arthritis
What we get wrong about Lyme disease.
The stories we tell about the epidemic get things backward.
BIOLOGY ENVIRONMENT
What We Get Wrong About Lyme Disease
The stories we tell about the epidemic get things backward.
BY KATHARINE WALTER
OCTOBER 5, 2017
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My sister Camilla and I stepped off the passenger ferry onto the dock at Vineyard Haven, Martha’s Vineyard’s main port, with a group that had already begun their party. They giggled, dragging coolers and beach chairs behind them. We competed to see how many items of Nantucket red we could spot.
Not that we were wearing any. Camilla wore shorts with white long underwear underneath, and I wore beige quick-dry hiking pants. Both of us had on sneakers with long white socks. It was late June, perfect beach weather. The water sparkled. But we weren’t headed toward the ocean. We were there to hunt for ticks.
On the island, we hopped in a cab. Camilla looked longingly out the window as we passed the turns for the town beach and Owens Park Beach. The driver pointed out the location of the famous shark attack beach from Jaws. We drove on south to Manuel Correllus State Forest, an unremarkable park in the center of the island and the farthest point from any beach.
THE GLAMOUR OF IT ALL: Camilla Walter harvesting deer ticks on Prudence Island, in Rhode Island’s Narraganset Bay. Tick collecting made Popular Science’s 2004 list of worst science jobs.Courtesy of the author
Deer ticks, or blacklegged ticks, are poppy-seed sized carriers of Lyme disease. We needed to collect 300 before the last ferry returned to Woods Hole, Massachusetts that night. We each unfurled a drag cloth—a one-meter square section of once-white corduroy attached to a rope—and began to walk, dragging the cloth slowly behind us as if we were taking it for a stroll. The corduroy patch would rise and fall over the leaves and logs in the landscape, moving like a mouse or a chipmunk scurrying through the leaf litter. Ticks, looking for blood, would attach to the cloth. Every 20 meters, we’d stoop to harvest them.
Tick collecting made it to Popular Science’s 2004 list of worst science jobs alongside landfill monitor and anal wart researcher. On cool days, though, sweeping the forest floor, kneeling to pluck ticks from corduroy ridges, the job became rhythmic. I felt strangely close to the forest. As I soon found out, the work got me closer to people, too.
The wilderness that we’ve feared, romanticized, and valorized is a fantasy.
Sometimes hikers would stop by, curious, then repulsed. They would want confirm the proper way to pull off ticks (with tweezers planted close to skin, perpendicularly), or to tell us about their diagnoses. Lyme disease isn’t like many of the diseases studied by my friends in the epidemiology department, where I was a doctoral student. No one talks about their grandmother’s syphilis infection, caused by Treponema pallidum, another spirochete bacterium.
But once people heard what Camilla and I were collecting, stories of brushes with ticks and family members’ diagnoses were shared freely. I quickly became the “tick girl.” When I started my dissertation I was preoccupied by the ecological question: How have humans altered the environment and triggered a disease emergence? By the time I finished, I realized that far more interesting were the rich and revealing tick stories shared with us along the way.
Illness makes us talk. “This is true of all forms of pain and suffering,” Arthur Kleinman, an anthropologist and physician at Harvard University, told me. We talk about illness “to seek assistance, care, and in part to convey feelings about fear, anxiety, or sadness.” In his book, The Illness Narratives, Kleinman writes that “patients order their experience of illness … as personal narratives.” These narratives become a part of the experience of being sick. “The personal narrative does not merely reflect illness experience, but rather it contributes to [it].”
The result is a peculiar togetherness. Once, a friend’s mom emailed that she’d just pulled off her first tick of the season, from her pubic hair: “I’m guessing it doesn’t it surprise you to hear, Katie, that you came to mind almost immediately when I discovered the little bugger? I’m afraid that ticks and you will be forever linked in my mind.” Naturally some took the motif too far. One creepy grad student thought that, because I was standing in front of a tick poster at an academic conference, I’d want to hear about the time he pulled a tick off his dick.
By dosing ourselves, we gain control.
The country singer Brad Paisley romances the tick: “I’d like to see you out in the moonlight / I’d like to kiss you way back in the sticks / I’d like to walk you through a field of wildflowers / And I’d like to check you for ticks.” I’m with Paisley here. Creeps aside, tick grooming is an act of love. My sister and I were diligent in the tick checks we gave ourselves and each other. Most nights, we’d pull off several at the campsite showers.
Tick stories mostly fell into a few categories. There were the boastful ones. On Washburn Island, a tiny island a few hundred yards off of Cape Cod, two hairy, fully-bearded park rangers, Steve and Steve, couldn’t be bothered to pull off their ticks. For most of the summer, they lived outside in tents and tarps and always had a few handfuls of ticks embedded in their skin. The Steves boasted that they’d each been infected with Lyme disease and babesiosis, a parasitic illness also carried by deer ticks, on and off for the last several years. Theirs was a backcountry machismo, as if their burliness made them immune to the intrusion of the forest twigs and ticks upon their bodies. Their symptoms, though, were presumably as real as anyone else’s.
The bulk of people’s reactions to the disease reflected a confused anxiety about boundaries. En route to a wedding in Easton, Connecticut, deep in Lyme country, someone found out that I was a tick girl and asked if they should be worried. The wedding was on a farm, an edge habitat where weedy species—mice, chipmunks, and robins—proliferate. Weedy animals include some of the best hosts for the Lyme disease bacterium. They can be infected with a tick bite and pass on the bacterium to the next tick that feeds on them, continuing unbroken chains of transmission. Deer, which are also hosts for ticks, thrive in these fragmented habitats, too.
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I recited my usual tick check endorsement: Shower and check yourselves at the end of the night and you’ll be fine. The Lyme bacterium is only transmitted after the tick has been attached for two or three days. Still, when guests filled the lawn for corn hole and cocktails, I couldn’t help but notice all the cocktail dresses and open heels, ankle-deep in grass. The next morning, one woman told me she’d plucked three ticks from her ankle.
Worry bled to fear. On Cuttyhunk Island, the most remote of the Elizabeth Islands, a necklace of islands spilling off of southern Cape Cod, my sister and I were generously hosted by a woman I’ll call Susan, a self-trained student of the Lyme epidemic. “Ticks have become the bane of island existence,” Susan gravely told me shortly after I arrived. By 2010, everyone Susan knew on the island was taking doxycycline, the antibiotic most commonly prescribed for Lyme disease. She and her husband arrive in Cuttyhunk at the start of the summer season armed with bottles of it and take it prophylactically. Every time they pull off a tick, they take three doses, spread over 24 hours. This is not recommended by the CDC (the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention). Doxycycline makes your skin sensitive to the sun, so their regimen makes it necessary to wear a hat and lots of sunscreen or stay inside.
Susan fenced in her lawn to keep out rabbits, which can host adult ticks, then raised the fence to defend against deer. “Our house is ringed with Damminix tubes, the yard fenced, grass mowed short, and still they turn up in the bed with us,” she told me. (Damminix tubes hold cotton infused with an insecticide that kills ticks.) We slept in her son’s room, crisp and nautically themed and lined with file cabinets full of scientific articles about Lyme disease epidemiology and ecology, local and national reporting on the epidemic, and printed email exchanges with epidemiologists and local politicians. Susan is now spearheading the island’s Tick Eradication Campaign. Her plan for eradication was ambitious, she admitted. But, she asks: “Wouldn’t it be nice to be able to say that you are stepping onto a tick-free island where a sunburn is the most dangerous health risk?”
