Larry Brown and the Story of the Bees
Sunday, December 12, 2021 at 06:57PM Larry Brown headed up the welcoming committee for the VIP Pan Am flight one arriving early one morning at Palam airport, to greet a delegation of bees visiting India on a special mission. Presumably a part of south India will soon be known as the "Land of Milk and Honey".
One's senior year in college is when you get to take some electives. One elective I took was Beekeeping. The professor (Bill Wilson) was excellent and the subject was intriguing. I really got into it. I remember the professor saying that one of his dreams was to import some American bees to India. The reason was simple. The primary species used for honey production in India is Apis indica. It is a smallish skittery bee that does not produce very much honey. The American bee (Apis mellifera) produces about 10 times as much honey and is much more easily domesticated.
I was so interested in bees I got some hives and went into production myself. It was fun and I learned a lot more. Then, upon graduating college in 1962, low and behold, I was accepted to go to India in the Peace Corps and my job was to be Beekeeping extension and research.
During training, individuals' exact jobs/assignments were kept secret - I guess because things were in a state of flux so they didn't want someone to get excited about an assignment, then have that assignment fall through the cracks. So, no one was told exactly what their job might be in India, not even "the beekeeper". But, for some reason "the beekeeper" was often used as the example when discussing whatever about our assignments. Well, I was the only one in the group that knew very much about bees so it was pretty much a foregone conclusion that I was "the beekeeper" they kept referring to.
Once in India, I remembered the professor's dream to import bees to India. And, after becoming acquainted with the Indian bees I agreed with him that the American bee might do lots better. So I started feeling people out on the possibility of bringing some American bees over to see how they might do.
My Indian counterpart was a government beekeeper. He had three assistants spread out across Coorg (in Mysore State South India which is now called Karnataka State) all working in beekeeping extension. When I felt out these people on the possibility of bringing some bees over from America I was met with a flat "no", it would not be allowed. Why? Because American honey bees have more diseases than Indian bees. I felt like we could get around that concern quite safely.
So, I slowly began feeling out more people and spreading the word by speaking of the proposal at conferences, etc. Every step of the way I was met with a flat no, it is too risky - until finally, after a full year of talking about it, someone suggested I approach a man named Dr. Sadar Singh. He had a Ph.D. in Entomology from Cornell and was a forward thinker. He was in government service at the time. I cannot recall his specific title, but he was very high up in Federal Government in New Delhi. He was something akin to our Secretary of Agriculture in the US - or maybe the Deputy Secretary. I somehow got to Delhi, found him speaking at some conference, and approached him with the idea. He said he thought it was a great idea and would support it all the way - but, to be safe, I could not take the bees to South India. I had to take the bees to the Kullu Valley, up in the Himalayas. The reasoning for that is that the Kullu Valley is isolated biologically and any spread of disease (should that happen) could be controlled more easily.
Luckily, Tom Arens and Roger Banks were living and working in Kullu. They were living in one room so I tried to find another place to live. There wasn't another place available so we hired a man to build us a 3-tiered bunk bed. We did pretty well I thought.
I needed money to pay for this venture so I met with the Ford Foundation and with USAID. Ford said they would give some money and the AID folks said they could come up with some PL-480 money. It was not an expensive proposition. I cannot remember the total cost. It might have been around $2,000.
I don't remember how, but someway I had come up with the perfect place to get the bees - Whitcomb Apiaries, Davis, CA. Harry Whitcomb produced certified disease-free bees and would send them anywhere. Harry was responsible for the first leg of the journey - he took them from Davis to San Francisco and put them on PanAm 1 (one of PanAm's daily flights around the world). The flight to New Delhi was the second leg. I had to meet them at the airport in New Delhi, get them through customs, then get them to the Kullu Valley, then get them from the Kullu airport to Patlikuhl.
