I first met Jeff in 1999 and joined the the gypsies of Beekeepers in 2000; a young 17-year-old escaping the halls of educational facilities after graduating from high school. I joined a small circle of beekeepers in Long Prairie and Eagle Bend, Minnesota, which provided me the opportunity to assert my independence, financially provide my own way, be near my brother, and fall in love.

Author on the right, photo courtesy of Tina Kahrs

I probably idealize that time period too much, but it seems like the happiest days of my life were in Minnesota, secretly gardening naked, swimming with beautiful wood and painted turtles in the pond behind the bee shop, or mudding with our three- and four-wheelers at Spider Lake. In early spring every good beekeeper feels the itch to hurry with orange honey production in California and get on the road with the bees, heading northeast toward Minnesota, Land of the 10,000 Lakes, which naturally appeals to my DNA-laden wanderlust blood.

Jeff Anderson is a ruggedly-built stocky Minnesotan with sandy hair who looks like he stepped out of a Western Shootout Saga; and yet his voice is always calm and gentle which meticulously sounds out witty remarks in a very dry sense of humor. My fondest memory of Jeff was from Saturdays, when he would play the piano while I sang and Rachel, his daughter and my soon-to-be sister-in-law, played her flute. Jeff was the type of man every teenager wishes for her father (although I wouldn’t trade my own, but wouldn’t mind having a second one)–willing to get out on his-three wheeler and play in the mud with four young couples.

Jeff used to run a five-thousand-hive bee operation. But since 2000, Jeff’s bees have dropped from five thousand hives to less than two thousand. This spurred a research enterprise to find out why the bees died and charge the culprits to enforce the federal laws. California & Minnesota Honey Farms is a four-generational enterprise, handed down through the family since 1945. The family was featured in a May 1993 National Geographic Article on Beekeepers, and when my oldest brother, Rick, was 13 and saw another 12-year-old female beekeeper, that article inspired him to pester my parents to get him a beehive (which didn’t work). Unbeknownst to all, Rachel’s family seared into his mind and in 1999 they met in college, marrying in 2001.

Jeff Anderson, photo courtesy of Kyle Anderson

California & Minnesota Honey Farms has been in danger of extermination—not only from the disappearing and dying bees, but also from International Paper company.  International Papers is a vile corporation that illegally sprayed chemicals on the bees, which killed off thousands of hives and jeopardized the livelihood of a family whose business spans four generations, thousands of bee stings, and countless lonely nail-biting miles on the road.

Bees are like canaries in a coal mine—their decline and seemingly disappearance signals dangers for the rest of us. The problem is that beekeepers have become marginalized since agricultural areas are turning into developed cookie-cutter homes and industrial complexes, making it hard for beekeepers to be heard… until the Great Disappearing of Bees began sometime in 2005. This made Jeff Anderson, Protector of Bees, famous for his fight against International Papers.

The Melon’s current discussion topic gives me a chance to write about Wendell Berry, an author I’ve loved for a while. Berry is a prolific non-fiction, short story, novel, and poetry writer, so I’m never sure how to discuss his various themes, but since The Melon wants different perspectives on the family, I’ll discuss Berry’s views, most with which I agree.

Of all the structures in society, the nuclear family is the one to which Berry thinks people owe the most responsibility. By default, average American adults must interact with at least a handful of structures: the government, their workplace, their local community, and their family (to name a few). An individual’s responsibilities to these groups inevitably, at some point, come into conflict with each another. “Fidelity” is the story in which Berry most clearly describes his view on the family as the paramount structure in society. In this story, Danny’s father, an old man named Burley, is in the hospital, in a coma. The hospital staff says he may still be cured, but Danny knows that Burley is old and dying and would want to die on his own land near his family. So Danny steals Burley from the hospital, takes him home, is with him when he dies, then buries him. The state puts a detective on the case who wants to find evidence of the “kidnapping,” so he can prosecute the family for acting against the hospital’s wishes. But Burley’s family and a few of his close friends confront the detective, and their comments make him question the legitimacy of his investigation. These two examples show the two different perspectives:

“And you, [Detective Bode], are here now to tell us that a person who is sick and unconscious, or even a person who is conscious and well, is ultimately a property of the organizations and the state. Aren’t you?”

“It wasn’t authorized. He asked nobody’s permission. He told nobody. He signed no papers. It was a crime. You can’t let people just walk around an do what they want to like that. He didn’t even pay the bill.”

“Some of us think people belong to each other and to God.”

In that scene, Berry poses a dilemma: To whom does an individual ultimately belong? To the government or to the people who love him? The characters who speak for Berry argue the later, although Bode does have a point that a family shouldn’t be able to get away with just anything, just because they’re family.

And later:

“A fellow would need [the hospital’s] permission to get in. If he needs their permission to get out, he’s in jail. Would you grant a proprietary right, or even a guardianship, to a hospital that you would not grant to a man’s own son? I would oppose that, whatever the law said.”

“Well, anyway,” Detective Bode said, “all I know is that the law has been broken, and I am here to serve the law.”

“But, my dear boy, you don’t eat or drink the law, or sit in its shade or warm yourself by it, or wear it, or have your being in it. The law exists only to serve.”

“Serve what?”

“Why, all the many things that are above it. Love.”

Every time I read this passage (I wish I could quote the whole thing), I have an aha moment. The law should not simply legislate indifferently, it should serve. The state deals indirectly, not directly, with eating and drinking and warming and clothing. The government, an abstract entity, should give deference to individuals. (More on that later.) This principle, as most principles, looks different in different situations, but I would rather the state be in allegiance to the family than the family be in allegiance to the state. (As a student of Russia, the Soviet structure comes to mind as a system in which the family had to make allegiance to the state their priority.)

Berry is not an anarchist; he is a tax-paying, voting citizen, active and vocal in his community and the nation, especially in matters of farming and food production (He’s had a large influence on the writer Michael Pollan). But he knows that the other societal structures exist only to serve the family, whereas many live, maybe unconsciously, that the family is secondary to their obligations to other groups in society.

Berry thinks government can hinder or break apart the family; he also thinks higher education can potentially have the same negative impact. When a young person leaves for college, she often breaks apart from her family and community, often never to return. Berry thinks colleges have become isolated centers of learning instead of entities which prepare locals to interact with their community, the initial impetus of many colleges.

In Berry’s novel, Hannah Coulter, an elderly Hannah laments that her two sons and a daughter are spread out across the country, and she attributes their location to her insistence that they pursue higher education. She then compares her and her husband’s attitude toward education to her neighbor family’s attitude:

This seemed funny at the time.

Digital Ethnography is a study, an anthropological discipline. Professor Wesch (blog) at Kansas State University has a team of students every year study the internet and its new trends. I tend to think academics are generally behind the major trends, not participating in them or generating them. But one of KSU’s methodological principles is known as “participant observation“, whereby the observer-academics take part themselves in the trends that shape online culture. Sometimes, as Prof. Wesch’s very viral 2007 YouTube video demonstrated to the world, the academics can become an internet phenomenon themselves.

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The ornately adorned Trinity night club in Seattle is known for hosting some of the hottest DJs for its Saturday night dance parties. Tonight they are getting a taste of Tacoma since two of the University of Puget Sound’s well-known techno DJs, David Hvidsten (“Chaosthetic”) and Brad Miller (’06 alum) along with Jason LeMaitre (also from Tacoma) are spinning back-to-back in the 50’s-era retro Blue Room.

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