The idea that the natural and human exist in separate realms is the very “trouble with wilderness,” the environmental historian William Cronon wrote in his 1995 book Uncommon Ground. The wilderness that we’ve feared, romanticized, and valorized over the last few hundred years, he says, is a fantasy:
[Wilderness] is quite profoundly a human creation—indeed, the creation of very particular human cultures at very particular moments in human history … Wilderness hides its unnaturalness behind a mask that is all the more beguiling because it seems so natural. As we gaze into the mirror it holds up for us, we too easily imagine that what we behold is Nature when in fact we see the reflection of our own unexamined longings and desires.
In the stories told by our doctors, our parks, and the CDC, ticks are invaders. To defend ourselves, we use insect repellent, clothing, and prophylactic antibiotics; fences, signs, and pesticides. “When it comes to pesticides, the environmental toxin par excellence, Lyme patients are often its greatest proponents,” writes Abigail Dumes, an anthropologist at Michigan State University. We prefer the risk posed by pesticides to the fear of Lyme, Dumes explained to me. They let us become actors instead of victims. By dosing ourselves with pesticides (or antibiotics), we gain control of our risks. Ticks, on the other hand are uncontrollable. “It’s difficult to live with the idea that there are enormous threats and many can’t be controlled,” Kleinman tells me.
The problem is our defensive barriers aren’t working particularly well. Deer ticks are now established across 45 percent of United States counties. Their range has more than doubled in the last 20 years. Reported cases of Lyme disease have more than tripled since 1995 and the CDC estimates that more than 300,000 Americans fall ill each year. The story of tick-as-invader isn’t particularly helpful—or complete.
LYME EMERGES: Allen Steere and Stephen Malawista published these maps of Lyme disease in 1979, just two years after it had been named. They noted a correspondence between disease clusters and areas where two species of black-legged ticks were known to exist.Courtesy of the author
In November 1975, Polly Murray, an artist living in Lyme, Connecticut, contacted the Connecticut State Department of Public Health. Two of her children were sick with what doctors called juvenile rheumatoid arthritis, a disease of joint pain. Their knees were so swollen that they were forced to walk with crutches. Several other neighborhood children had similar symptoms. Arthritis is rare in children. And it is not normally found in clusters. So Murray kept careful notes of her children’s symptoms and compiled a list of other sick children.
At first, doctors were dismissive. But Allen Steere, a young rheumatologist at Yale-New Haven Medical Center, was curious. He began to investigate cases in Lyme, Old Lyme, and East Haddam, quiet, wooded communities just east of the mouth of the Connecticut River. Through a surveillance “grapevine,” he found 51 residents—39 children and 12 adults—in a community of 12,000 suffering from unexplained arthritis. A quarter of patients also had erythema migrans, an expanding circular rash with a pale center, also called a bullseye. In some neighborhoods, 10 percent of children suffered from this unexplained arthritis. In 1977, in the journal Arthritis and Rheumatism, Steere and his team named the set of symptoms Lyme arthritis. They called it “a previously unrecognized clinical entity.”
If anyone is an invader here, it’s us.
At that point, what caused the symptoms remained a mystery. The clustering of cases suggested the new disease was infectious, and the summertime peak of cases suggested it was spread by something in the water—picked up by swimmers—or by insects. Steere’s team tested his patients’ blood for dozens of viruses and bacteria. Nothing fit. In 1979, Steere and a colleague mapped out the first 512 cases of Lyme arthritis. The distribution of cases overlapped neatly with what was then the range of deer ticks. Many of Steere’s patients lived in wooded areas and had mentioned insect bites. But hundreds of ticks were tested and no pathogen was found.
A few years later, William Burgdorfer, an entomologist at the Rocky Mountain National Laboratories, identified a new spirochete—a corkscrew shaped bacterium, capable of spiraling through the tissues of its hosts—in ticks collected from Shelter Island, a tiny island nestled between the two pointer fingers of Long Island. Sixty percent of ticks collected on the island carried the bacterium. Soon after, spirochetes were found in the blood of people suffering from Lyme arthritis. The Lyme disease bacterium, Borrelia burgdorferi, was named in his honor. It cycles silently in forests between ticks and a group of hosts, mostly small rodents and birds. From the perspective of the bacterium, humans are dead-end hosts and play no role in the spread of disease to new areas.
The modern history of the disease is relatively short: Just 40 years have passed since it was named. This can contribute to the sense that it is a new invader into our pristine neighborhoods and parks. But where did the bacterium come from? Was it truly new? And why did it first appear in a bucolic Connecticut suburb?
Spreading ticks and migrating bacteria leave no trace on the environment. Unlike pathogens that spread strictly from human to human (like measles), we cannot trace the history of the Lyme disease bacterium from the history of human epidemics. So, in 1990, biologists turned from medical records to museums. They sifted through old ticks in entomology collections at Harvard University and the Rocky Mountain National Laboratories, testing for bacteria. They found ticks infected with B. burgdorferi collected in the 1940s in Montauk Point and Hither Hills, parks near the Hamptons on the eastern tip of Long Island. Museum collections held no ticks before the 1940s.
That effectively doubled the known history of the disease. Then, researchers turned to the hosts themselves. They snipped ear punches from mouse specimens at the Smithsonian Museum, the Natural History Museum in New York, and the Harvard Museum of Comparative Zoology. Mice from Cape Cod in the 1890s turned out to be infected. Now the disease had a century-long history. Scientists studying Ötzi, the Tyrolean Iceman, stumbled upon in 1991 by hikers in the Italian Alps, have found that he was lactose intolerant, had intestinal parasites, severe atherosclerosis—and probably had Lyme disease. This meant the bacterium likely existed in western Europe 5,000 years ago.
PIERCING: The hypostome of a deer tick is a piercing organ with recurved teeth.Ed Reschke / Getty Images
To extend the history of the bacterium further back still, my advisors, Maria Diuk-Wasser and Gisella Caccone, and I turned to the 1 million letters of the bacterium’s genome. Pathogens evolve as they spread, and their genome carries a historical record of this development. By comparing pathogen genomes collected from different areas, we can build an evolutionary tree and a history of the pathogen’s spread. We can also tell how big the population of pathogens is now, and whether it is growing. This is the crux of phylogeography: Use evolutionary relatedness to answer questions about biogeography, the historic and spatial distribution of genetic diversity. A classic finding in the field, for example, is that the HIV epidemic originated in the French or Belgian Congo around the 1920s.
I began to chase bacteria from as wide an area and from as far back in time as possible. Biologists mailed me ticks in tiny tubes of ethanol from Michigan, Wisconsin, and Virginia. A Styrofoam container filled with dry ice and DNA samples of infected ticks collected across Canada was Fed-Exed to me. Old ticks were harder to come by. At the Yale Peabody Museum of Natural History, I pulled out drawer after drawer of taxidermied Peromyscus leucopus, white-footed mice, elegantly arranged in rows, with handwritten labels tied around their right ankles. Many were collected in the 1800s, when natural history museums were filled with hunting trophies. But the taxidermist had been tidy. The mouse skins had been cleaned of ticks. The oldest ticks I could find that were infected and had well-preserved DNA were from the early 1980s. Camilla and I added them to the 7,000 ticks from our summer harvest.
