Busy with the Bees

Weather-browned William F. Huston, 55, of Corona, Calif., can sense a gag even before a wag gets it off. "Hear you've been busy as a bee," says the jokester, at which Huston smiles, shrugs and replies: "Well, it's a business you can sure get stung in." Huston's business is that of providing colonies of bees to carry on the necessary cross-pollination of California's $2 billion fruit and vegetable crops. The company now has $500,000 in annual sales and is growing fast.

Huston and other California beekeepers are prospering because they have improved on a necessary natural process. Once colonies of wild bees did most of the pollinating. Now the wild bees have been decimated by increasing use of insecticides. Not only do the beekeepers make up for the decline in the bee population, but entomologists are also developing special strains of bees that prefer particular crops.

Huston, with 57,000 hives available in peak seasons and a fleet of 18 bee trucks to carry them, can provide a colony of bees that is rented out to pollinate areas of up to a mile in radius and then returned to him. The charge for a hive, which includes a queen and around 40,000 workers and drones, runs from $3 to $6 depending on the crop to be pollinated and the time it takes. The queens are necessary since they produce the young bees, and Huston and his fellow beekeepers can make limitless numbers of queens by picking out specific bees and feeding them "royal jelly." This is a pasty substance deriving from the glands of the workers that the bees themselves feed all off spring for the first two days of their lives --and only to the destined queen bees after that.

New techniques in bee-raising and new demands for domestic bees in the wake of insecticides are speeding up the pace among beekeepers. Huston formerly got the bulk of his income from honey, the thing that bees think they really make best. For the sake of honey, bees are willing to fly even into an alfalfa blossom that will, for protective reasons, whang a bee on the head and whack it in the rear before the bee can fly free, smeared with pollen and heavy with nectar. Now the Huston Honey Co. income is split fifty-fifty between honey and pollination revenues. And Huston predicts that within ten more years 80% will be from pollinating.

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