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WELLNESS UNDER THE SWASTIKA
Vacationland for Hitler-Era Germans

Brochures and posters from before World War II give an eerie, uncanny glimpse of everyday life in Fascist Germany. Nazis, of course, didn't think of themselves as monsters.

Seaside idyll: A beach with wicker chairs, a dock stretching into the glimmering ocean, leisurely tourists relaxing in the sun. A swastika flutters over everything, on a flagpole. It's a photo from a brochure printed in 1941, meant to lure vacationers to the Baltic Sea coast.

Another brochure has a photo of Germans exercising in organized rows on the beach, and another photo of a woman aiming a bow and arrow into the sky. Westerland Beach, on the North Sea island of Sylt, 1937: "Beach games and athletic activities of all kinds -- in particular the old Teutonic art of archery -- will reawaken your joy of living."



This is how tourist brochures looked under Hitler. The Fascist era presented itself as a sunny, health-conscious new age. Thousands of Germans who had lived through a depression in the 1920s managed under Nazism to afford their first vacations, supported by a government leisure organization called Kraft durch Freude ("Strength Through Joy") as well as the economic upswing of the '30s. Most of these brochures were Kraft durch Freude propaganda. But Hasso Spode, professor and author of a tourism study ("Wie die Deutschen Reiseweltmeister wurden," or "How the Germans Conquered World Travel," published only in German) says they shaped at least one part of the contemporary German psyche: The cliché of Germans as globetrotting tourists "is a product of the Nazi era," even if its origins lie further back, he says.

The Hitler-era tourism boom lasted almost until 1939, when the war started. Kraft durch Freude functioned for a while as the world's largest tourist agency. Spode estimates that 43 million Germans went on state-sanctioned trips, spending millions of Reichsmarks in hotels, restaurants, mountain huts, lakes, and parks.

The propaganda tried to show Germans as well as the rest of the world what Fascist Germany had to offer: golf courses, auto shows, ski slopes, movie stars. "We have a great goal in mind," Josef Goebbels was quoted as saying in one brochure. "To make Germany a vacationland not just for our own people, but for the entire world."

And -- in spite of increasing worldwide skepticism about Hitler's regime -- foreign tourism increased in Germany until the Kristallnacht pogrom on November 9, 1938, caused the market to collapse.

After the war, the tone changed. A Berlin map from 1948 lists former tourist attractions and their condition: "Schloss Charlottenburg -- destroyed; Zoo Station -- under repair; Brandenburg Gate -- damaged," etc. Before and after pictures show how the war begun by Germany had converted its capital to ruins.
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Plastic bags are killing us
The most ubiquitous consumer item on Earth, the lowly plastic bag is an environmental scourge like none other, sapping the life out of our oceans and thwarting our attempts to recycle it.
By Katharine Mieszkowski
Aug. 10, 2007

On a foggy Tuesday morning, kids out of school for summer break are learning to sail on the waters of Lake Merritt. A great egret hunts for fish, while dozens of cormorants perch, drying their wings. But we're not here to bird-watch or go boating. Twice a week volunteers with the Lake Merritt Institute gather on these shores of the nation's oldest national wildlife refuge to fish trash out of the water, and one of their prime targets is plastic bags. Armed with gloves and nets with long handles, like the kind you'd use to fish leaves out of a backyard swimming pool, we take to the shores to seek our watery prey.

Dr. Richard Bailey, executive director of the institute, is most concerned about the bags that get waterlogged and sink to the bottom. "We have a lot of animals that live on the bottom: shrimp, shellfish, sponges," he says. "It's like you're eating at your dinner table and somebody comes along and throws a plastic tarp over your dinner table and you."

This morning, a turtle feeds serenely next to a half submerged Walgreens bag. The bag looks ghostly, ethereal even, floating, as if in some kind of purgatory suspended between its briefly useful past and its none-too-promising future. A bright blue bags floats just out of reach, while a duck cruises by. Here's a Ziploc bag, there a Safeway bag. In a couple of hours, I fish more than two dozen plastic bags out of the lake with my net, along with cigarette butts, candy wrappers and a soccer ball. As we work, numerous passersby on the popular trail that circles the urban lake shout their thanks, which is an undeniable boost. Yet I can't help being struck that our efforts represent a tiny drop in the ocean. If there's one thing we know about these plastic bags, it's that there are billions and billions more where they came from.

The plastic bag is an icon of convenience culture, by some estimates the single most ubiquitous consumer item on Earth, numbering in the trillions. They're made from petroleum or natural gas with all the attendant environmental impacts of harvesting fossil fuels. One recent study found that the inks and colorants used on some bags contain lead, a toxin. Every year, Americans throw away some 100 billion plastic bags after they've been used to transport a prescription home from the drugstore or a quart of milk from the grocery store. It's equivalent to dumping nearly 12 million barrels of oil.