Finally, with 150 complete genomes in hand, my colleagues and I were able to extend the North American history of Lyme disease from a hundred years to many thousands. We drew a new evolutionary tree which showed that the bacterium likely originated in the northeast of the U.S., spreading south and west across North America to California. Birds likely transported it long distances to new regions, where small mammals continued its spread. Imprinted on the bacterial genomes was also a signature of dramatic population growth. As it evolved, it seemed to have proliferated.
Most interestingly, the tree was far older than we’d expected—at least 60,000 years old. Lyme was likely here in North America much longer than that, long before it was first named in the 1970s, long before humans first arrived in North America from across the Bering Strait (about 24,000 years ago), and long before the last glacial maximum, when much of North America was covered by an ice sheet (also about 24,000 years ago). If anyone is an invader here, it’s us. Our analysis also showed that the modern epidemic was not sparked by some new mutation that made the bacterium more readily transmissible. It was sparked by changes in ecology, most of which were man-made.
When colonists first arrived in New England, much of the area was forested. White-tailed deer were abundant. Deer ticks, whose distribution is closely tied to that of deer, most likely existed throughout much of the continent, too. Colonists pressed and pleated the complex fabric of New England’s forests, grasslands, and swamps into a starched blanket of fenced farmlands. Hunting and deforestation decimated deer populations. By the mid 18th-century, deer had almost entirely vanished. They never disappeared, though. Deer—and likely, deer ticks and B. burgdorferi—persisted in refugia, isolated pockets of southern Cape Cod and the far eastern tip of Long Island. Some deer populations were carefully cultivated. In 1698, hunters stocked the Naushon Island, one of the Elizabeth Islands (a few islands north of Susan’s Cuttyhunk) with deer. The island soon became a glamourous hunting destination and was purchased by the Forbes family in 1856, whose annual hunting party was attended by Ralph Waldo Emerson and Herman Melville, among others. The earliest record of a deer tick in the northern U.S. was on Naushon Island in 1926.
Beginning in the mid 1800s, farming gradually shifted westward and New England slowly reforested. But only shreds and slivers of forest were allowed to regrow. Deer populations rebounded and the animal spread across a transformed, suburban New England, one in which wolf predators had been exterminated, and where deer hunting was strictly limited. Ticks followed the deer, and B. burgdorferi followed the ticks. The sprawling grassy suburban lawn adjacent to a forest patch is the ideal Lyme disease habitat. The majority of tick-borne infections occur here because excellent hosts for B. burgdorferi also thrive in these manufactured edge habitats. More recently, climate change has been warming our winters, accelerating ticks’ life cycles and extending their range eight miles farther north each year.
The genetic and ecological history of the Lyme disease bacterium make it clear: Neither ticks nor the bacterium are invaders onto our pristine landscapes. They are the beneficiaries of an artificial and fragmented ecology created by the real invaders, us. Having sectioned and sliced the continent into a patchwork, we are confronted with the consequences. “Many of the individuals I spoke with during the course of my fieldwork moved to or remained in forested suburbs to be ‘close to nature,’ ” writes Dumes. “But ‘after Lyme,’ many described an experience of becoming ‘prisoners of their own paradise.’ ”
We’ve built structured domestic spaces on the periphery of the natural world to help us keep alive our fantasy of a wilderness that is pristine but kept at a safe distance. Ticks put the lie to that fantasy. They make us pay attention. They force us to notice and explore the freckles and spots of dirt on our ankles and our partners’ ankles. They force us to observe the spaces around us. They are rude reminders that there is no such thing as wilderness untouched by humans or humans detached from nature.
That’s a better story than tick-as-invader. This history doesn’t offer a tidy answer for how to stem the epidemic. But it shows us that our modern response to Lyme disease—to build more boundaries—echoes the impulse that created the epidemic in the first place. It’s not a just problem with Lyme. I defended my doctoral work earlier this year and am now studying another artificial boundary—the one between prisons and the free world—that is creating another epidemic: tuberculosis. My study sites have moved from Martha’s Vineyard to Brazilian prisons, but in a few ways, the new disease stories I’m encountering are alarmingly familiar.
Katharine Walter is a postdoctoral fellow at Stanford University.
Puerto Rico’s slow-motion medical disaster.
Hurricane Maria left a ruined island and 16 Puerto Rico residents dead. But public health experts worry that figure could climb higher in the coming weeks, as many on the island fail to get medicines or treatment they need for chronic diseases.
Hurricane Maria left a ruined island and 16 Puerto Rico residents dead. But public health experts worry that figure could climb higher in the coming weeks, as many on the island fail to get medicines or treatment they need for chronic diseases. Roads are blocked, supplies are stuck at the ports, and only 11 of Puerto Rico’s 69 hospitals are open. Doctors at one children’s hospital were forced to discharge 40 patients this week when their generator ran out of diesel fuel.
But the immediate need for treatment is only the beginning of the island's public health challenges. With the island’s entire power grid knocked out, Puerto Rico’s massive pharmaceutical manufacturing industry—which provides 30 percent of the island’s gross domestic product and 90,000 jobs—has been shut down. FDA administrator Scott Gottlieb announced this week that his agency is trying to shift production to the mainland US to prevent shortages of cancer drugs, immunosuppressants for transplant patients, and medical devices for diabetes patients. Bringing Puerto Rico back online will make a big difference for people living both on—and off—the island.
In the short term, energy is essential to keeping patients alive. Medicines like insulin to treat diabetes or tetanus vaccines need to be kept cool. That means either in a refrigerator at 45 degrees Fahrenheit (for seasonal flu or tetanus vaccines) or at room temperature, which is about 72 degrees (for insulin). But without air conditioning, Puerto Rico’s tropical climate is hitting the upper 80s this week. “Refrigeration and cold storage are really big issues, and will be for the forseeable future,” says one former federal emergency response official who asked not to be identified.
The patients most affected by the failing cold chain will be those with chronic conditions. One-fifth of Puerto Rico's population has some kind of disability, including half of those above age 65. Its 3.5 million residents have the highest prevalence of diabetes in the United States—nearly 13 percent compared to 8.7 percent on the US mainland. That helps make Puerto Rico the most vulnerable US territory to a natural disaster like Hurricane Maria, according to a recent study by the Association of State and Territorial Health Officers .
Federal health officials say they are already seeing patients come into emergency clinics with chronic disease related problems. “People with the most dire need are dialysis patients,” says Lt. Cmdr. Garrett Martin-Yeboah of the US Public Health Service and the national clinical pharmacist to the Department of Health and Human Service’s assistant secretary for emergency preparedness and response. “They are on a good number of prescription medications. Because of the volume of medications and tenuousness of their condition, those are some of the patients we are concerned about.”
The immediate refrigeration problem is solvable. Martin-Yeboah said a squad of federal emergency care doctors who were stationed on the island before Maria struck brought battery-powered mini-fridges that can run four days without power. They also brought their own diesel generators—though a week after the storm left, there is still not enough fuel to run them. “There are some challenges in Puerto Rico with fuel and things like that,” says Martin-Yeboah, who coordinates medicines and supplies for HHS doctors. “We’ve had to go to the airport to retrieve medical supplies,” she says. “Our suppliers can get them to Puerto Rico, but can’t get it to the site.”
