A rare cross-sectional glimpse of natural honeycomb construction. (Photo by Max Westby.)

In 2009, lifelong beekeeper Dan Harvey faced an existential crisis when he lost 
much of his honeybee stock to colony collapse disorder (CCD). So the former Vietnam-era Special Forces veteran did what came naturally: He took to the deep dark woods of the Pacific Northwest, searching for answers to his predicament.

Harvey began by hunting for wild and feral bees living near his home in Port Angeles, Wash. (These bees have escaped from commercial colonies and find refuge in the tall timber and glens enveloping the Olympic Peninsula). For years, he crossbred the feral bees he captured with honeybees in order to produce hybridized hives that would be well-suited to the dank climes of the temperate rainforest region.

Then one day Harvey discovered an isolated
 hive full of bees he claims are highly resistant to Nosema ceranae, a pathogen and debilitating fungus considered one of the many threats related to CCD.

“The fungus would lodge in their gut, making the digestion of pollen impossible, leading to die-offs,” Harvey explains. But since he’s introduced the wild bees, his colonies have been on the rebound — no small feat in today’s bee climate. Now, three years after the initial crossbreeding took place, the offspring are proving themselves to be survivors.

At a time when honeybee populations are dwindling, and bees continue to abandon doomed hives, and the link to agricultural pesticides is stronger than ever, news of these disease-resistant bees has resulted in local and national media coverage.

According to the Department of Agriculture, CCD has accounted, at least in part, 
for 30 percent of bee losses annually, since 2007. It’s also jeopardizing beekeepers, rural economies, and the farm communities that depend on those bees. Worldwide honeybees pollinate 400 crops, while adding an estimated $15 billion in revenues per year to the U.S. farm economy.

Despite their pastoral image, the burden placed on the domesticated honeybees is a weighty one. Bred for their non-aggressive demeanor and ample honey production, they’re also expected to help propagate tens upon of thousands of acres of flower-pollinated crops on farms throughout the U.S. and Europe.

As scientists and beekeepers have been literally and figuratively
 beating the bushes to understand CCD, they’ve often turned to the
 role genetic diversity plays in the overall health of bee colonies. And recent research published in the peer-reviewed science journal PLoS ONE suggests honeybees are as adverse to monogamy as they are to monocrops.
 In fact, mixing it up, so to speak, can yield unexpected and surprising benefits for honeybee populations. Honeybees — whether feral or domesticated — need variety. Not only do worker bees spend their waking hours hopping from plant to plant, but some queen bees are also promiscuous, mating with multiple males in a brief period of time. And, as it turns out, there’s a biological rationale for this promiscuity; the overall fitness of the hive depends upon these multiple partners.

“Most bees, ants, and wasps mate singly. Honeybee queens are different 
in that regard — producing highly productive hives that dominate their landscape,” says Heather Mattila, a researcher at Wellesley College.

In the study published in PLoS ONE, Mattila and her co-author Irene Newton found that bees — like humans and other species — depend on helpful bacteria to aid in digestion. And the genetically diverse bee colonies they studied had a significantly greater number of probiotic species living in their guts than the more uniform hives. Moreover, the uniform beehives were 127 percent more likely to contain harmful pathogens than their more diverse counterparts.

“We’ve never known how genetic diversity leads to healthier bees, but this 
study provides strong clues,” says Matilla.

Unfortunately, most honeybee hives are of the uniform type. Early settlers brought just one subspecies known as the “dark bee,” Apis mellifera mellifera, with them from northern Europe to the Jamestown colony. It remained the only honeybee in the U. S. until the introduction of the Italian honeybee, Apis mellifera lingustica, in the mid-19th century. Today, the latter is the most common.

Susan Cobey, a bee breeder and geneticist at UC-Davis, believes the recent findings underscore the complex nature of honeybee societies. Her own research has
 taken her as far afield as the Republic of Georgia’s Caucasus Mountains in search of honeybees possessing beneficial genetic traits.

A 1922 U.S. ban on the importation of bees and the overreliance on a
 subset of honeybees bred for ease of handling and productivity has led to 
genetic “bottlenecks” limiting genetic diversity, she points out. Speaking metaphorically, she adds: “It’s like you had one boatload of people come over here that populated the whole U.S. and no one else is allowed in.”