Only 1 percent of plastic bags are recycled worldwide -- about 2 percent in the U.S. -- and the rest, when discarded, can persist for centuries. They can spend eternity in landfills, but that's not always the case. "They're so aerodynamic that even when they're properly disposed of in a trash can they can still blow away and become litter," says Mark Murray, executive director of Californians Against Waste. It's as litter that plastic bags have the most baleful effect. And we're not talking about your everyday eyesore.

Once aloft, stray bags cartwheel down city streets, alight in trees, billow from fences like flags, clog storm drains, wash into rivers and bays and even end up in the ocean, washed out to sea. Bits of plastic bags have been found in the nests of albatrosses in the remote Midway Islands. Floating bags can look all too much like tasty jellyfish to hungry marine critters. According to the Blue Ocean Society for Marine Conservation, more than a million birds and 100,000 marine mammals and sea turtles die every year from eating or getting entangled in plastic. The conservation group estimates that 50 percent of all marine litter is some form of plastic. There are 46,000 pieces of plastic litter floating in every square mile of ocean, according to the United Nations Environment Programme. In the Northern Pacific Gyre, a great vortex of ocean currents, there's now a swirling mass of plastic trash about 1,000 miles off the coast of California, which spans an area that's twice the size of Texas, including fragments of plastic bags. There's six times as much plastic as biomass, including plankton and jellyfish, in the gyre. "It's an endless stream of incessant plastic particles everywhere you look," says Dr. Marcus Eriksen, director of education and research for the Algalita Marine Research Foundation, which studies plastics in the marine environment. "Fifty or 60 years ago, there was no plastic out there."

Following the lead of countries like Ireland, Bangladesh, South Africa, Thailand and Taiwan, some U.S. cities are striking back against what they see as an expensive, wasteful and unnecessary mess. This year, San Francisco and Oakland outlawed the use of plastic bags in large grocery stores and pharmacies, permitting only paper bags with at least 40 percent recycled content or otherwise compostable bags. The bans have not taken effect yet, but already the city of Oakland is being sued by an association of plastic bag manufacturers calling itself the Coalition to Support Plastic Bag Recycling. Meanwhile, other communities across the country, including Santa Monica, Calif., New Haven, Conn., Annapolis, Md., and Portland, Ore., are considering taking drastic legislative action against the bags. In Ireland, a now 22-cent tax on plastic bags has slashed their use by more than 90 percent since 2002. In flood-prone Bangladesh, where plastic bags choked drainage systems, the bags have been banned since 2002.

The problem with plastic bags isn't just where they end up, it's that they never seem to end. "All the plastic that has been made is still around in smaller and smaller pieces," says Stephanie Barger, executive director of the Earth Resource Foundation, which has undertaken a Campaign Against the Plastic Plague. Plastic doesn't biodegrade. That means unless they've been incinerated -- a noxious proposition -- every plastic bag you've ever used in your entire life, including all those bags that the newspaper arrives in on your doorstep, even on cloudless days when there isn't a sliver of a chance of rain, still exists in some form, even fragmented bits, and will exist long after you're dead.



Grand efforts are under way to recycle plastic bags, but so far those efforts have resulted mostly in a mass of confusion. A tour of Recycle Central in San Francisco makes it easy to see why. The plant is a Willie Wonka factory of refuse. Located on a bay pier with a stunning view of the downtown skyline, some 700 tons of discarded annual reports, Rolling Rock bottles, Diet Coke cans, Amazon.com cardboard boxes, Tide plastic detergent bottles and StarKist tuna fish cans surge into this warehouse every weekday, dumped from trucks into a great clattering, shifting mound. The building tinkles and thumps with the sound of thousands of pounds of glass, aluminum, paper, plastic and cardboard knocking together, as all this detritus passes through a dizzying network of conveyor belts, spinning disks, magnets and gloved human hands to emerge as 16 different sorted, recyclable commodities, baled up by the ton to be shipped or trucked away and made into something new again. It's one way that the city of San Francisco manages to divert some 69 percent of its waste from landfills. But this city's vaunted recycling program, which is so advanced that it can collect coffee grounds and banana peels from urbanites' apartment kitchens and transform them into compost used to grow grapes in Napa Valley vineyards, simply cannot master the plastic bag.