The Navy hospital ship Comfort, which was finally dispatched this week, may also help in the short-term, especially for trauma patients. The converted supertanker will bring 1,000 beds, 12 operating rooms, a CAT-scan, and radiology capabilities to Puerto Rico. Meanwhie, emergency responders are using ham radios to reach some communities and even considering air-dropping medicines into villages, according to Nicolette Louissaint, executive director of Healthcare Ready, a group that coordinates post-disaster medical supply chain between public agencies and private suppliers such as pharmacies and drug manufacturers.
“The most important part is how we support the patients,” Louissant says. “These disaster responses are massive logistical operations. We have to do unusual things. Folks are looking at how you can get up to the mountains, and what solutions to move medicines to people but also people to medicines.”
Louissant noted that less than 10 percent of the island’s pharmacies were open as of Wednesday. Overall, there is no panic over medicines, according to health officials working in Puerto Rico. But they are prepared for the situation to worsen if conditions don’t improve quickly. Chronic diseases like cardiovascular disease and diabetes are often not counted in the final toll of natural disasters like Hurricane Maria. “These people end up dying from things that are preventable under ordinary circumstances,” said the former federal emergency official. “That’s what is going to start happening.”
But long-term, the effects of Puerto Rico's collapse may ripple far beyond the island. Twelve of the top 20 global pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies have manufacturing facilities on the island, according to the Puerto Rico Industrial Development Company. As a result, Puerto Rico manufactures seven of the top 10 drugs sold globally including AstraZeneca's cholesterol treatment Crestor, Abbvie arthritis drug Humira, and Johnson & Johnson-owned HIV drug Prezista, USA Today reported. Those three companies have said supplies of their drugs are in good shape and drugmakers are working to get production up and running. Still, Puerto Rico officials say it may be months before the island's power grid is fixed.
Facing months in the dark, ordinary life in Puerto Rico is "beyond reach."
Everyone from the governor of Puerto Rico to the mayor of San Juan is predicting that it could take four to six months to resume electrical service. For Puerto Ricans, that means empty refrigerators, campfire cooking, bathing in their own sweat and perhaps wrangling for fresh water.
SAN JUAN, P.R. — Two days after Hurricane Maria flattened this island of 3.5 million people, knocking out all its power and much of its water, the rebuilding of the services and structures needed for people to resume some semblance of ordinary life was looking more complicated by the day.
All or part of three towns in the northwestern part of the island — Isabela, San Sebastián and Quebradillas — were being evacuated Friday because of fears about structural damage to the nearby Guajataca Dam. Close to 70,000 people could be affected if the 90-year-old dam, which is 120-feet high and can hold about 11 billion gallons of water, collapsed, said Puerto Rico’s governor, Ricardo Rosselló.
And with everyone from the governor of Puerto Rico to the mayor of San Juan predicting that it could take four to six months to resume electrical service, people were contemplating empty refrigerators, campfire cooking, bathing in their own sweat and perhaps wrangling for fresh water on an island accustomed to hard times but nothing like what the future may bring.
“It’s been hard to see infrastructure deteriorate in Puerto Rico, but it has been harder to meet citizens who have lost it all,” Governor Rosselló said.
The most immediate danger was from the dam, which suffered structural damage. And finding gasoline was already a big problem. Lines for ice and gas stretched for blocks. Generators needed diesel or regular gas to work, and supplies at gas stations were quickly dwindling.
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“People will start going nuts pretty soon,” said Miguel A. Soto-Class, president of the Center for a New Economy, a nonpartisan research organization. “I don’t think it will be 'Mad Max,’ but people will be looking for diesel and gasoline, more than water even.”
The water supply was also becoming a problem. Even in San Juan, people need electricity to access water, and water is also critical to running some air-conditioning systems. At Centro Medico, a major hospital outside San Juan in Río Piedras, the emergency unit was treating patients but had no air-conditioning, said Dr. Johnny Rullán, a physician.
But the biggest long-term obstacle was the prospect of months without power.
Puerto Ricans are the first to say they can improvise — resolver — when a drought dries them up or a terrible storm knocks them down. But the idea of grappling long term without power hung like a pall over the island.
“This is really affecting me,” said Nina Rodriguez, a human resources manager in San Juan. “I have four children and the youngest is 6 months old. We are preparing for six months, maybe even a year without power.”
She added: “All the infrastructure has collapsed. Everything we had before the hurricane is beyond reach.”
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An aerial view of a flooded neighborhood in Catano, P.R., in the aftermath of Hurricane Maria. Credit Ricardo Arduengo/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
While few places could withstand a Category 4 hurricane without extensive damage to power grids, Puerto Rico’s government-owned power company was particularly vulnerable because of a history of neglect, mismanagement, out-of-control debt and decrepit infrastructure, experts said. A monopoly by the Puerto Rico Electric Power Authority, or Prepa, was reviled by island residents long before Hurricane Maria shut it down.
“Our plants look like the cars in Cuba,” said Eduardo Bhatia, a Puerto Rican senator. They could produce power before the hurricane, but not efficiently and not cheaply.
Even though Hurricane Irma spared Puerto Rico, brushing it lightly as it whirled west two weeks ago, almost 70 percent of the island lost power. Some residents were still waiting for electricity when Hurricane Maria hit the island.
Eugenio Toro and his wife Cristina Bernal lost power Sept. 6. As a result, they felt ill prepared for Hurricane Maria. “We couldn’t freeze things,” Mr. Toro said. “We never got the light back. We did go buy a generator but there is little gas and we can only use it a few hours a day.”
So much of the damage still needs to be assessed that it is possible the power situation may turn out to be less dire than feared. On Friday, Prepa’s chief executive, Ricardo Ramos, said on CNBC that he was hopeful that the power plants — as opposed to the power lines, pylons, substations and transformers — may be intact.
“We’ve lost probably 80 percent of the transmission and distribution infrastructure,” he said, adding that crews had completed only about a third of an island-wide survey of the damage and would have more information in two days.
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He also said that important buildings on the island, including Centro Medico and a convention center now being used by emergency workers, would have their power back in two or three days.
Mr. Ramos said he shortened estimates for how long power would be out after Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo of New York arrived Friday with teams to help restore electricity. “We expect three to four months at most,” for the whole island, he said.
Getting power back to Puerto Rico will be daunting and expensive. Transformers, poles and power lines snake from coastal areas across hard-to-access mountains. In some cases, the poles have to be maneuvered in place with helicopters.
And yet it gets worse. Puerto Rico is an island, which means the tons of much-needed supplies — trucks, poles, cables, tools, spare parts, helicopters — must be shipped into Caribbean ports, making the process infinitely more cumbersome. Trained electrical workers by the hundreds will also have to be flown into Puerto Rico, where they will have to find places to stay, not an uncomplicated task.
Photo
Fallen trees and debris in Old San Juan. Credit Erika P. Rodriguez for The New York Times
So every relief delivery can be a major event.
Mr. Cuomo and a delegation from New York arrived Friday morning with supplies that included more than 34,000 bottles of water, 500 flashlights, 1,400 cots and blankets and, perhaps most important, 10 generators.
Mr. Soto-Class said Prepa has been plagued by bungling and more recently a debt it cannot pay, a shortage of cash, and layoffs. Some of its infrastructure dates back to the 1970s, or earlier.