After 500 years of only two types of honeybees dominating the landscape in the U.S., the thinking goes, the lack of genetic diversity is weakening their ability to resist CCD.

To get around the bottleneck, Cobey’s work focuses on enhancing honeybee stocks through the manipulation of bee semen to widen the gene pool. With the help of beekeepers overseas, she’s importing the germplasm of a subspecies of honeybee known as Apis melliflora caucasia, which is native to the fringes of southern Europe. “They’re providing the best of their stock,” she says.

Not that there’s one simple fix for CCD. Diversity is just one part of the equation. “A lot has to do with pesticides and nutrition,” Cobey adds. “The amazing thing about bees is they bounce back [for a while]. But at some point they collapse.”

Scientists and beekeepers alike are working furiously to prevent that from happening. But in the meantime, it might be wise to ask: What if we turned back the clock on agricultural production and allowed honeybees to forage and frolic more freely?

This shit matters. (Photo by David Jones.)

From time to time a book merits its title. Published in 2010, Holy Shit: Managing Manure to Save Mankind may just be the No. 1 book on the No. 2 business. In it, Gene Logsdon manages to be both funny and educational as he advocates for overcoming our aversion to excrement for the sake of healthy soil.

According to Logsdon, we need manure and lots of it. He contends we should follow our nose for practical and elegant solutions to improving soil fertility, and turn waste into compost fit for crops and gardens.

We spoke to Logsdon recently to get the straight poop.

Q. You’ve had a long career in journalism. What inspired you to write a book on manure?

Gene Logsdon. (Photo by Ben Barnes.)

A. I was hearing from lots of readers who were getting into backyard farm animals, especially chickens. They did not seem to have any appreciation for the rude fact that animals defecate and urinate and no realization that they would have to deal with that manure. Since I really hoped that small-scale animal husbandry would become a fact of American life, and having memories of when it was, even in towns, I knew that without proper manure handling, the new movement was going to get into trouble with neighbors. And lead to all the silly rules that previous generations used to keep farm animals far from their noses.

What is really funny about this is that it didn’t matter to those paranoid about chicken manure how many big dogs loped through their backyards, shitting and pissing all the way. Dogs and cats are part of modern culture, even if they produce twice as much manure as a hen. Thinking about dogs and cats made me realize, with a little research, how god-awful amounts of pet manure were literally going to waste in this country. So I started writing. When I did, I realized how much I knew about manure. How pitiful for a man to reach his majority, as they say, with nothing else to brag about except a keen knowledge of shit.

Q. How long have you been farming?

A. I started doing farm work at age 5. In grad school, my wife and I kept a little homestead farm and then again during the 10 years I worked for Farm Journal while living in the Philadelphia area. My father and I milked 100 cows for a while, a foolish mistake in our case. That was “real farming.”

What I do now — for 38 years — is farming, but [it’s] not a commercial venture. I am not a “real” farmer because I make very little money at it, but I live much more of a farming life than most of the big grain farmers around me.

Q. Has the price of petroleum-based chemical fertilizer remained high (as gas prices have)? And if so, how has it affected farm operations in your area?

A. Fertilizer prices are going through the roof. Corn farmers are putting on $100 worth of it per acre this year. If you have 5,000 acres of corn, that’s half a million bucks. Since we are supposed to have a surplus of natural gas, which is used to make nitrogen fertilizer, that price could come down, but from everything I can see, the price of phosphorus and potash is going to keep going up. As I say in Holy Shit, this just makes manure that much more precious and holy. But of course, since corn prices have also gone up, the big farmers are still driving the price of land (as well as fertilizer) higher and higher.

Q. If 6,000 years of civilization are based on six inches of fertile topsoil, what does the current state of farmlands in the U.S. tell us? Are we headed for a collapse at the current rate of consumption?

A. I don’t see a collapse in yields in the near future. But it is almost impossible to keep good fertile topsoil with organic matter content of at least 3.5 percent (5 is much better) on large-scale farms operated with heavy machinery. Erosion is still very bad on hillier land. Compaction is a growing problem.

Every civilization I have studied has collapsed in time because of poor farming. Or good farming encouraging overpopulation, which finally lead to poor farming. History teaches me to be a pessimist. China maintained a garden farm economy for 40 centuries (remarkable). But in the end, it just encouraged more population growth and eventually there was not enough food to go around.

