on the tailgate of the truck like a surgical tray, the instruments of diagnosis arranged in the order of their use, and she moved through the steps without pause, without commentary, without the hesitation that she had felt the first time she did an alcohol wash twenty years ago, when the killing of three hundred bees had felt like a betrayal, had felt like the beekeeper violating the covenant, the beekeeper killing the things she was supposed to protect, and the feeling had faded over the years, had been replaced by the understanding that the wash was protection, that the data was protection, that knowing the enemy's strength was the first step in fighting the enemy, and the fighting was the covenant, and the covenant required the wash.

She did the first wash at the home apiary on a Tuesday in late June, the flow still on, the colonies strong, the population at its peak, which was also the peak of the mite population, because Varroa reproduced in the brood cells, the female mite entering a cell just before it was capped, laying her eggs on the developing pupa, the offspring feeding on the pupa's fat body, maturing, mating inside the cell — brother and sister, the genetics of the parasite as inbred as the genetics of any organism that mated with its siblings in the dark of a sealed cell — and emerging with the adult bee when the bee chewed through the cap, the mites riding out on the bee's body, the hitchhikers that the bee could not feel and could not remove and that would move to a new cell and repeat the cycle, the mite population doubling approximately every month during the brood-rearing season, the exponential growth of a parasite in an environment of unlimited hosts.

The first colony: she pulled a frame of open brood, the frame with young larvae visible in the cells, the white C-shaped grubs lying in pools of brood food, and she shook the bees from the frame into a plastic tub and scooped a half-cup measure and dumped the bees into the jar of alcohol and screwed on the lid and shook. Sixty seconds. She had counted the seconds so many times that her body knew the duration without counting, the way a musician knew the length of a rest, the internal metronome that had been calibrated by repetition. She poured the alcohol through the strainer. She counted the mites.

Four.

Four mites in three hundred bees. One point three per hundred. Below threshold. This colony was managing. This colony's hygienic behavior — the workers' ability to detect mite-infested cells and uncap them and remove the parasitized pupa and the mites — was working, was keeping the mite population below the level at which damage occurred, and the hygienic behavior was genetic, was heritable, was one of the traits Meg selected for when she chose her queens, the queens from the breeder in Chico whose stock had been selected for mite resistance, for the grooming behavior that allowed bees to detect and remove mites from their own bodies and from the bodies of their nestmates, the self-cleaning that was the colony's first line of defense against the parasite.

The second colony: seven mites. Two point three per hundred. Below threshold but climbing. Meg noted it. She would recheck this colony in two weeks.

The third colony: fourteen mites. Four point seven per hundred. Above threshold.

She set down the jar. She looked at the number on the pad where she recorded the counts, the fourteen that was a small number on paper and a significant number in the hive, the fourteen that meant this colony's mite population was growing faster than the colony's defenses could contain, that the mites were reproducing in the brood cells at a rate that would, if unchecked, produce a colony collapse by September — not the dramatic collapse of the headlines but the slow decline, the gradual reduction in population as the mites weakened the emerging bees and the viruses they carried shortened the bees' lives and the colony's foraging force diminished and the honey stores declined and the brood area contracted and the colony entered the feedback loop of parasitic decline, each generation weaker than the last, each round of reproduction producing fewer bees and more mites, the ratio shifting, the balance tipping, and by October the colony that had been strong in June would be a handful of sick bees in a box of empty comb, the deadout of next February's inspection, the frozen cluster that Meg would scrape from the frames and note in the notebook and clean and move on.

She would not let this happen.

She treated with oxalic acid. Oxalic acid was an organic compound — found naturally in rhubarb, spinach, many plants — that killed Varroa mites without killing bees at the concentrations Meg used, a selective toxin, a weapon that exploited the difference between the bee's physiology and the mite's physiology, the mite being more sensitive to the acid than the bee, the differential sensitivity being the therapeutic window, the narrow space between the dose that killed the mite and the dose that killed the bee, and Meg worked in that window with the precision of a person who understood that the window was narrow and that precision mattered.

She mixed the solution: 3.2 grams of oxalic acid dihydrate per 100 milliliters of sugar syrup. She measured with a digital scale, the powder white and crystalline, the consistency of fine sugar, and she added it to the warm syrup and stirred until it dissolved and poured the solution into the applicator, a large syringe, a 60-milliliter catheter syringe that she had purchased from a veterinary supply company, and she drew the solution into the syringe and she opened the hive and she dribbled the solution along the bee-covered seams between the frames, five milliliters per seam, the liquid falling on the bees' backs, the bees ingesting the solution as they groomed themselves and each other, the solution contacting the mites on the bees' bodies and entering the mites through their permeable body surfaces, and the mites died.