“When the electric power authority had the money, they mismanaged it and didn’t invest,” he said. “Now there is less money to run the authority with. This compounds it all, one on top of the other.”
By some measures, the authority, formed during the Great Depression, is the largest public electric utility in the United States, with more than 1.5 million customers. Most of the electricity it produces is generated by burning fuel oil — a dirty, outmoded source. It is virtually the last power company producing electricity that way. Hearings in the Puerto Rican Senate revealed that the authority bought sludge and then billed Puerto Rico’s unsuspecting ratepayers as if they had bought high-grade oil.
The lack of electricity also affects the water supply in certain areas. Some towns need electricity to get their water pumped in.
For now, generators are the saving grace for the lucky few who have them to crank up their refrigerator and a few fans. Some restaurants, hotels and many hospitals have operating generators. But the vast majority of Puerto Ricans on the impoverished island cannot afford them.
For older residents, the lack of power could be dangerous.
Ermerita Rosa Perez, 83, sat on her porch in San Juan praying the rosary and worrying not just about comfort but about survival.
“Four to six months without electricity?! Oh no, no, no, no, we will die,” Ms. Rosa said. “Us old people can’t make it that long. Just today, I was looking at this flooded mess and I was thinking of mopping. I said, ‘No, I can’t. I need to rest.’ I will take a cold water bath — which I’m not supposed to do, because I have arthritis — and rest.”
She worried about her health. “I am diabetic. I have high blood pressure. It’s so hot I can’t take it,” she said. “I’m an old lady, hauling pots to my carport to cook on a gas stove? It’s too much. So I sit here on my porch, trying to catch a breeze, praying to God to bring things back to normal.”
Her son, Hilberto Caban, was less panicked. He said the authorities were probably exaggerating how long the lights would be out.
“That way if it takes three weeks or a month, we’ll all say, ‘Great! Look how hard they worked!” he said.
Hurricane Maria passed, but for two women in Puerto Rico, the terror was only just beginning.
Neighborhoods have become disaster zones, the 100-mile island covered in detritus, destruction and despair.
By Samantha Schmidt, Sandhya Somashekhar and Katie Zezima September 21 at 7:29 PM Follow @schmidtsam7 Follow @sandhyawp Follow @katiezez
LEVITTOWN, PUERTO RICO — The winds had eased, the debris was no longer soaring through the air, the chaos had subsided. Elizabeth Serrano Roldan decided to lie in her bed and rest. In her gated, middle-class community in the San Juan suburbs, it appeared Hurricane Maria had finally passed.
Then came the water.
It was murky, and sudden, and it flowed into Serrano Roldan’s home with ferocity. Needing a wheelchair to get around, she was marooned on her mattress — her 82-year-old mother was similarly trapped nearby — as the water rose a foot, then two, then more. Her bed had become an island. There was no way out and no one heeding her pleas for help.
“We called and called and called,” Serrano Roldan said. “They promised to come, and nothing happened. It kept rising and rising and rising.”
She looked to the three crosses hanging over her bed, the painting of the Virgin María on the wall. And she prayed. No storm had ever done this here, not in this neighborhood. Hurricane Maria, it seemed, was coming to get her even after it was already gone.
Neighborhoods like this one across Puerto Rico have become disaster zones, the 100-mile island covered in detritus, destruction and despair. As of Thursday afternoon, more than 24 hours after the strong hurricane’s eye had cleared out, the scope of Maria’s damage was still unknown. Much of the U.S. territory remained without power — and could lack electricity for months. Communications were in many places nonexistent.
The information that did trickle out Thursday included images of downed power lines, caved-in buildings and streets blanketed in choppy brown water. Roofs in the capital of San Juan were torn apart, leaving the interiors open to the elements. Enormous trees were pulled from the ground by their roots, and forests were stripped of their leaves.
Stark images and grave news also emerged out of other islands battered by Maria. In the island nation of Dominica, the prime minister said Thursday that at least 15 were confirmed dead and 20 more were missing in the wake of the storm, according to the Associated Press.
A car sits in the middle of a flooded street in Levittown, Puerto Rico. (Dennis M. Rivera Pichardo/For The Washington Post)
‘Oh my God’
Here in Levittown, one of the largest planned communities in Puerto Rico, the flooding was triggered after authorities opened the gates to the Rio de la Plata, in the center of the island, to bring water levels down. The action caused an artificial lake to overflow about 8 or 9 p.m. Wednesday, flooding the community of thousands and trapping residents in their homes.
Early Thursday, emergency management teams and the National Guard rescued dozens of residents, taking them to nearby shelters. But many more remained stuck in their homes with almost no cellphone reception, some of them waiting on their rooftops.
More than 30 neighbors rushed to the two-story house where Serrano Roldan lives with her mother. The neighbors, many of them elderly, needed to find higher ground, and the Roldan family’s home was the only one on the block with a second floor. The women welcomed them.
As the neighbors sought refuge in the three small rooms upstairs, along with their five dogs, Serrano Roldan stayed downstairs, in her bed. Serrano Roldan has spinal muscular atrophy and uses a wheelchair; she must be lowered into her accessible bed with a crane.
With the waters swiftly rising around her on the first floor, she prayed: “Thy will be done.”
In front of her, sleeping on a lower bed, even closer to the rising water, was her mother, Anna Roldan, weeping.
“I couldn’t leave her,” the mother said.
Elizabeth Serrano Roldan, left, and Vicente Sanabria survived the flood together at a house in Levittown with other neighbors. (Dennis M. Rivera Pichardo/For The Washington Post)
As the sun rose, the water began to slowly pull away, allowing the neighbors to start filtering back to their homes. Residents assessed the damage. Many found all of their belongings — their furniture, their cars — destroyed from the floodwater.
The flooding was a shock to Levittown residents, not only because it was unexpected but because it was unlike anything the neighborhood had experienced. It is the largest housing development in the Toa Baja municipality, and historically, it had been considered safe from hurricanes. Residents across Levittown said their homes had never before flooded.
By midday Thursday, some of the neighborhood’s most vulnerable residents still hadn’t found a way out of their wet, damaged homes.
Serrano Roldan sat in her doorway in her waterlogged, inoperable wheelchair. She was stuck, sweating in the humid, wet home, with a bandage wrapped around an open vein on her right wrist.
The gray-haired woman, a college professor at the University of Puerto Rico, was recently diagnosed with bronchitis and sepsis. Before the storm made landfall, she had been receiving IV treatment from a home nurse. She desperately needed to be taken to a hospital but could no longer make calls on her landline.
Her mother reached over to her, trying to feed her a bologna sandwich.
“I don’t have an appetite right now,” she said. “Nothing.”
Her mother, who has severe arthritis, walked slowly through the first level of the home, assessing the damage. In the bedroom, where Serrano Roldan’s butterfly collection lines the walls, nearly everything was lost. All of their clothes, dressers, bedding, all of the machines Serrano Roldan uses to get around on a daily basis, soaked in the floodwater.
“Oh my God,” the mother said.
Thursday happened to be her 82nd birthday.
‘Very perilous shape’
Puerto Rico, home to 3.5 million U.S. citizens, was still getting pelted by Maria’s outer bands Thursday as search-and-rescue operations began. The heavy rains sparked dangerous flash floods, particularly in more remote mountainous areas, which the National Hurricane Center called “catastrophic” and “life-threatening.”