Q. In the city, organic dirt costs $19 for a 25-pound bag. Are farmers in the right business? That seems like a lot of money for dirt.

A. For the price you quote, a city gardener could make his own, the compost way. Just takes more time than the busy modern man thinks he has. Back in the early 1900s, when horses were the main means of travel, city gardeners often made their own soil by piling horse manure, bedding, and leaves about three-feet-deep on a gravel pad. They let it decay. And with water, they had a grand garden in a couple of years.

Q. For non-farmers in the audience, what’s the difference between manure and compost?

A. When manure decays it turns into compost just like any other organic matter. The compost decays further into humus. After two years of decay, the manure compost has lost all of its very bad elements (like parasitic worms) and if you use commonsense hygiene, it is no different from handling compost made from decaying leaves except that it is a lot richer in nutrients.

Q. You might have raised the ire of environmentalists with the chapter on the merits on biosolids, or sludge. Did you expect a pushback, and do you use any on your crops?

A. Oh yes I did. And I learned that it is easier to convince an evangelical Christian that not everything in the Bible is the truth than to convince an evangelical environmentalist that properly treated biosolids are like a million times safer than riding around in an automobile.

The National Academy of Sciences has twice given properly treated biosolids a green light. So have many scientists who know a helluva lot more about sludge than the environmentalists do. The only real problem is that humans like to dump their old pills and other drugs and cleaning fluids and industrial wastes, etc. down the toilet. Progress with that problem is ongoing and I expect it will be solved. But the danger is exaggerated. I don’t see cultural attitudes changing very fast, so I just shrug and quit arguing.

I have used dried sludge (“cake” in the trade) from our local water treatment plant on my garden. It works fine. I have gone through the process of sewage purification test tube by test tube with the people who work at the plant. The problem is just plain horribly exaggerated compared to other pollution problems we face.

Q. In the closing chapters you mentioned we should be literally and figuratively get our shit together. Can you explain?

A. We must think about getting our shit together literally not figuratively. This stuff slides through our bodies every day of our lives. It goes in as lovely, lush, tasty food. The body takes out what it needs for nutrition during a process in which the stuff is totally and integrally a part of our digestive process. But the second it slides out into the pot it becomes terrible, rotten, awful, disease-ridden stuff. If it were white and smelled like roses, we would be saving literally billions of dollars every year, using it for fertilizer instead of spending billions trying to make it disappear.

Volunteers plant vegetation to slow erosion along the banks of Chollas Creek. (Photo by Groundwork San Diego.)

Driving down side streets in southeast San Diego past paddling ducks, native sage, and ugly, graffiti-covered utility boxes offers a whiff of the promise and the menace befalling Chollas Creek.

This is no Blue Danube: Bounded and bisected by freeways, a cypher of an old creek traverses low-income neighborhoods via a series of ravines and concrete channels. Nonetheless, a local nonprofit organization has set out to salvage the creek from urban ruin. In the process, the group hopes to create a place for healing and restoration in a neighborhood sorely in need of both.

Unlike reverie-inducing waterways such as the Hudson or the Mississippi rivers, which served as engines for Americaʼs economic development, the rivers of Southern California tend to be short, quirky, and intermittent. More often than not, theyʼre considered hindrances to progress by boosters eager to make way for highways and shopping malls. Many, like Chollas Creek, have simply been entombed in concrete.

Laced with heavy metals, Chollas Creek is one of the most heavily polluted waterways in San Diego County. In the aftermath of winter storms, the lower creek can resemble a slow-moving landfill.

“We’re kind of a dumping ground for demolition and construction debris that comes from outside the neighborhoods,” says Leslie Reynolds, a former San Diego State University administrator who is leading the charge to clean up the creek.

In 2007, Reynolds founded the nonprofit Groundwork San Diego to tackle Chollas Creek head-on. She sees the cleanup as an environmental justice issue since it impacts some of the poorest parts of San Diego.

“I know I sound like a broken record, but why is this allowed to happen?” she asks on a recent midmorning tour, surveying a corridor of houses edging the creek whose ragged fencelines would not be out of place in the slums of Tijuana. She points out an intersection, known as the “Four Corners of Death,” that is ground zero for local gang activity. Even more telling are the reinforced doors and windows meant to keep the occupants safe and intruders out.

