BEEWARE : The sweet life is becoming a memory as beekeepers get stung by predatory insects and recurring drought.

It wasn’t very long ago that Ventura County was known as a paradise for bees and beekeepers.

Honey was plentiful, like the water that ran in county rivers. Purple sage and black sage--favorite pollen sources for honeybees--covered hillsides from the Pacific to the county’s inland borders.

But no longer. A combination of natural and man-made factors is making life increasingly difficult for the county’s commercial beekeepers and for those who keep bees as a hobby. Predatory mites, the ongoing drought and the northward migration of the feared (and misunderstood) Africanized bee are among the elements that have come together during the last few years to threaten the once-thriving industry.

And if all this weren’t enough, the recent record-breaking cold snap that damaged citrus crops and killed pollen-rich flowers may have dealt a devastating blow to bee populations. The full extent of the damage won’t be known for some weeks, but local beekeepers are bracing for the worst.

The current crises would be unfortunate if their sole effect were to imperil a small industry with deep roots and a rich tradition in Ventura County, but the problem is much more serious than that. It goes to the very heart of the county’s agricultural economy, a large part of which depends on a plentiful supply of honeybees for crop pollination.

Although there are no definitive figures available on the number of beekeepers in Ventura County, local agricultural officials estimate that there are between 10 and 15 commercial keepers. These are people who make their livings exclusively from bees--they sell honey and wax and provide farmers with bees to pollinate their crops.

But in Ventura County, as in the state and the nation as a whole, part-time and hobby beekeepers are more common than commercial keepers. If the state mirrors national trends, there are between 1,200 and 2,000 part-timers and hobbyists in the county. They too are having hard times. But it is the commercial beekeeper who is suffering the most.

“When I got into this business 12 years ago, it was the kind of situation where you couldn’t do anything wrong,” said Red Bennett, who raises bees and packages his own honey in Piru Canyon. “Now it’s a situation where it’s nearly impossible to do anything right.”

Don Schram has been a full-time commercial beekeeper--first in Oxnard, then near Fillmore--since 1978, when he left a factory job in Camarillo. Schram has 144 hives at a Saticoy avocado farm. About 90% of all crop pollination in this country is done by honeybees, and Schram’s bees are being kept at the avocado farm in the event of an off-season avocado bloom--and also to feed on the nearby blue-gum eucalyptus. There’s little else for them to eat, now that the drought has left the nearby hills brown and sage-less.

“Most people who go into this business have some sort of childhood connection to it,” Schram said. “I had a granddaddy who kept bees back in Alberta, Canada, where I grew up. I loved working with them, and I loved the smell of the wax and the honey.” Today, he said, people are so far away from the reality of farm life that many don’t even know where honey comes from. “The connection is lost,” he said.

Schram’s own connection remains strong, however, despite increasing pressures on the industry. On his business card, below his name, are the words Honey Bees--Angels of Agriculture. Unfortunately, his little angels are in serious trouble. “Yeah,” he said, “it’s all hit the fan at once.”

Actually, the trouble has been brewing for a long time. One of the problems now facing California beekeepers had its roots in England in the 1920s, when large numbers of bees began dying mysteriously on the Isle of Wight, just off England’s south coast. When a canny entomologist decided to dissect some dead bees, he found the culprit: a microscopic mite that makes its home in the bee’s windpipe. The critter was dubbed Acarapis woodi , and became more commonly known as the tracheal mite.

Quickly responding to the problem, the U.S. government passed a law in 1922 prohibiting the importation of bees into the country. It was effective for more than six decades. Then, in 1984, tracheal mites began to show up in Florida, and in 1987 they made it to California.

“There have always been reports that somebody’s uncle or cousin from somewhere has been sending bees in,” said Eric Mussen, extension agriculturist at UC Davis. Mussen says that so many beekeepers migrate to find irrigated fields--both to feed their bees and to collect pollination fees--that the proliferation of predators cannot be stopped.