The poor conditions complicated efforts to assess the full scope of damage, though authorities in Puerto Rico are already estimating that the cost could reach into the billions.
President Trump acknowledged the likelihood of severe damage. The island is in “very, very, very perilous shape,” Trump told reporters in New York during a meeting with Ukraine President Petro Poroshenko.
Across the continental United States, people pleaded for information about their loved ones on the island, sending panicked messages on social media and dialing and dialing and dialing, getting nothing but silence or busy signals.
About 5 million Puerto Ricans live on the U.S. mainland, including 700,000 in New York City and more than a million in Florida.
“People are begging for information,” Vanessa Pahucki, a teacher in New York, wrote in an email. She has not yet heard from her uncle, who is in Naguabo, on the eastern side of the island. Pahucki started a Facebook group called Loved Ones in Puerto Rico — Check In, where people are asking for updates about areas where loved ones live, and where people on the island are sharing videos.
Rep. Nydia M. Velázquez (D-N.Y.) hasn’t heard from her five siblings in Yabucoa. She did speak to a sister near San Juan who lost her home when a nearby river flooded.
“It’s terrible, but it’s the story,” she said. “We’re just getting so many phone calls. People are desperate because they don’t know. They don’t know the whereabouts, they don’t know if they are fine, and it’s terrible. This is unprecedented. This is beyond the imagination of everyone.”
Hurricane Maria passed through Puerto Rico leaving behind a path of destruction across the national territory. (Dennis M. Rivera Pichardo/For The Washington Post)
‘We’ll find someone’
Waiting with Serrano Roldan and her mother were a married couple, Barbara Terreforte and Vicente Sanabria, the last of the Levittown neighbors that had sought refuge in the home. They are both in their mid-70s, and Sanabria has diabetes.
They sat by the front door, wondering how they might get out of there. The roads were still flooded, and the only means of escape would be in a large SUV.
Terreforte’s daughter had managed to walk more than an hour to check on her parents. Around the neighborhood, scores of other Puerto Ricans trudged through knee-deep waters to check on their relatives.
With no cellphone reception, it was nearly impossible for families to communicate. Some of the Levittown residents were in shelters, but many others were still in their homes. Families drove around with their windows open, asking locals if they had seen their aunts, parents or friends. Others, on the mainland and around the world, posted messages on Facebook and Twitter. They posted coordinates, house numbers and names of their relatives in Levittown, asking authorities to please help rescue them.
Terreforte’s daughter went to fetch an SUV to try to bring her parents to safety. But Terreforte didn’t want to leave Roldan and her daughter behind.
“How do you know someone will come get you?” Terreforte asked.
“Go, don’t stay here. You’ll be safer there,” Roldan said. “We’ll find someone.”
Then, minutes later, a white SUV pulled into the driveway. It was a family friend, who had heard from Serrano Roldan’s daughter in Florida that her mother and grandmother were stranded in Levittown. The family friend offered to drive the mother and daughter to a hospital for Serrano Roldan to receive the treatment she needed.
She was “like a little angel,” Serrano Roldan said, tears forming in her eyes.
Roldan quickly grabbed what she could — clothes, essential medicines, identification — and stuffed it in one of her daughter’s butterfly-print suitcases. The family friends helped lift Serrano Roldan out of her wheelchair and into the car.
“I’ll sit with you and hold onto you,” her mother said. Then, waving to neighbors, they drove off through the flooded streets. A way out.
Amid drought and conflict, Kenyan women try new livestock: bees.
Residents of Kailer village normally live to the rhythm of mooing cows and bleating goats. But over the past year, silence has reigned over these swathes of dry land dotted with cacti and mathenge, a dense shrub.
FEATURE-Amid drought and conflict, Kenyan women try new livestock: bees
By Moraa Obiria
6 MIN READ
KAILER, Kenya, Aug 2 (Thomson Reuters Foundation) - Residents of Kailer village normally live to the rhythm of mooing cows and bleating goats. But over the past year, silence has reigned over these swathes of dry land dotted with cacti and mathenge, a dense shrub.
Faced with severe drought, herders and their animals have had to travel further than normal to find water or grazing - and to escape worsening raids on their livestock at home, say the village's women.
"We don't know when they'll return, as cattle raiders may attack them on the way," said a worried Christine Lewatachum of Kailer, a village in the Rift Valley county of Baringo.
As climate change brings worsening drought and more erratic rainfall, competition for water and grazing is growing, stoking rivalry and theft between livestock herders.
Women and their children, left to mind some of the animals at home, also find themselves vulnerable to livestock raids - and left without an income when they happen.
But an unusual kind of livestock is helping: bees.
Since 2009, women in the village - and others like it in the region - have managed beehives as a new way of earning a living.
They use the hives to produce honey, soap, beauty creams, candles and cough syrup, among other products, and sell them to residents from neighbouring villages.
While the business has been going on for some time, it is proving particularly valuable as droughts grow more frequent and severe as a result of climate change.
Even as conditions grow more uncertain, "we want to break free from poverty," said Josephine Lemangi, one resident.
Solomon Kerieny, an animal production officer at the Ministry of Agriculture, said that a longer dry season and erratic rainfall have severely affected earnings from livestock, making families more vulnerable.
"When houses lose livestock, they lose their livelihood," he said. "Women need to embrace alternative sources of income like beekeeping so they can withstand weather shocks like these."
Foiling Cattle Raiders
For women in Baringo county, cattle raids and violence are a fact of life. In 2009, Faith Lekimosong, a member of the women's group, was forced to leave her village of Kiserian without her livestock - 80 goats and 18 cows – after eight raiders attacked her home.
"After that I would hear gunshots ringing in my head for a long time," she recalled, having found refuge in a nearby village.
"It is a nightmare to live in a place where you have no idea if your animals will be there tomorrow," she added.
The women's group, which Lewatachum co-founded in 2000, initially specialised in buying and raising dairy goats "to stop depending on our husbands' income".
In 2005, however, cattle raiders stole most of the women's herd. "It was too much," said Lewatachum. "We sold the few remaining goats and had to find a new solution."
They decided on beekeeping. "Raiders are less interested in bees as they don't consider them as valuable as livestock," Lewatachum said.
The Ministry of Agriculture and various charities donated five beehives to the women in 2009, and trained them on making honey-derived products.
Income and Jobs
Every three months, the group harvests and sells about 22kg of unprocessed honey for 4,000 Kenyan shillings (about $38). Processed honey sells for three times that price.
A 100g pot of body cream goes for 200 shillings ($2), while a piece of honey soap fetches between 20 and 30 shillings ($0.20-0.30).
Other products made from honey or honeycomb are more unusual.
"The arthritis and asthma syrup as well as the snake venom antidote are particularly popular," said Lewachtum. "Residents often get bitten by snakes lurking in shrubs when fetching water or searching for grazing spots."
The women display their products at weddings or farm fairs, she said. When they aren't able to meet demand, they buy honey from other beekeepers.
"In times of drought there is no nectar for bees to feed on, so we can only harvest once a year instead of three times," said Lemangi, another group member.
The women put the profit they make into a fund from which members can take out loans with a 1 percent interest rate.