Fixing the mess will be enormously complicated, requiring the reduction of roadside pollution, stopping illegal dumping, removing invasive weeds, and perhaps most challenging of all, persuading residents to look upon the creek as a source of pride rather than an eyesore.

Still, Reynolds sees the creekʼs potential as a catalyst for change. And thanks to help from federal agencies such as the Environmental Protection Agency and the National Park Service, support from philanthropies such as the TKF Foundation, and a small army of volunteers willing to do grunt work, the creek is coming back to life, albeit in piecemeal fashion.

Work has already begun to restore the natural flow of the creek. Crews have begun eradicating invasive weeds choking the creek’s banks, and Groundwork San Diego recently mobilized hundreds of shovel-wielding volunteers to stabilize hillsides in Radio Canyon sorely in need of erosion control.

The ultimate goal is not just a less-polluted Chollas Creek, but a series of green paths and pocket parks along sections of the creek, parts of which are already in place, linking the upper reaches of the watershed with the San Diego Harbor. The greenway will traverse 23 miles and thread through densely populated neighborhoods where green space is lacking.

Hopefully, efforts to restore the creek will bind the community to a common purpose. “We just see people literally blossoming from this process,” says Christine Tanabe, a spokesperson for TKF, which recently gave Groundwork San Diego $45,000 to fund restoration planning. She hopes that “thoughtful working together” will translate into “other improvements in other aspects of their community and life.”

TFK has had prior experience coaxing similar restoration projects into existence in equally gritty sections of Baltimore and Washington, D.C., turning neglected properties into focal points for community residents and local control. In the McElderry Park neighborhood of Baltimore, the foundation helped locals transform a trash-strewn lot frequented by drug addicts into a meditation garden.

TKF is now sponsoring the “Sacred Spaces, Open Places” design competition, offering $4 million in awards — and Groundwork San Diego plans to enter. But given the inherent challenges facing Chollas Creek, can restoration efforts actually work?

Efforts to redesign the Los Angeles flood channel seemed equally quixotic, until community activists rebranded it the L.A. River and got city higher-ups to pay attention. In 2007, the city approved a river revitalization plan that tacitly acknowledged decades of poor planning decisions, and vowed to take nearby communities into account. The plan has spurred local efforts to restore the river to its original contours and to create green parkways.

South of San Diego, the town of Imperial Beach, too, has been undergoing a remarkable transformation. Wedged between Interstate 5, the Pacific Ocean, and the U.S.-Mexico border fence, Imperial Beach was California noir. It faced infrastructure challenges as daunting as Chollas Creekʼs that were exacerbated by ongoing U.S.- Mexico border tensions. After decades of local activism and a series of highly publicized events highlighting the abysmal state of water quality, crews have restored a wetland, installed basins to capture storm runoff, and seeded hillsides with native plants to prevent further erosion. It’s not Eden, but at least it’s no longer being ignored.

So perhaps, with loving care and diligence, a trashed creek in a run-down corner of San Diego can one day become an urban oasis. It’s too early to determine the ultimate fate of Chollas Creek, but it’s certainly too soon to count it out.

Colin Archipley (right) in the greenhouse.

Tucked into San Diego’s rolling hills, Archi’s Acres is a stark departure from the war Marine Sgt. Colin Archipley left behind. Rather than hunt down insurgents, he now grows oversized basil and specialty crops on six acres for local markets. The work is hard, but for Sgt. Archipley, it feels like a respite from the six years he spent training and fighting in Iraq.

In need of a second act, Archipley and his wife Karen pooled their resources to open the farm in 2007. Their mission is twofold; they hope to operate a successful small-scale organic farm and help soldiers make the transition from fighters to champions of sustainable agriculture and financial independence. Together the couple runs a program called Veterans Sustainable Agriculture Training (VSAT), a six-week course run in partnership with two local community colleges that focuses on organics and hydroponics (and the combination of the two, which is rare), as well as greenhouse production and the basics of putting together a business plan.

The couple belongs to a budding veterans-to-farmers movement, a larger effort to recruit vets released from military service to help reinvigorate the aging population of farmers, 40 percent of whom are expected to retire within the next decade. I spoke with Archipley recently about the program and the larger scope of the movement.