Ask John Jurinek, the plant manager at Recycle Central, what's wrong with plastic bags and he has a one-word answer: "Everything." Plastic bags, of which San Franciscans use some 180 million per year, cannot be recycled here. Yet the hopeful arrow symbol emblazoned on the bags no doubt inspires lots of residents to toss their used ones into the blue recycling bin, feeling good that they've done the right thing. But that symbol on all kinds of plastic items by no means guarantees they can be recycled curbside. (The plastic bags collected at the recycling plant are trucked to the regular dump.) By chucking their plastic bags in the recycling, what those well-meaning San Franciscans have done is throw a plastic wrench into the city's grand recycling factory. If you want to recycle a plastic bag it's better to bring it back to the store where you got it.

As the great mass of recyclables moves past the initial sort deck on a series of spinning disks, stray plastic bags clog the machinery. It's such a problem that one machine is shut down while a worker wearing kneepads and armed with a knife spends an hour climbing precariously on the disks to cut the bags out, yielding a Medusa's hair-mass of wrenched and twisted plastic. In the middle of the night, when the vast sorting operation grinds to a halt to prepare for the next 700-ton day, two workers will spend hours at this dirty job.

Some states are attacking the recycling problem by trying to encourage shoppers to take the bags back to grocery stores. California requires large grocery stores and pharmacies that distribute the bags known in the trade as T-shirt bags -- those common polyethylene bags with two handles, usually made from petroleum or natural gas -- to take them back for recycling, and to print instructions on the bags to encourage shoppers to return them to the stores. San Francisco Environment Department spokesperson Mark Westlund, who can see plastic bags lodged in the trees on Market Street from his second-story office window, is skeptical about the state's ability to get shoppers to take back their bags. "We've had in store recycling in San Francisco for over 10 years, and it's never really been successful," says Westlund, who estimates that the city achieved only a 1 percent recycling rate of plastic bags at the stores. "People have to pack up the bags, bring them into the store and drop them off. I think you'd be more inclined to bring your own bag than do that."

Regardless, polyethylene plastic bags are recyclable, says Howie Fendley, a senior environmental chemist for MBDC, an ecological design firm. "It's a matter of getting the feedstock to the point where a recycler can economically justify taking those bags and recycling them. The problem is they're mostly air. There has to be a system in place where they get a nice big chunk of polyethylene that can be mechanically ground, melted and then re-extruded."

So far that system nationwide consists mainly of supermarkets and superstores like Wal-Mart voluntarily stockpiling the bags brought back in by conscientious shoppers, and selling them to recyclers or plastic brokers, who in turn sell them to recyclers. In the U.S., one company buys half of the used plastic bags available on the open market in the United States, using about 1.5 billion plastic bags per year. That's Trex, based in Winchester, Va., which makes composite decking out of the bags and recycled wood. It takes some 2,250 plastic bags to make a single 16-foot-long, 2-inch-by-6-inch plank. It might feel good to buy decking made out of something that otherwise could have choked a sea turtle, but not so fast. That use is not an example of true recycling, points out Carol Misseldine, sustainability coordinator for the city of Oakland. "We're not recycling plastic bags into plastic bags," she says. "They're being downcycled, meaning that they're being put into another product that itself can never be recycled."

Unlike a glass beer bottle or an aluminum can, it's unusual that a plastic bag is made back into another plastic bag, because it's typically more expensive than just making a new plastic bag. After all, the major appeal of plastic bags to stores is that they're much cheaper than paper. Plastic bags cost grocery stores under 2 cents per bag, while paper goes for 4 to 6 cents and compostable bags 9 to 14 cents. However, says Eriksen from the Algalita Marine Research Foundation, "The long-term cost of having these plastic bags blowing across our landscape, across our beaches and accumulating in the northern Pacific far outweighs the short-term loss to a few."

Of course, shoppers could just bring their own canvas bags, and avoid the debate altogether. The California bag recycling law also requires stores to sell reusable bags. Yet it will be a sad irony if outlawing the bags, as San Francisco and Oakland have, doesn't inspire shoppers to bring their own canvas bags, but simply sends them to paper bags, which come with their own environmental baggage. In fact, plastic bags were once thought to be an ecologically friendly alternative to cutting down trees to make paper ones. It takes 14 million trees to produce the 10 billion paper grocery bags used every year by Americans, according to the Natural Resources Defense Council. Yet suggesting that plastic bags made out of petroleum are a better choice burns up Barger from the Earth Resources Foundation. "People say, 'I'm using plastic. I'm saving trees,'" he says. "But have you ever seen what Shell, Mobil and Chevron are doing down in the rain forests to get oil?"

Gordon Bennett, an executive in the San Francisco Bay chapter of the Sierra Club, agrees. "The fundamental thing about trees is that if you manage them properly they're a renewable resource," he says. "I haven't heard about the oil guys growing more oil lately." Still, as the plastic bag industry never tires of pointing out, paper bags are heavier than plastic bags, so they take more fossil fuels to transport. Some life cycle assessments have put plastic bags out ahead of paper, when it comes to energy and waste in the manufacturing process. But paper bags with recycled content, like those soon to be required in San Francisco and Oakland, use less energy and produce less waste than those made from virgin paper.