This has allowed them to expand their operation to 14 beehives and to buy a 2.25-acre piece of land in the village, where they plan to set up a honey processing plant.
"We will use it (the plant) to increase our production so we can sell products in the rest of the country and offer jobs to women and girls," said Lewatachum, as she straightened a crumpled bee suit in a makeshift shed.
She said the initiative has provided women with not only a better income but better prospects for the future.
"When the members take out loans, they know they have to pay them back and that prompts them to think about potentially setting up their own businesses or renting a portion of land to farm it," she said.
Group members now earn an average of 26,000 shillings (about $250) per month from their various businesses, compared to next to nothing previously, as everything was stolen by raiders, she added.
Security Still an Issue
While the women are becoming more secure economically, continuing insecurity threatens their progress, experts say.
"Without physical security, the women cannot establish long-term investments, as cattle raids or counter-attacks routinely burn houses and injure residents," said Tom Nyamache, a professor of economics at Kenya's Turkana University College.
In February, the government deployed over 100 police reservists to the area to reinforce local authorities - but even they were attacked by the bandits, Nyamache said.
But while cattle raids continue, the beehives have so far remained intact. (
Santa Barbara’s bee whisperer.
Nick Wigle saves hidden hives with love and kindness.
There is a man among us who talks to the bees. They spoke recently on a warm Sunday morning in my driveway. Nick Wigle was standing with his hands on his hips, squinting down at a small gas-meter vault packed with 3,000 stinging residents. “All right, guys,” he said. “We’re going to take this nice and easy.” The hive buzzed back, its low tone telegraphing the gentleness unique to Santa Barbara’s bees.
I’d liked the idea of hosting honeybees, but the young swarm, recently propagated from its mother hive somewhere in our Mission Canyon neighborhood, chose a particularly inconvenient time and place to move in, right near the front door and in the middle of some construction work. We wouldn’t hit them with pesticides — we worried about the modern plight of the bumblebee known as colony collapse disorder — so we looked up live removal services. Wigle, owner and operator of Super Bee Rescue and Removal, came highly recommended for his passion and professionalism. Turns out, he also puts on a bit of a show.
As he lit his smoke can and set up a CAUTION sign, Wigle told me he’d just wrapped up a few tough removals of unusually aggressive — “spicy” — colonies that necessitated a boom lift and a vacuum. He was looking forward to a mellower job where he could leave off his protective suit and simply “be with the bees.” Crouched down with head and hands exposed, he gingerly propped open the vault lid. A volleyball-size hive shimmering with wings clung to its underside.
Slowly but deliberately, Wigle began prying off thick slabs of honeycomb and transferring them to a wooden beekeeper’s box. He’d scoop up a handful of bees now and then and tip them into the round opening. I surprised myself by feeling both assured and amazed as I watched the tricky dance of trust taking place just a few feet away. Every so often, a rogue bee would dart angrily toward me. Wigle would walk over calmly and shepherd it back.
All the while, Wigle narrated the history of my hive’s budding life cycle, its workers’ flight path over a nearby honeysuckle bush, and how Alamar Avenue below us is affectionately known among beekeepers as “bee alley” for its abundance of healthy colonies. He half-joked about how he was careful not to look like a bear, by showering and shaving before a removal job. He was able to smell the bees’ moods — “acidic, unripe bananas” when they’re agitated and a “warm, happy” scent of pheromones when they tell one another it’s safe to move from their hive to the box. The changeover of the queen is the absolute foolproof form of persuasion.
Right then he spotted her. “There you are,” he said softly, plucking the matriarch from the brood and placing her on her new waxen throne. “Watch,” he said. “Soon they’ll start walking over on their own.” Within minutes, a line of female workers and male drones began marching dutifully from the vault to the box. An hour later the changeover was complete. There didn’t appear to be any casualties.
Wigle handed me a jar of honey from a previous job and said thanks for calling him. If the gas company had gotten to the hive before he did, they would have nuked it, he said. Then he loaded up his tools and the hive and headed to his home at HeartStone Ranch in Carpinteria. There, he will nurse the colony — inevitably weakened by the move — back to full health before selling it to a backyard beekeeper or commercial farmer.
Wigle said it’s not unusual for clients who’ve requested a removal to ask for their hive back. They wind up missing it. “Bees are incredibly intelligent and incredibly sweet,” he said. “People realize bees are not out to kill — they’re more like cows with wings.”
I already miss mine.
Nick Wigle isn’t the only live-bee-rescue expert in town. And he’s not cheap. There are hobbyists and part-timers who handle easy removals for free or a nominal fee. But few, if any, have the equipment, insurance, and experience that Wigle does.
Wigle relishes the jobs no one wants — 50-year-old monster hives wedged in the delicate rafters of a historic estate, migrating swarms that take up residence in crowded malls and schools. With only one full-time employee, he still manages one major removal a day, sawing through walls and army-crawling through attics to reach the bees. An infrared camera pinpoints hidden hives, which maintain an internal temperature of 92-93 degrees. Wigle rarely takes a day off, and he recently bought his own lift because he kept returning his rentals covered in honey. “They didn’t like that,” he smiled.
Frustrated pest-control companies — which often have trouble fully exterminating bees because they accidentally leave the hive or some honeycomb behind for the next swarm to find — tip him off to new work. Wigle pays them in money or honey. “I do not want there to be a single beehive that has to get exterminated,” he declared, explaining how critical the pollinators are to the county’s avocados, strawberries, and dozens of other fruit and vegetable crops.
More than eight feet of honeycomb guarded by 20,000 bees were extracted from inside this home’s chimney flume.
With a South Coast coverage zone, Wigle is regularly contracted by the City of Santa Barbara and the Santa Barbara Unified School District, and last year he removed and relocated colonies from a UCSB Associated Students building and a dead 35-foot palm tree at the zoo.
In beekeeping terms, Wigle is a relative newcomer, starting just eight years ago. But he’s packed in a lot in those years, and he credits an entrepreneurial streak from his childhood for guiding him into it. At age 9, he started his own egg business on his parents’ avocado ranch. They assumed he’d tend to a few chickens and then lose interest. Instead he built an empire of 150 chickens and hauled crates of eggs to the farmers’ market, where he’d sit and sell in his overalls. He partnered with his sister, but bought her out in a hostile takeover.
In high school, Wigle got into electronics and helped his dad fix his office computers before starting his own mobile repair business. Many of his clients, he found, needed help selling vintage cars and antique furniture on eBay, so he turned that into his next moneymaking venture. That lasted until 2008, when the economy tanked. Wigle took a job with the Sheriff’s Office and worked as a custody deputy for two years, stationed at the jail. But the place wore on him. “I need to be outside, and I need to be helping people,” he said. “I couldn’t do either at the jail.”
Around this time, Wigle’s parents divorced. His mother kept the ranch, but she worried about how to make it financially viable since root rot had killed all the avocado trees. On Craigslist, Wigle found a commercial beekeeper looking for a home for his 600 hives. They offered space on the ranch, and in addition to paying rent, the beekeeper — a Russian man named Anatole who spoke little English — agreed to apprentice Wigle. “He did the best he could,” said Wigle, “but I had to go read every beekeeping book I could find because I couldn’t figure out what the hell he was talking about.”