Q. In your TEDx presentation you mentioned that food security is tied to national security. Would you mind elaborating on that?

A. When people aren’t hungry they naturally feel better. But more importantly any strong economy is based on a foundation of agriculture. And that’s definitely true in the United States. The original colonies were founded on tobacco, corn, and cotton. Those ties go all the way back to the start of our country. Globally, areas that have food have access to agricultural systems and those agricultural systems build a foundation for local economies. You have money flowing, people are able to pay their bills, feed their family, [pay for an] education, and so forth. If you look at a global map, areas that have food shortages are more hostile.

Q. That’s quite a transition from Marine sergeant to farming. Did you have any understanding of what you were getting yourself into?

A. We had no idea. And that might have been a good thing because we had no understanding of how difficult it could be. We purchased the farm because we really liked the property and the area, not with the idea of becoming full-time farmers. When I came back from Iraq, I still had a few-month commitment with the Marine Corps. [Then] I starting working with the avocados and I really enjoyed that. One thing I enjoy about agriculture is the physical lifestyle it provides. I couldn’t see myself in a cubicle. [We like] the fact that 
we’re self-employed. I don’t have a manager staring over my shoulder. Our boss is our customer. We started the training program to share that message with other like-minded people who might enjoy similar types of freedoms.

Q. How many people have passed through your Veteran Sustainable Agriculture Training program?

A. Last year, I think we trained about 45 people and we have 15 people we’re working with right now. We work with a lot of active duty soldiers, which means they need to get permission from their commanders to come and train here. Last year was [about] proving that agriculture is a viable career and that we have a viable business. There’s got to be more options available for military people entering the private sector in these crazy times.

Q. Do you think the program simply allows soldiers to decompress or does it actually lead to careers in farming?

A. We see ourselves as an agribusiness incubator. Our goal is to lead men and women from the military into careers in agriculture, or into entrepreneurship in the food and fiber industries. It can give them a greater sense of a mission; like the military, the food system is a part of something greater. You can hang your hat up at the end of the day and say 
I really did something today to make my community a better place.

Q. How much food do you produce?

A. [On six acres] we grow 10,000-plus pounds of avocados, 1,200 basil plants per week, and several cases of kale per week. I don’t know offhand. But we are very productive — to the point that we are sustainable.

Q. After the Civil War, Union soldiers received favorable terms under The Homestead Act to settle the West. Do you see historical ties between military service and farming?

A. Absolutely. When the vets came home from World War II, the VA [U.S. Dept. of Veteran Affairs] had an ag training program. And like the vets that reclaimed the West, the vets that are entering farming now will have to discover the future of agriculture. I think the industrial farming model is at a tipping point, it’s no longer sustainable.

Around the turn of the century, about 30 percent of Americans worked in ag. Now it’s less than 3 percent and over half of them are at retirement age or above. So they’re ready to leave the industry. Any time you have a void in the marketplace someone is going to fill it. This is our opportunity.

Q. We have the GI Bill, which enables you to go to school and receive job training. Is there something like that for farming?

A. Well, we’re GI Bill approved; soldiers can come to us through the VA.
 As far as lending and purchasing programs for farms, there’s CalVet home and farm loans. But we’re excited to see what comes out of the Farm Bill — if the provisions will have lending programs that will be a little more accessible to vets.

Q. Aren’t the start-up costs still tremendous?

A. More and more investors are looking at ag as a better place to put their money. What
 has done well since the crash of the markets? Agriculture has. Why? Because you have 7 billion people [in the world] and 310 million Americans who need to eat. There are wants, needs, and musts in the economy. You’d like an iPad, but you must eat. Food is becoming more valuable. Jim Rogers, a very successful investor, was quoted in Time Magazine saying: “If you want to make as much money as a banker become a farmer.”

Q. Do you have any alumni success stories?

A. Yes. Mike Hanes. He was a nine-year Marine with several deployments. After separating 
from the Marine Corps I think he spent two years on the streets, living under a tree. We befriended him and put him through the training program. He has the best hot sauce recipe in the world. Since then he’s launched Dang!!! (a hot sauce made with maca). Now you can find his product at Whole Foods stores throughout California; hopefully nationwide pretty soon.