The only salient answer to paper or plastic is neither. Bring a reusable canvas bag, says Darby Hoover, a senior resource specialist for the Natural Resources Defense Council. However, if you have to make a choice between the two, she recommends taking whichever bag you're more likely to reuse the most times, since, like many products, the production of plastic or paper bags has the biggest environmental impact, not the disposal of them. "Reusing is a better option because it avoids the purchase of another product."

Some stores, like IKEA, have started trying to get customers to bring their own bags by charging them 5 cents per plastic bag. The Swedish furniture company donates the proceeds from the bag sales to a conservation group. Another solution just might be fashion. Bringing your own bag -- or BYOB as Whole Foods dubs it -- is the latest eco-chic statement. When designer Anya Hindmarch's "I am not a plastic bag" bag hit stores in Taiwan, there was so much demand for the limited-edition bag that the riot police had to be called in to control a stampede, which sent 30 people to the hospital.
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Hitler’s ‘Desert Island Discs’ turn up in a dead Russian soldier’s attic
August 7, 2007
Roger Boyes in Berlin

Adolf Hitler, the most notorious champion of Richard Wagner and “racially pure” German music, banished Jewish and Russian musicians from the concert halls of the Third Reich — but apparently listened secretly to their work.



New light has been shed on the Nazi leader’s musical tastes by the discovery of what are said to be a hundred of his gramophone records found in the attic of a former Soviet intelligence officer, Lev Besymenski.

“There were classical recordings, performed by the best orchestras of Europe and Germany with the best soloists of the age,” Mr Besymenski said in a document explaining how the records came into his possession.

The 86-year-old, who helped to interrogate captured Nazi generals, died this summer. The document and the record collection have now been made available to Der Spiegel magazine.

“I was astonished that Russian musicians were among the collection,” Mr Besymenski wrote. Hitler dismissed Russians as ‘Untermenschen’, sub-humans, and was contemptuous of their contribution to world culture. Yet the records included works by Tchaikovsky, Borodin and Rachmaninov — scratched from frequent playing and all clearly labelled ‘Föhrerhauptquartier’, the Föhrer’s headquarters.”

The Soviet intelligence officer had found them in Hitler’s Chancellery in Berlin in May 1945, still packed in crates. Hitler’s staff were counting on an evacuation to the Nazi leader’s Alpine hideaway on the Obersalzberg and it was known that he could only relax with his music.

Mr Besymenski, then a captain in military intelligence, kept quiet about the records during his lifetime for fear that he would be accused of looting.

The most astonishing fact about the records — essentially Hitler’s “Best of . . .” collections — is the presence of Jewish performers. Among the recordings is a Tchaikovsky concerto performed by the virtuoso Polish Jewish violinist Bronislaw Huberman. Hitler would have been aware, while listening to Huberman’s playing, that he had founded the Palestine Orchestra in 1936 (which went on to be the foundation of today’s Israel Philharmonic Orchestra) and that he was living in enforced exile. The Austrian Jewish pianist Artur Schnabel, whose mother was killed by the Nazis, also had his work included in Hitler’s personal collection. It is not known which records in the collection were listened to most frequently, nor have they been formally catalogued.

“I’m not terribly surprised by Hitler’s record choices,” said James Kennaway, of Stanford University. “Nazi music policy was pretty incoherent. Stravinsky was played in the Third Reich because he was known to have right-wing views, Bartok because Hungary was a German ally.” Dr Kennaway, a leading musicologist who specialises in the Nazi period, added: “The only real point of consistency in Nazi policy was antiSemitism, so the Schnabel and Huberman recordings do stand out.”

Hitler had spelt out his view of Jewish culture in Mein Kampf. “There was never a Jewish art and there is none today,” he wrote, adding that the “two queens of the arts, architecture and music, gained nothing original from the Jews”.

Roger Moorhouse, a historian and the author of Killing Hitler, said that the record collection, if authentic, suggested a contradiction between the Föhrer’s aesthetic and political values. He said: “It is interesting that being Russian or Jewish did not disqualify a musician from a place in Hitler’s record collection. There was probably a separation in his world view between the political and the artistic.”

Although Hitler took piano lessons as a child, he displayed no personal musical talent. His surgeon, Hanskarl von Hasselbach, noted that “Hitler always whistled out of tune”.

His former radio operator, Rochus Misch, the last survivor of Hitler’s bunker, recently recalled how he had summoned his manservant to put on a record after a row with army commanders. “He just sat there, completely sunk in the music. The Föhrer needed distraction.”