Bees are sold by the pound and shipped in what are called packages. A package typically contains 3 lbs. of bees (10,500 worker bees and one queen). Basically, a package is a wooden box with wood on 4 sides and window screen on 2 sides. Packages are commonly shipped through the mail quite successfully. I ordered 10 packages. With Terry Heipp's support and help, we met them at the Delhi airport at about 3 am. Terry, bless her heart, was always up for such shenanigans. Another couple of people went with us but I can't remember who. (If anyone reading this went with Terry and me to pick up the bees - write me - I'd love to be reminded of it.)
You will recall that June in India is hot. And, the word hot does not do it justice. Three am in June in New Delhi is like an oven and 3 pm is oppressive - mad dogs and Englishmen only - and bees are extremely sensitive to heat. The bees would have succumbed to the heat if left unattended for as little as 20 or 30 minutes. This was a significant concern so Dr. Singh sent a man to the airport with me to get the bees through customs expeditiously. Whatever authorities Dr. Singh had provided were very compelling. We got the bees through Customs about as quick as we could walk through the office. It was wonderful.
The next leg of the journey was to get the bees from New Delhi to Kullu but that plane didn't leave for a few hours so we loaded the bees into Terry's air-conditioned Peace Corps van and took them to the air-conditioned Peace Corps office. Then, about 10 am, when it was much hotter, we went back to the airport and loaded the bees on a DC-3 to Kullu. I reserved seats for both the bees and me and I sat next to them with a supply of cold water. When the bees started showing signs of heat stress I would squirt water through the screens on the packages to cool them off. It worked like a charm. Out of 100,000 + bees, we hardly lost a bee - and they had traveled halfway around the world.
I had accounted for every leg and every contingency except one - the last leg of the journey. I had not arranged transportation from the Kullu airport to Tom and Roger's place in Patlikuhl - maybe 10 miles. The bus would have been the last resort, but luckily someone on the flight was being met by friends with a jeep. They were kind enough to give me and the bees a ride to Patlikuhl. Tom was great. I had not had time to finish preparing all the hives for the bees. He had finished them and had them ready for the grand introduction.
I don't remember making all the arrangements being terribly difficult. However, looking back now I can't imagine how anyone arranged things like that without the help of telephones. Telephones just didn't work well in India in those days. So I was doing this mostly by mail from the small village of Patlicuhl - ordering bees from California, coordinating the flights, getting Customs clearance from Dr. Singh, meeting the plane with the government man, obtaining money from both the Ford Foundation and PL-480, actually making the payments for the bees and the flights, reserving seats on the DC-3, etc., etc. As far as I can remember I used a telephone only one time in the 20 months we spent in India and it wasn't for this.
Whitcomb Apiaries also included some extra queens in the shipment so I did some experimentation with them too. I killed the queens in two or three Indian colonies and introduced an American queen to see if I could transform an Indian colony into an American colony that way. The American queens were accepted by the Indian bees, but the experiment didn't work. Indian bees are smaller than American bees. Hence, the honeycomb cells in the Indian colony are smaller than the cells in an American colony. The American queen was physically too big to get her abdomen down to the bottom of the cell to properly lay an egg. Without progeny, the colony dies.
Did the American bees produce 10 times as much honey as Indian bees as anticipated? No. They started off like gang busters but the heavy rains during mid-summer monsoon season set them back significantly. As far as I know, they survived and did well but not as well as hoped. I lost track of them soon after we left India.
A few Apis mellifera queens had been imported successfully through the years for experimentation but I was told later that no one had ever before successfully imported full colonies of bees - and - it had been tried, I think someone said, some 26 times. I was just too ignorant (ignorance is bliss) to know better and succeeded
It was an interesting experiment. It could have been a Ph.D. thesis. I always intended to publish it. I had written monthly reports for the government, but my carbon copies were lost when someone broke into our house and stole the safe (the entire safe) we kept all the valuables in. So, the experiment was never published.
Bees don't need much tending during the winter so I got out of Tom and Roger's hair and returned to Coorg to continue whatever it was I was doing down there for the last couple of months of our tour. I lived with John Paul and Dave Sanshuck - my fourth home in India. They had a nice house in the middle of an orange orchard with plenty of room and a great cook named Sylvestor (except when he drank too much). It was great.
LB (11/3/2021)