Whatever route the tracheal mite took to Ventura County, it nearly ruined local beekeepers. Some lost as many as half their hives in 1987, and lots of hobbyists decided to give it up. “It turned out that the tracheal mite was significantly more devastating to our bees than a lot of people had thought,” Mussen said.

Today, many beekeepers treat their hives with menthol to prevent the development of tracheal mites. But treatment is expensive and the tracheal mite is no longer the only predator to worry about. Last spring, a mite about the size of a dog flea called Varroa jacobseni appeared in Ventura County. A native of Asia that made its way west from Florida, it kills more slowly than the tracheal mite, taking up to three years to destroy a hive.

Because Varroa mites are new to Southern California, no local beekeepers have yet lost hives to the infestation. “It will happen, though, if they’re not treated,” Mussen said. Unfortunately, the one legal treatment, Mussen explained, is expensive.

“The problem is that even in good honey-making times, beekeepers’ profit margins weren’t particularly super, but it was an OK business,” Mussen said. “Now when you superimpose a buck or a buck-and-a-half a colony for tracheal mite control, then maybe four or five dollars a hive for Varroa control, you’re adding a cost you never had before, and you’ve never made that much money in the first place.”

For 10 years Don Schram’s bee business was a family affair, an enterprise he shared with his son Randy. But recently Schram suggested that Randy find another line of work. “I told him that there’s not enough in it to make it worthwhile,” he said.

County agricultural statistics--although sketchy since budget cutbacks eliminated the job of county bee inspector--show the economic decline. Since 1986, annual gross receipts for honey, beeswax and pollination have crested and dipped, starting at $1,047,000 in 1986 and finishing in 1989 at $875,000. Projections for 1990 look even lower.

It may be easy to dismiss an industry that yields less than $1 million a year as only marginally significant, especially in a county where avocados alone bring in nearly $50 million. But that overlooks the fact that avocados depend on honeybees for pollination. On the national level, crops that need honeybees to produce are valued at about $9 billion annually. For every dollar’s worth of honey sold by beekeepers in this country, U.S. farmers benefit by $143.

“Honeybees are extremely valuable to every one of us who eat,” said John Thomas, an extension entomologist at Texas A&M; University. “That’s the real value of bees. We could do without beekeepers if the only benefit was honey.”

The downturn in the fortunes of local beekeepers is particularly poignant in Piru Canyon, where Ventura County beekeeping has its deepest roots and most colorful history. Mussen of UC Davis said, “Ventura County used to be the prime sage-producing area in the world, and Piru Canyon was known far and wide as the most beautiful honey-producing region, bar none. I mean, that was it .”

Red Bennett keeps about 1,500 colonies of honeybees in Piru Canyon. In a state where 75% of commercial beekeepers’ income comes from pollination, Bennett’s operation is a rarity in that most of his income is derived from honey production. In good years, that hasn’t been a problem because black sage was so widely available in the hills near his home.

In these drought-stricken times, however, Bennett has to truck his bees all the way to the clover fields of North Dakota each summer to find enough food to make a honey crop. It’s an expensive proposition that Bennett would avoid if it weren’t absolutely essential. “Under the conditions we’re working right now, we’re just barely able to survive,” he said. “The last three years we’ve managed to break even, but this year is going to be a negative. It wouldn’t take too much more to put us out of business.”

“We’re actually getting less for our honey now than we were five years ago,” Bennett said. “Between the price of honey, the mites and the drought, we’re having a very difficult time.”

George Lechler remembers when local beekeepers had anything but a difficult time. The 89-year-old Lechler, whom Schram refers to as “the horse’s mouth” when it comes to local beekeeping history, got his first beehive in 1909 at the age of 7. He still keeps 300 hives as a hobby.

Lechler’s family goes back in the Piru Canyon area to 1879, when his grandfather started keeping bees that he received in payment for a debt. Eventually he was shipping honey to France and Germany. The Lechlers have been in the bee business in Ventura County ever since.