Fuhrer’s favourites
Five discs that Hitler wanted to take with him
1 Piano sonatas, Opus 78 and 90, Beethoven
2 Wagner’s overture to The Flying Dutchman by the Bayreuth Orchestra, conducted by Heinz Tietjen
3 Russian arias, including the death in Boris Godunov, by Mussorgsky, sung by the Russian bass Fyodor Shalyapin
4 Tchaikovsky’s Violin Concerto, with the Berlin State Opera Orchestra, soloist Bronislaw Huberman
5 Mozart Piano Sonata No 8 in A minor with Artur Schnabel
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Are the Bees Dying off Because They're Too Busy?
By Susan Kuchinskas, East Bay Express
Posted on August 11, 2007

All across America, a mysterious disease is wiping out bee colonies. This malady causes all the bees in a hive to seemingly vanish overnight, abandoning their brood in the nursery, as well as their stores of honey and pollen. Other bees and pests, which normally plunder deserted honey, shun these hives. This baffling die-off dealt a financial blow to commercial beekeepers this season and raised fears of environmental and economic disaster. For farmers, no bees means no pollination.

But pollination is happening like mad in Leah Fortin's tiny yard in North Oakland, Calif. Busy little bee bodies cover the clumps of lavender, salvia and roses that line her driveway. More bees work the malaleucas on the parking strip, those trees with shaggy bark that look like giant Q-tips when they're in bloom.

A lot of these bees -- although surely not all -- come from the hive on Fortin's roof. The unobtrusive wooden box, barely 20 inches by 16, and 13 inches high, sits on the tar-and-gravel roof of her stucco bungalow, sheltered by the chimney. Honeybees bustle in and out of the narrow slit along the bottom, delivering bundles of pollen and droplets of nectar, then hurrying out again for more.

"The neighbors call us 'The Little House on the Prairie,'" Fortin said on a recent summer afternoon. "They think I'm a kook."

Fortin, who administers after-school programs, captured this wild swarm in early May, and so far it's thriving. "My book said to take two pieces of cardboard and scoop them into a five-gallon paint can, so that's what I did," she said. "I was scared shitless. I had no idea what I was doing." She covered the can with a net and drove home. "It worked, and there they are."

Fortin put out a small jar of honey to make the new colony feel at home; since then, she's done nothing except peek at them once in a while. "It doesn't matter what you know and what you don't know," she said. "The bees know what they're doing." And what they do is pollinate.

Honeybees aren't native to North America, so indigenous plants don't need them for pollination. If all the honeybees disappeared, we'd still have corn and wheat. But most of the imported fruit and vegetable species commonly thought of as quintessentially Californian -- almonds, grapes, plums, cucumbers, cantaloupe, asparagus -- need the help of bees to wed male pollen to female pistil. Without bees, there would be no apples, no cherries, no tomatoes, no zucchini. Even tofu would be scarcer -- soybeans depend partly on the honeybee for pollination.

Most of these crops are no longer pollinated by wild honeybees. Like many indigenous insects and plants, feral honeybees have been nearly wiped out by pesticides, loss of habitat and parasites like the varroa mite.

Meanwhile, commercial beekeeping has come to resemble other kinds of factory farming. While the bees themselves retain more freedom of movement than almost any other living creature raised by man, a commercial bee lot is more like a cattle feed lot than a wild meadow.

Beehives are crammed close together in rows just a few feet apart; in the wild, a square mile supports at the most three or four hives. A wild colony's diet is diverse, comprising pollen and nectar from myriad plants. To compensate for the lack of forage around bee lots, bees are typically fed high-fructose corn syrup, the same stuff that's contributing to a human health crisis. And just like other agricultural livestock, bees become stressed when you crowd them together. They're more susceptible to diseases and parasites, less able to function naturally.

It's all making some bee scientists wonder: Is the epidemic known as Colony Collapse Disorder real, or are the bees simply being worked to death?

Big beesness

If you want to put bees' value into dollars and cents, just look at California's almond industry. Almonds are the state's second-largest crop, with farmers raking in $2.34 billion in 2005. This year's yield, grown on 615,000 acres, is expected to be a record 1.310 billion pounds, up 18 percent from last year -- despite the dire statistics about Colony Collapse Disorder.

If you drive through the heart of California's agriculture industry, the Central Valley, watching the miles of orchards in bloom, they look natural. In fact, the California almond industry depends on a herculean human effort to subvert the natural order of things. In nature, most flowers don't get pollinated. But you don't get a billion-pound harvest by letting nature take its course. In the old days, an orchard owner might invite a beekeeper to keep hives on his land in a mutually beneficial arrangement. The agribusiness way is to rent hives for the two-week almond pollination season. This year, growers paid $150 per hive, placing three to five hives per acre.

