Hives

Almond trees are exploding with pink and white blossoms across the vast Central Valley, marking the start of the growing season for California's most valuable farm export. Toiling among the blooms are the migrant workers that will make or break this year's crop: honeybees. The insects carry the pollen and genetic material needed to turn flowers into nuts as they flit from tree to tree. It's a natural process that no machine can replicate. But it can't be left to chance. Bees are too integral to the fortunes of California's nearly $3-billion-a-year almond industry.

When the Hives last played the Coachella Valley Music & Arts Festival, the appearance could have been considered a victory lap for the band. It was 2003, and the practitioners of lean, fashionable rock 'n' roll had a year earlier seen their air-guitar-ready scolder "Hate to Say I Told You So" crack the top-100 on the U.S. pop charts. The success of the song ultimately led the band to a multi-album global deal with Universal Music U.K. said to be worth seven figures. Rock 'n' roll, it seemed, had been very, very good to the Hives.

When the Hives last played the Coachella Valley Music & Arts Festival, the appearance could have been considered a victory lap for the band. It was 2003, and the practitioners of lean, fashionable rock 'n' roll had a year earlier seen their air-guitar-ready scolder "Hate to Say I Told You So" crack the top-100 on the U.S. pop charts. The success of the song ultimately led the band to a multi-album global deal with Universal Music U.K. said to be worth seven figures. Rock 'n' roll, it seemed, had been very, very good to the Hives.

Almond trees are exploding with pink and white blossoms across the vast Central Valley, marking the start of the growing season for California's most valuable farm export. Toiling among the blooms are the migrant workers that will make or break this year's crop: honeybees. The insects carry the pollen and genetic material needed to turn flowers into nuts as they flit from tree to tree. It's a natural process that no machine can replicate. But it can't be left to chance. Bees are too integral to the fortunes of California's nearly $3-billion-a-year almond industry.

Kirk Anderson bought his first honeybees from a Montgomery Ward catalog in 1970. The 3-pound cage came in the mail, and as he opened it and fed the bees sugar water, his lifelong passion with Apis mellifera began. Nearly 40 years later, Anderson, 61, calls himself an urban beekeeper, and he cares passionately enough about bees that he does house-call rescues throughout Los Angeles County. Anderson gets 20 calls a week.

A La Crescenta beekeeper who kept nine apiaries in Tujunga pleaded innocent Thursday in Municipal Court to charges that he failed to register his hives with the city. Nereu Da Silva, 56, claimed that he should be exempted from registering his apiaries because he keeps bees as a hobby, not as a commercial enterprise.

Thousands of bees, so stunned that they couldn't even sting, were left temporarily homeless in a most precarious place today when their hives fell off a truck and crashed onto the Foothill Freeway in La Canada-Flintridge. Sgt. Walt Nowakowski of the California Highway Patrol said it could have been a very dangerous situation if the weather had been hot what with countless angry bees taking out their wrath on passing commuters.

Beekeepers battling a mysterious ailment that led to the disappearance of millions of honeybees now fear the sting of imported Australian bees that could out-compete their hives and may be carrying a deadly parasite unseen in the U.S. The Department of Agriculture has allowed shipments of Australian bees to resume despite concerns by some of its scientists. Australia had been sending the insects across the Pacific for four years to replace hives devastated by the perplexing colony collapse disorder.

Third-generation beekeeper Roscoe Hall spent the last year fretting over a disease that has inexplicably caused thousands of his industrious insects to abandon their colonies. Now entire hives are disappearing too. In the long, flat valley where the nation's almonds grow, bee thieves are striking hard, nabbing increasingly valuable hives from farmers' fields where bees are used to pollinate blossoming nut trees. A few weeks ago, 180 of Hall's hives were lifted over a period of days, a bit of banditry he estimates cost him nearly $70,000 in lost bees, pollination fees and honey production.

Between blood-sucking mites and the mysterious phenomenon known as "colony collapse disorder," honeybees in California have been dropping like, well, flies. That's why Daniel Salisbury, 47, says the city of Santa Monica should halt its policy of exterminating feral bees and instead legalize beekeeping and create a bee yard that would operate as a temporary holding pen for colonies awaiting relocation to agricultural zones. At the Santa Monica City Council meeting on Tuesday, Councilman Kevin McKeown hopes to win support for a study of whether to amend or repeal the old ordinance that prohibits beekeeping.