In 1952, George Lechler owned 2,200 hives from which he extracted 349 tons of honey, or a little over 300 pounds per hive. That’s six times the current statewide average. But back then, sage bloomed everywhere, thriving in the aftermath of the frequent fires that burned through the area. There was also plenty of water.

“I’ve seen three dry years before--’49, ’50 and ‘51--and my dad saw three real bad ones too,” Lechler said. “But this is the first time that I’ve seen four.”

Another problem he has yet to encounter is the Africanized honeybee, the distant relative of the domesticated European honeybee. For more than 30 years, the Africanized bee has been moving north from Brazil as it seeks new habitat and plentiful sources of food. Its manner is aggressive enough that the media has taken to calling it the “killer bee,” a term beekeepers find inappropriate.

Reaching down, gloveless, to grab a handful of his bees from a hive, Don Schram described the Africanized bees’ most infamous characteristic.

“The thing about them is that once they become defensive, they become offensive,” Schram said. “They get alarmed much faster and more of them will go on the chase and they’ll go for a much longer distance than European honeybees will.”

John Thomas of Texas A&M; is an expert on the Africanized bee, some of which he examined firsthand on Oct. 15, when a swarm was found in one of the 500 traps strung along the Texas-Mexico border. According to Thomas, the Africanized bee is the original wild parent of the European honeybee, which was brought from North Africa to Europe hundreds of years ago and then selectively bred through the centuries for gentleness and maximum honey production. He compares the process to the domestication of any farm animal, which, after countless generations of breeding, bears little resemblance to its wild ancestors.

“The things you see in it are exactly the traits and behaviors you would expect to find in a wild animal that has to depend on itself for survival, “ Thomas said. “So the meanness is to protect it from its enemies, man being a primary enemy.”

Hence the multiple stingings, reports of which have terrified people living in the bees’ path.

Although Thomas said the swarm found in Texas in October was an aberration, with the vanguard still several hundred miles south in Mexico, he said it’s just a matter of time before the bees cross the border in force. Most experts put their estimated time of arrival in Southern California at three to four years.

When that happens, the challenge for the beekeeping industry will be to maintain its domesticated stock in spite of the intruders. That will require constant--and expensive--vigilance by beekeepers who will have to make sure their European queen bees are not replaced by Africanized queens. It’s really just a continuation of the type of selection that has gone on for centuries, Thomas said, only on a more aggressive level.

Removal of Africanized queen bees from beekeepers’ hives and replacement with European queens is a technique that has been used successfully in Argentina, Venezuela and Brazil to fend off the invaders, Thomas said. “The journals contain lots of stories from those places on how people have survived the Africanized bee.”

For America’s commercial beekeepers to survive the arrival of the Africanized bee, they will also have to develop some public relations savvy, as an increasingly panicked--and often ignorant--public starts to view their profession with suspicion. While beekeepers are generally confident about their ability to preserve the integrity of their stock and aren’t overly worried about the danger of working around Africanized bees, there is concern about public hysteria.

“The reaction on the part of many city councils in Texas was to ban honeybees within the city limits,” Thomas said, a policy he doesn’t agree with. “You eliminate your human resource that understands and can work with the bees and doesn’t fear them. Also, by banning bees, you eliminate all the competition for food within the city, leaving it all for the Africanized bee.”

Mussen sees the arrival of the Africanized bee as a likely death knell for hobby beekeeping. “Hobbyists are already quitting because it’s no longer fun,” he said, “and hobby beekeeping will sort of disappear once the Africanized bee shows up in any significant numbers.”

One Ventura County resident who is undaunted by the prospect of aggressive bees is 13-year-old Timothy McGuire of Camarillo, who recently became the first California resident to win the American Beekeeping Federation’s 4-H essay contest.

“I was amazed,” Schram said. “You start to worry about the future of this business, and then this kid appears, right here in our back yard.”

McGuire’s essay, “The Relationship Between Honeybees and Man Through the Ages,” documents the relationship between bees and humans, from cave drawings to the space age.

It concludes: “Man has taken the honeybee from the open spaces of the world to outer space via the Space Shuttle. What can be next?”

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