Since 1999, beekeepers in the Pacific Northwest have earned four to five times more income from pollination than from the combined sales of honey and wax, according to a survey by Oregon State University.

But it was hairy out in the fields this year, as beekeepers from around the country raced to get their hives to California before they collapsed. Some growers found themselves renting empty hives.

Thousands of beekeepers had done the math and begun building up their stock. It's not uncommon for a commercial operation to run to 10,000 hives, trucking them from California to South Dakota to Florida in the course of a single year. One million hives, or nearly half of all the hives in the United States, were hauled into California this year, according to Randy Oliver, a beekeeper in Grass Valley, Calif., who has pollinated almonds for 25 years.

For a honeybee, the lucrative almond pollination season comes at the worst possible time. The natural lifecycle of a bee colony follows the seasons, with a hibernationlike rest period during the winter. Unfortunately for the bees, California almond trees bloom around Feb. 10, a miserably rainy time of year.

A colony may rear ten to 12 generations of bees in a year. The queen moves through the hive, laying eggs in combs toward the center of the nest. The eggs hatch in three days; the larvae are fed nectar by nurse bees until they emerge from their cells in 21 days to begin work in the hive. A few are male; they're called drones because they do nothing but hang around and eat, on call in case the queen dies and a new queen needs to mate. The females get to work, spending three weeks as house bees. They may feed the larvae, keep the hive clean, attend the queen or just fan their wings to cool the hive. Some act as sentries, attempting to chase away bears, skunks and robber bees from other hives. Then they go out to forage for another three weeks, completing their lifecycle. Elderly bees don't retire; they simply fly out one day and don't return.

As the days shorten and the sun dims, the hive produces its last generation of the year. These "winter bees" must survive the cold months and live long enough to raise the vigorous new brood that will bring back the spring pollen and begin the cycle again.

"Winter bees live for about six months," Oliver said. "Come spring, when the hives are moved to almonds, these same bees that survived the winter and raised the first brood then have to go out to forage. They can't do it." Instead of gathering the pollen, the exhausted bees drop dead outside the hive, Oliver surmises.

Eric Mussen, who specializes in beekeeping (an apiculturalist) for the University of California, Davis, thinks malnutrition could be another piece of the syndrome known as Colony Collapse Disorder -- the same kind of malnutrition afflicting Fast Food Nation.

Wild bees live on water, nectar, and pollen. Nectar provides the carbohydrates they use for energy and to make honey, while pollen is a rich mix of protein, fats, minerals, vitamins, and micronutrients. But just as human food can lose nutrients from overcooking, Mussen thinks adverse weather could produce tiny changes in pollen grains, resulting in one of the mysterious symptoms of Colony Collapse Disorder -- reports that the vanished bees leave behind combs rich with pollen. Too much chilling, as well as weather that's too hot and dry, can cause pollen to become sterile by killing its protoplasm. Perhaps, he speculates, bad weather destroyed some nutrients vital to the bees as well, making the pollen useless to their bodies.

The normal dearth of pollen in the fall, combined with the drought that swept the country last year, could have created a season's worth of undernourished bee colonies -- colonies too weak to stand up to the strain of life in the agrifactory.

"Perhaps bees in that malnourished state could have made it had they not been fed on by mites and viruses," Mussen says. Like humans, all bees carry viruses, but the immune systems of healthy bees usually keeps the viral load under control. "They haven't found a bee with less than two viruses. In some apparently healthy colonies, some bees had five to six different viruses. You can't blame the viruses, but if you have a weak bee, such things can overwhelm it."

Add this to the stress of days spent bumping over the interstates, and it wouldn't be surprising that colonies can't fight off the mites and viruses that plague them. A working bee's life has become as stressful as any human cube-dweller's. Colony Collapse Disorder, then, may be no more than the result of one too many things going wrong in a bad year, surmises bee broker Denise Qualls.

"Beekeepers, especially commercial beekeepers, have always lost 10 to 20 percent of their hives when they come out here for pollination," says Qualls, whose company, Pollination Connection, helps manage the annual rush of bees from all over the country that converge on California for the almond season. "Granted, the loss is higher, but -- you know, they used to just call it bad beekeeping. Now they have a name for it."

Buzz in the backyard

Qualls thinks inbred queens are another possible factor in collapsing colonies. The queen produces all the eggs to replace workers, and she secretes pheromones that keep the hive humming. The conventional wisdom is to purchase queens bred to be gentle and good honey producers; some beekeepers replace the queen each year, because a younger queen is supposed to be healthier. "But they keep coming from the same stock," Qualls points out, so any vulnerabilities may get reinforced.