Israel is referred to repeatedly in the Bible — 17 times, in fact — as the "land of milk and honey," but until three years ago, archaeologists had discovered little firm evidence that beekeeping was ever practiced there. Many scholars, in fact, assumed "honey" referred to a nectar from dates or other fruits. Then, three years ago, researchers found a 3,000-year-old apiary in the Iron Age city of Tel Rehov in the Jordan Valley, the oldest known commercial beekeeping facility in the world, suggesting that the word "honey" likely referred to the real thing.

Between blood-sucking mites and the mysterious phenomenon known as "colony collapse disorder," honeybees in California have been dropping like, well, flies. That's why Daniel Salisbury, 47, says the city of Santa Monica should halt its policy of exterminating feral bees and instead legalize beekeeping and create a bee yard that would operate as a temporary holding pen for colonies awaiting relocation to agricultural zones. At the Santa Monica City Council meeting on Tuesday, Councilman Kevin McKeown hopes to win support for a study of whether to amend or repeal the old ordinance that prohibits beekeeping.

In 1998, Ann Philbin, director of the Drawing Center in New York, received a couple of letters from UCLA inviting her to apply for the top position at a fledgling museum near the university's campus. "I threw the letters in the garbage," she says. "I had never heard of UCLA at the Armand Hammer Museum of Art and Cultural Center." But at the urging of artist Lari Pittman, she agreed to check it out on her next trip to Los Angeles. "When I walked in, I had one of those eureka moments where I thought, 'Uh-oh, I know exactly what this should be,' " Philbin says.

In the romantic City of Light, the bees are downright busy. Common sense says it's better to keep hives of stinging insects in the countryside, away from city centers packed with people. Yet on storied rooftops and in public gardens in the urban jungle of Paris, the bee business is thriving. Bees are disappearing from fields across France and elsewhere in the world, victims of a loss of habitat as well as a mysterious factor variously attributed to disease, parasites and pesticides.

Kirk Anderson bought his first honeybees from a Montgomery Ward catalog in 1970. The 3-pound cage came in the mail, and as he opened it and fed the bees sugar water, his lifelong passion with Apis mellifera began. Nearly 40 years later, Anderson, 61, calls himself an urban beekeeper, and he cares passionately enough about bees that he does house-call rescues throughout Los Angeles County. Anderson gets 20 calls a week.

Beekeepers battling a mysterious ailment that led to the disappearance of millions of honeybees now fear the sting of imported Australian bees that could out-compete their hives and may be carrying a deadly parasite unseen in the U.S. The Department of Agriculture has allowed shipments of Australian bees to resume despite concerns by some of its scientists. Australia had been sending the insects across the Pacific for four years to replace hives devastated by the perplexing colony collapse disorder.

Beekeepers and biologists have long known of the phenomenon of "queenrightness." When the queen bee is home, the life of a honeybee colony is the picture of happy, efficient, cooperative living--the colony is queenright. But if a queen disappears from her hive, within as little as an hour there is growing tension among the workers. The disgruntled bees are less willing to work at their important tasks, including the collection of pollen and nectar. "When you take the queen away, bees get very agitated," said Mark Winston, head biologist on the honeybee queen research team at Simon Fraser University in British Columbia, Canada.

The dead bees under Dennis vanEngelsdorp's microscope were like none he had ever seen. He had expected to see mites or amoebas, perennial pests of bees. Instead, he found internal organs swollen with debris and strangely blackened. The bees' intestinal tracts were scarred, and their rectums were abnormally full of what appeared to be partly digested pollen. Dark marks on the sting glands were telltale signs of infection. "The more you looked, the more you found," said VanEngelsdorp, the acting apiarist for the state of Pennsylvania.

Third-generation beekeeper Roscoe Hall spent the last year fretting over a disease that has inexplicably caused thousands of his industrious insects to abandon their colonies. Now entire hives are disappearing too. In the long, flat valley where the nation's almonds grow, bee thieves are striking hard, nabbing increasingly valuable hives from farmers' fields where bees are used to pollinate blossoming nut trees. A few weeks ago, 180 of Hall's hives were lifted over a period of days, a bit of banditry he estimates cost him nearly $70,000 in lost bees, pollination fees and honey production.

If you believe Swedish singer Howlin' Pelle Almqvist, something's been missing from music the last few years -- his band, the Hives. "This might be the best we've ever been," the mike-tossing, eyeball-popping, amp-climbing frontman bragged to a capacity Wiltern crowd on Tuesday. Supreme rock 'n' roll confidence is part of this Scandinavian garage quintet's shtick.