By the end of his training, Wigle had absorbed a quirky but invaluable mix of old-world, sensory-based beekeeping techniques along with Western scientific knowledge. “That allows me to work with pretty much any kind of client,” he said. “For instance, if a client is like, ‘We want to do this super organically and, you know, be hippies,’ I think, great, I love that game.” He recalled the rescue at my house. “That day I decided I was just going to sit and commune with the bees.”
It was another Sunday morning, and this time we were at his ranch. The main house, as it often is, was rented out for a wedding, so Wigle; his wife, Rachel; and their young daughter, Sarah, stay in a guesthouse off the barn. Sarah likes to play with stinger-less male bees she calls the “fuzzies.”
Wigle was walking two helpers — his employee, Tracy, and the family nanny, Chelsea — through the process of spinning out honey from wax, which they’d later use to make candles. The thick, amber liquid oozed into four gallon-size buckets and filled the kitchen with a sticky-sweet aroma. The giggles came easily. Wigle called it “honey delirium.”
Super Bee is big on education, said Wigle. He spends large portions of his nonstop workweek tending to the hives of 80 or so residential beekeeper clients, teaching them how to recognize the signs of whether a colony is struggling or thriving. It takes patience. “I know instant gratification is awesome,” Wigle tells people, “but welcome to farming.” Among his clients are Montecito celebrities whom he won’t name. “I don’t care how many movies or records you’ve made,” he said. “If you’re interested in bees, we can be friends.”
Commercial farms and ranches also contract Wigle, some holding as many as 36 separate hives. In his own “hospital apiary,” he has more than 100, with plans to turn an old Airstream trailer on the property into a honey processing room. He also wants to re-establish a plexiglass-sided observation hive at the Museum of Natural History, where he sometimes lectures. Schools invite him to talk to kids, who, he said, “always ask the best questions. Though it gets tricky explaining the mating cycle.” When a male drone mates with a queen, his reproductive organs are ripped out mid-air. “We tell the kids it’s the boy bee’s last day because it just takes so much out of him.”
Wigle has trained dozens of interns and WWOOFers (World Wide Opportunities on Organic Farms, an international program of work-stay volunteers). The experience helped him overcome his introverted personality, which made him the quiet kid in high school and created some difficulty with early clients. Now, he really enjoys chitchatting — especially about bees.
One of his favorite topics is how particularly large, healthy hives are turning up these days — a welcome relief from the early years of colony collapse disorder (CCD) in 2008 and 2009, when bee populations around the world were perishing mysteriously at astonishingly high rates. No single cause could be identified, though potential culprits include mites, parasites, pesticides, and habitat loss. Panic spread that the species might not survive, threatening the security of the world’s food web. While certainly still a serious problem, CCD losses appear to be slowing, according to the Environmental Protection Agency.
Still sticky from her honeycomb crib, a baby bee emerges into the world.
With its temperate climate and hearty lineages of drought-tolerant bees, Santa Barbara avoided widespread catastrophe, though did suffer a general decline and a couple of scary incidents. In 2012, 18 hives within a two-mile radius in Montecito suddenly failed, many of them under the care of Wigle and his clients. “It was horrible,” he remembered. Keepers connect deeply with their bees. There was grief and anger. “It was like a family member died.” Worse, there were no answers, though Wigle suspects pesticides.
Too often, Wigle said, one hive is sprayed and the poisons are spread among many others. “A lot of landscapers in town spray without a license and without the knowledge of what they’re really doing,” he said. Two years ago in Carpinteria, piles of dead bees suddenly appeared throughout the office park that was Lynda.com’s headquarters. Concerned beekeepers collected some of the bodies for testing, but guards on the property confiscated them, news reports at the time stated. No explanation could be pinpointed, but again, pesticides were at the top of the suspect list.
Wigle may look like a wild man with a death wish when he reaches bare-handed into a ball of stinging insects, but those moments are careful and calculated, because Wigle insists on a safety-first approach to all his work. Much earlier in his career, he learned the hard way when he was stung in the head more than 50 times by a hive of Africanized bees in Winchester Canyon. He’s still nailed occasionally, but he’s built up such a tolerance that he barely feels it. He knows other beekeepers who swear by the health benefits of the toxin, which in small doses has reportedly helped reduce pain and inflammation from arthritis or autoimmune diseases.
Africanized bees — the more belligerent cousin species of the Western honeybee — are rarely found in Santa Barbara, said Wigle. Other areas of the country don’t have it as easy Some beekeepers in the Southwestern states, for instance, have no choice but to suit up in heavy gear, meticulously searching for any small opening. Even then, they tiptoe toward their hives, wait 50 yards away, and sometimes turn around slowly if the colony looks like it’s having a particularly bad day.
On the other end of the spectrum are Santa Barbara bees, with their relatively laid-back colonies. According to Wigle, the calmest are in downtown Santa Barbara and the spicier are around Goleta. Year-round access to nectar and pollen keep hives fat and happy. That’s why commercial beekeepers from as far away as the East Coast truck their hives here for the winter, when eucalyptus and gum trees are in bloom. You’ll often see them parked in open fields near Costco.
There’s a mid-17th-century beekeeper saying still used today that goes “A swarm in May is worth a load of hay; a swarm in June is worth a silver spoon; but a swarm in July is not worth a fly,” meaning that later in the year there’s less time for new bee colonies to collect pollen from blossoms so they can survive the winter. So Wigle advises would-be keepers to hold tight until the spring.
In the meantime, he’ll keep spreading the word. “Call it what you want,” he said. “Stupid, brave, something else. I just want people to know you don’t have to kill bees. There’s another way.”
If you’ve ever had Lyme disease, blame the anti-vaxxers.
In 1998 the FDA approved a a drug called Lymerix, and it was pretty effective until the chronic Lyme crowd and the anti-vaxxers started ranting:
Lyme disease has been spreading for years, and thanks to global warming it’s poised to explode over the next few years. This map is from New Scientist:
That’s bad. But it turns out there’s a vaccine for Lyme disease. Or I guess I should say, there used to be a vaccine for Lyme disease. In 1998 the FDA approved a a drug called Lymerix, and it was pretty effective until the chronic Lyme crowd and the anti-vaxxers started ranting:
Influenced by now-discredited research purporting to show a link between the MMR vaccine and autism, activists raised the question of whether the Lyme disease vaccine could cause arthritis. Media coverage and the anti-Lyme-vaccination groups gave a voice to those who believed their pain was due to the vaccine, and public support for the vaccine declined.
“The chronic arthritis was not associated with Lyme,” says Stanley Plotkin, an adviser to pharmaceutical company Sanofi Pasteur. “When you’re dealing with adults, all kinds of things happen to them. They get arthritis, they get strokes, heart attacks. So unless you have a control group, you’re in la-la land.”
But there was a control group – the rest of the US population. And when the FDA reviewed the vaccine’s adverse event reports in a retrospective study, they found only 905 reports for 1.4 million doses. Still, the damage was done, and the vaccine was benched.
All of you who have had Lyme disease should know this. You could have avoided it if not for the ravings of the anti-vax nitwits and the gullibility of the mainstream TV talkers who give them a platform. It’s long past time to put an end to this idiocy.
But I won’t leave you without some good news. First, although you can’t vaccinate yourself, you can vaccinate your dog. So there’s that. Second, a French company has developed an even better Lyme vaccination, and it should be ready in 2023. That’s a mere six years. Just be patient, OK?