Think of all the hereditary ailments that afflict purebred dogs, and compare that with the health of your basic mutt. Maybe these queens have become the poodles of the insect world. During last year's pollination rush, Qualls says, a significant number of queens died: "They just weren't strong enough."

Maybe that's what happened to Peter Scholz. For several years, he bought a starter package -- a queen and three pounds of bees -- and carefully placed them in the hive that sits on a four-foot-square perch under a tree in the backyard of his two-story Oakland Edwardian. All through the summer, they worked the flowers. But every winter, the colony dwindled away -- or, you could say, collapsed.

Scholz gave up, but left the hive in place. Two springs ago, a feral swarm moved in. This colony is thriving, and he expects to get 50 pounds of honey this year. "It makes sense in a Darwinian way that the hives that flourish locally and swarm are the ones you want to adopt," he says.

It's a method that's worked for commercial beekeeper Steve Gentry for nearly 30 years. He keeps around a hundred hives scattered in 14 locations from here to Santa Cruz; in winter, he takes them all to the Santa Cruz Mountains to get fat on the manzanita bloom. Every colony originated from a wild swarm.

"All my hives are survivor stock," he says, ones that have managed to fight off varroa and tracheal mites, two parasites that began infecting American colonies in the 1990s. "It's survival of the fittest. If my bees swarm, there's some vitality there. Beekeepers say they don't have time for swarms. But when they don't have any bees, they'll have time."

Living among the bees

Swarming is the natural process by which a colony reproduces itself. Capturing swarms is a popular pastime for backyard beekeepers -- and it may provide insurance against whatever disasters are befalling commercial operators. A colony has to be strong, healthy and able to fight off disease in order to expend precious resources in swarming. The swarm is a group of hardy pioneers led by a queen who has proven herself through breeding and, perhaps, in combat with another queen.

In the spring, while the hive is buzzing with newborn bees and the combs drip with honey, the colony produces a second queen. The old queen flies out with a batch of drones to mate, and then takes off with a thousand or so workers to find a new home. The swarm pauses to rest and feed, gathering en masse on a tree limb or wall, while scouts look around for an attractive site. They may stay for a day or two and then move on if they don't find a good spot.

So, when Leah Fortin gets another swarm call on a hot June weekend, she throws her gear in her truck and, with neighbor and fellow beekeeper Peter Scholz, goes after it. But this mass of bees on a clump of lilies in the front yard of a house near Grizzly Peak is no longer a swarm; it's begun to set up housekeeping on several fronds of the plant. They must have been desperate; worker bees in a swarm have only three weeks to establish a new colony, lay down comb, and let the queen begin to lay eggs before they die. When it gets close to their time, they'll build comb on just about anything. But there's no way this nascent colony could have survived the winter's cold and wind.

Fortin uses a special smoker to calm the bees -- this is a standard practice, although no one knows exactly why it works. She grasps the bundle of leaves clotted with wax and snips them off. Now she has a bee bouquet. She gently places it in a five-gallon bucket.

Back at Scholz's house, it takes only minutes to put the bees into their new home. A standard beehive consists of a wooden box with a separate bottom and a lid that rests on top. Inside the box, nine or ten wooden frames hang from a ledge, like folders in a file cabinet. Each frame holds a sheet of foundation on which the bees will build their hexagonal chambers to hold eggs, developing larvae, pollen and honey.

Bees generally fly as far as four miles in search of food, but they do best when they don't have to venture more than half a mile. Pickings should be good in this heavily planted neighborhood, even though there are at least three other tame hives and one wild colony nearby.

While Fortin's North Oakland neighborhood is teeming with bees, others may have none.

The yield from Bill Smith's home orchard in the Alameda County town of Hayward, Calif., doubled after he installed his first hive five years ago. It all started with the 4-H Club. Another member had a hive near horse stables and mischievous boys, a bad combination. Smith agreed to take them: "I noticed that the following year, we got a much better fruit set around here. We really were starving for bees."

Smith claims he keeps bees only for pollination. But now there are the ten hives piled on a small trailer in a corner of his hilltop half-acre, plus a tottering stack of empty hive boxes waiting for new colonies. He is president of the Alameda County Beekeepers Association, and he's stockpiling honey to make mead. It's a sure case of bee fever.

The engineer lives with his family in a century-old house on a former chicken ranch. You can see the successive waves of development. A few two-acre pastures still dot the hill, surrounded by 1950s ranch houses. Lately, some of those pastures have been replaced by stucco mini-mansions that fill almost the entire lot.

"Don't tell the neighbors I'm here," Smith says. "They don't know." The row of yards bordering his are downhill enough that the honeysuckle-covered fence between them completely obscures their view. To the north, the hives are shielded by a thick cedar tree, and the house and garage obscure the view from the street and the south side.