They did not die immediately. They died over the next twenty-four to forty-eight hours, the acid disrupting their physiology, and they fell from the bees' bodies and landed on the bottom board and Meg could count them there the next day if she wanted to, could see the tiny reddish-brown bodies on the bottom board like grains of spilled cinnamon, the dead parasites that had been living on her bees and that were now dead because Meg had detected them and treated them and the treatment had worked, and the working was not a cure, was not an eradication, was a management, a reduction, a setting-back of the mite population to a level the colony could tolerate, and the tolerance was temporary, and the mites would rebuild, and Meg would monitor and treat again if the numbers climbed again, the cycle of monitoring and treatment that was the modern beekeeper's permanent condition, the endless war against an enemy that could not be defeated, only contained.

This was the part of beekeeping that was not romantic. This was the part that the books and the blogs and the lifestyle magazines did not photograph — the alcohol washes and the dead bees in the strainer and the oxalic acid and the syringe and the calculation of thresholds and the anxiety of the count, the moment when the number was above three and the beekeeper knew that the colony was losing the war and that intervention was required and that intervention meant applying a substance that killed things, even though the things it killed were the enemy, even though the killing was targeted, even though the alternative was the colony's death. The treatment was necessary. The treatment was the beekeeper's obligation. The treatment was part of the covenant: I will protect you from the things that feed on you.

Meg treated twelve colonies that week. She drove to each apiary, washed each colony, counted each wash, treated the ones above threshold, and logged the data in the notebook and the spreadsheet. The data formed a picture: the mite levels were higher in the larger colonies, which made biological sense — more brood meant more reproduction sites for the mites, more bees meant more hosts — and the levels were lower in the colonies with the queens from the Chico breeder, the queens whose genetics included the hygienic behavior, the mite-biting behavior, the traits that Meg had been selecting for over a decade and that were showing results, the colonies with these queens running mite levels consistently lower than the colonies with other queens, the genetics expressing themselves in the data the way genetics always expressed themselves, silently, statistically, over time.

She thought about parasites.

She thought about them in the evening, sitting on the porch with the beer that had become her evening ritual, the single beer that was the punctuation at the end of the working day, the period that separated the day's work from the evening's rest, and she thought about parasites not in the clinical sense, not in the entomological sense, but in the expanded sense, the sense that her mind produced when it was tired and the boundaries between the professional and the personal were porous, the way they became porous in the evening, in the quiet, in the alone.

The mite was not a metaphor. Meg did not trade in metaphors. Meg was a beekeeper, not a poet, and the mite was a mite, was Varroa destructor, was a parasitic arachnid that fed on the fat body of Apis mellifera and transmitted pathogens that killed colonies, and the mite was real, was a problem, was the thing she had spent the week monitoring and treating. But the mind made connections that the beekeeper did not authorize, the mind drew lines between things that were not the same but that rhymed, and the rhyming was the thing that happened on the porch in the evening with the beer, the connections that surfaced the way the dead mites surfaced on the bottom board after a treatment — visible, countable, evidence of something that had been present and feeding and that was now exposed.

Gavin had not been a parasite. Meg was clear about this. Gavin had not fed on her. Gavin had not weakened her. Gavin had been a partner, a co-inhabitant, a person who shared the space and the meals and the mortgage and the evenings and the bed, a person whose presence had been the structure of her domestic life the way the comb was the structure of the hive, and when the person left the structure remained but the structure was empty, was the drawn comb without the bees, was the architecture without the population, and the emptiness was not parasitism, was not the weakness caused by something feeding on you, was the weakness caused by something leaving you, which was a different weakness, a different diminishment, a different form of loss.

But there were parasites. Not Gavin. The habits. The patterns. The ways of being that Meg had developed in response to Gavin's leaving and that had attached to her and that fed on her and that she could not remove because they had become part of her, had become the way she moved through her days, the habits of isolation that were not isolation by choice but isolation by default, the staying-home that was not contentment but avoidance, the not-answering-the-phone that was not boundary-setting but barrier-building, the declining of invitations that was not selectivity but fear, and the fear was the mite, the fear was the thing on her back that she could not feel but that was feeding, that was weakening her capacity for connection, that was compromising her social immune system, and the weakening felt like tiredness, felt like preference, felt like "I'm just not a social person," the narrative she told herself that was the human equivalent of the colony that does not know it is infested because the mite is too small to see and the weakness is too gradual to feel.