Like Fortin, Smith is a laid-back beekeeper. "I hardly ever work the bees," he says. "Bees know how to take care of themselves. You give them a place to live, and they go crazy on their own."

Indeed, bees follow an internal timetable that's been bred into them through eons. Home beekeepers know that the less you try to do for the bees, the healthier they'll be. Is it some pheromone the bees put out that places you in their thrall? Or just that they're so fascinating, so soothing to watch? In any case, Smith is far from the first person to find that one hive leads to another.

"I hear about a good deal, or someone calls me up and says, 'I just captured some bees, and I have nowhere to put them.' I guess I'm just greedy," he says.

Back to nature

Although Steve Gentry says bees are a sideline for him, it's a pretty robust sideline. Gentry sells 3,000 to 4,000 pounds of Steve's Bees-branded honey every year at gourmet groceries and natural-foods stores, all small-run varietals. Right now, he's featuring chamise honey, made from the nectar of the tough, white-flowered chaparral bush. He has another lucrative business removing hives from inside the walls of homes.

While commercial beekeeping has become a high-labor, low-margin line of work, in the backyard it can be as natural and laissez-faire as you please. If you get a couple of quarts of honey, it's all good. But there is a middle ground, and people like Gentry are moving there. They're taking some tips from the Slow Food movement, offering high-quality, locally produced products at premium prices.

Marshall's Farm Honey, based in American Canyon in Napa County, is credited with being among the first companies to take honey upscale. Spencer and Helene Marshall have taken their cues from the winemakers of Sonoma County, offering small batches of varietal honey at farmers' markets. They scatter a few hives at choice locations throughout the Bay Area and isolate batches produced by the sequential wildflower and tree blooms. They encourage consumers to appreciate the "special flavor nuances and wonderful color variations" that result. The Marshalls even offer Hood Honey, described as a middle-range amber village mix, harvested from Oakland's neighborhoods.

Honey is just one product of those highly productive bees; the pollen and wax they produce are valuable, too. Exploiting them -- making use of everything possible -- is another lesson from boutique farmers.

For instance, you'd never know it from Judy Casale's house in an upscale subdivision in Castro Valley in California's Alameda County, but she whips up batches of lip balm, soap, lotion, candles and specialty honeys in her Tuscan-style kitchen. There's even one hive in her lushly landscaped backyard; her remaining stock of 34 hives is dispersed on private property throughout the Alameda County areas of Livermore and Castro Valley.

Like a lot of beekeepers, Casale got interested by chance ten years ago, after a presentation at a meeting of the California Rare Fruit Growers. "I liked the idea of backyard honey and pollination," she recalls. "I wasn't crazy about handling bees, but I got over it. The first time I poured a container of bees into a hive was pretty scary." She still completely suits up when she works the bees in her backyard, a colony with a cranky temperament.

She branched out from selling honey seven years ago. "There are only so many candles you can make, use, and sell, and I was looking for something more creative," she says. Today, her Dominique skincare line is a thriving operation that's transitioning from a hobby to a sideline business. Casale has landed accounts at several Los Angeles spas and is looking for more in the Bay Area. Her latest concoction is mojito-flavored lip balm.

Randy Oliver, the Grass Valley beekeeper, is another who looks beyond honey and wax. In fact, he looks to exploit every niche he can find. In addition to managing and renting 500 hives, he raises and sells queens and starter colonies in the spring. He teaches apiculture to bee clubs and schools, and he writes articles for journals. He's even getting into Web media, charging a small subscription fee for his website content.

Oliver wants to help commercial beekeepers get off the slippery slope of using more and more chemicals that have less and less of an effect. His 500 hives are small-time by commercial standards, but enough to prove the effectiveness of a more natural approach. He aims to be a bridge between agribusiness bees and the backyard.

Big operations have become monocultures, making more money from pollination than from honey -- and sometimes even killing off bees at the end of the season. Instead, Oliver advocates integrated pest-management strategies that keep mite populations down to reasonable levels without pesticides. At the same time, he acknowledges the professional's need to automate and minimize labor.

For example, dusting bees with powdered sugar causes varroa mites to fall off them. If you also replace the solid bottom of the hive with a screened bottom, the mites fall all the way out and have trouble crawling back in. But sprinkling powdered sugar is a lot slower than fumigating a hive, so Oliver invented a brush/cup combo that lets a beekeeper powder down a hive in just 15 seconds.

"Beekeepers, like most agriculturists, are pretty conservative and not willing to risk their operations by trying something out," he says. "They want to see other beekeepers doing something successfully and making money doing it. If they see people making money, they'll change."
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