Three per hundred was the threshold. Three mites per hundred bees, and the colony needed treatment. What was the threshold for people? How many parasitic habits per hundred behaviors before the person needed treatment? How many evenings alone before the aloneness became the infestation rather than the choice? How many phone calls not returned before the not-returning was the mite rather than the preference?

Meg did not know. Meg did not have an alcohol wash for herself, did not have a method for counting the things that were feeding on her, did not have a threshold above which she would acknowledge that intervention was required. She had the beer. She had the porch. She had the evening. She had the notebook with the mite counts and the spreadsheet with the treatment records and the professional discipline of a beekeeper who monitored her colonies with rigor and precision and who applied the same rigor and precision to every aspect of her beekeeping practice and who applied none of it to herself.

She treated her bees. She did not treat herself.

The irony was not lost on her. The irony was the kind of irony that lived in the space between what you knew and what you did, the space between the professional competence and the personal incompetence, the space that Meg inhabited with the particular discomfort of a person who could see the problem in the hive and could not see the problem in the mirror, or could see it but could not count it, could not quantify it, could not reduce it to a number that demanded action.

Luz noticed. Luz did not say anything about it — Luz had the restraint of a person who understood boundaries, who understood that the space between two people at work was professional space and that the personal leakage that occurred in that space was to be noted but not addressed, acknowledged but not discussed — but Luz noticed. Meg could tell that Luz noticed because of the small things, the things that were not words: the coffee Luz brought in the morning, the sandwich Luz packed for Meg without being asked, the way Luz stayed an extra half hour at the end of the day to help clean equipment when the cleaning was Meg's job and Luz was off the clock, the gestures that were not charity and were not pity but were the behaviors of a person who recognized that another person was carrying more than the work required and who wanted to carry some of it, and the wanting was not discussed and the carrying was not acknowledged and the not-discussing and the not-acknowledging were the form the kindness took, the form that Meg could accept because it was disguised as work, was packaged in the language of the professional, was the emotional equivalent of the oxalic acid dissolved in sugar syrup — the treatment hidden in the sweetness, the medicine made palatable by the medium.

Meg accepted the coffee. She accepted the sandwiches. She accepted the extra half hour. She did not say thank you because thank you would have named the thing, would have identified the treatment as treatment rather than as professional courtesy, and the naming would have required Meg to acknowledge that she needed treating, and the acknowledging was the thing she could not do, the thing she had never done, the thing that her grandmother had never done and that her mother had never done and that the women in her family did not do because the women in her family were strong and strength meant not needing and not needing meant not acknowledging and the not-acknowledging was the exoskeleton, the hard outer shell that kept the shape and bore the load and did not show the damage.

The mite was inside the exoskeleton. The mite was always inside the exoskeleton.

Meg finished her beer. She went inside. She washed the jar and the strainer and she put the oxalic acid back on the shelf in the bee shed, the white powder in the brown glass bottle, the label handwritten: OA 3.2g/100ml, the instructions for treatment reduced to a formula, the formula being the knowledge, the knowledge being the practice, and the practice would continue, would repeat in August and in September and in October, the monitoring and treating and monitoring again, the permanent vigilance that the mite required, the permanent attention to the thing that could not be eliminated but could be managed, the thing that would always be there, on the back, in the cell, in the fat body, feeding, and the beekeeper's job was to keep the feeding below the threshold, to keep the colony strong enough to tolerate the parasite, to keep the organism functional despite the thing that was trying to destroy it.

Management, not eradication. The beekeeper's creed. The rule that applied to mites and that might have applied to grief and that might have applied to fear and that might have applied to the habits of isolation that clung to Meg the way the mite clung to the bee — flat, persistent, feeding on something essential, something the organism needed to survive and that the parasite consumed and that the organism replenished and that the parasite consumed again, the cycle that did not end but that could be managed, could be kept below the threshold, could be lived with if you knew it was there and if you counted it and if you treated it when the numbers climbed.

The numbers would climb again. They always did. And Meg would count them and she would treat them and the cycle would continue and the colonies would survive and the honey would flow and the season would turn and the mites would persist because the mites always persisted, because persistence was what parasites did, persistence was their evolutionary strategy, and the strategy worked, had worked for millions of years, would work for millions more, and the beekeeper's strategy — monitoring, treatment, the vigilance that never ends — would work too, would keep the colonies alive, would keep the honey coming, would hold the line between the parasite's ambition and the colony's survival.

And the holding of the line was the work. And the work was the thing. And the thing continued.