Chase then called the Sandoval family, a Hispanic family of beekeepers who had, according to the mother, Theresa Sandoval, three generations of expertise on bees. They were from central Mexico. She was the only one he trusted to help him out of this serious business disaster.
A year ago, he’d tried to persuade her family of five to take over the job of managing the twenty-five hives, but they had refused. Was it because of this supposed beekeeper, Troy Court, that he’d hired to oversee the business? The balding man had been an egotistical bastard, bragging about his ability to create successful commercial beekeeping start-ups. And it had been Theresa Sandoval who had warned him that Court was no beekeeper. She’d seen him out at the area where Chase had the hives and had come to him later that day, warning him about it.
But what the hell did Chase know about bees? This was his fault due to his ignorance about the bee industry. His mother, Mary, had founded Mama’s Store, the highly popular organic grocery store in Silver Creek, and had pushed him into creating honey production as an “egg” in the ranch family’s financial basket. Mary wanted only raw, unfiltered, organic honey to sell in her store, not trusting other companies or their labels that touted the slogan.
His mother was hell on wheels when it came to details. She’d collected five commercial honey companies from around the USA, regional as well as national, and asked them to send her one jar each of their honey. And then she’d had it run through every test known to mankind to find out if they were telling the truth that their product was raw, unfiltered organic honey—or not.
Unscrupulous companies could put water in with the honey, making it thinner. Another trick was to mix fructose syrup with the honey. A third had no pollen in the honey, so it couldn’t legally be called honey. The fourth had filtered out the pollen because it came from China and not the USA, but the company was selling it fraudulently as “Made in the USA.” The fifth jar had not only no pollen in it, was from China and had antibiotics in it, of all things. Mary remembered in 2001 that Chinese beekeepers had an epidemic of foulbrood disease that killed millions of honeybee brood eggs. They used chloramphenicol, a carcinogenic antibiotic that had been banned by the FDA, to fight it. That honey couldn’t be legally sold in the USA, as a result.
Cheating businesspeople, Mary told him, showing him the results of the lab tests on all five jars. These companies were after money, not caring what they sold to the public. That was when they hired Court to set up and create a commercial honey production on the ranch, instead. Mary always wanted to know where the product came from, and that it had damned well be raw and organic—or else. By putting hives on the ranch, they would know the honey was the real deal. Her consumers could buy their honey with trust.
He called his mother on his cell phone.
“Hellllooooo, good morning . . .” Mary sang.
“Mom, it’s me,” he said heavily, scowling. “Court has quit.”
“Really?”
Chase expected his mother to say anything but that. “Yeah, he sent me an email this morning. You don’t sound surprised or unhappy about it.”
“Well,” she said, “that’s good news and bad news, son. The good news is that egotistical idiot is gone. The bad news is what might be wrong with our beehives? He left for a reason. Have you been out to look at the hives this morning?”
“No, it’s only seven a.m. And I know next to nothing about beekeeping.” His mother got up at five a.m., was at her grocery store by six thirty a.m. “Besides, what would I look for?”
“Well, it’s mid-May. Those hives need a lot of care and work at this time of year because they’re coming out of winter. I wonder why he suddenly up and left?”
“I don’t know and I don’t care. One thing is obvious: He’s left us high and dry. We don’t have a beekeeper.”
“Call Theresa Sandoval. She’s up at this time of morning. Ask her to come out, bring her three grown children, or whoever is still at home, and carefully check each of those hives, Chase. I don’t trust Court any further than I could throw his swelled-headed body.”
Mary disliked Court, that was no secret. She’d warned Chase he was a braggart and didn’t know half of what he said he knew. Mary knew more about the beekeeping industry and caring for bees than he did, she’d told Chase. But he’d relied on Court to manage the new company. What the hell! Sighing, he growled, “I’ll call her. But I need a trained professional commercial beekeeping person to run this operation and business for us, Mom. I can’t do it and neither can you.”
“Right you are,” Mary said lightly. “Call Theresa. Have her come over and check out those hives and give us a report. There’s a reason why Court suddenly quit. I don’t trust him.”
“Where do you find a professional commercial bee person?” he wondered out loud.
“Leave it to me to suss out,” Mary said archly. “I get beekeeper magazines. They have a classified section. I’ll start lookin’. Call me back when Theresa has checked out those hives, okay?”
“Yes, I will.” Chase scowled and hung up, fingering through the Rolodex on his desk. He wasn’t blazingly fast on a computer, and in fact hated typing in general because he was no good at it. But running the forty-thousand-acre family dynasty, Three Bars Ranch? That he could do and had been doing very well. At thirty years old, he was pretty damned good at managing the different groups of wranglers who did the hard, daily work to keep the ranch not only solvent, but flourishing. Except for the beekeeping part of it.
He punched in the numbers for Theresa Sandoval, hoping she’d answer.
“Hello?” Theresa said.
“This is Chase,” he said, “and I desperately need your beekeeping expertise, Theresa, and any of your kids that can come along to help you.”
* * *
Mary and Chase sat with Theresa at four p.m. that same day at the kitchen table. Mary had made a pot of coffee and they were grouped around the large, round maple table that had an oil cloth of brightly colored flowers across it.
“To sum it up,” Theresa said, opening her hands, “this is very bad news,” she warned. “My two daughters, son, and I, opened up every one of those twenty-five hives to inspect them. Twenty of them were in hive collapse.” She frowned, her brown eyes flashing. “The reason is because Court fed them corn syrup through the winter, which is not nutritious like honey is. They’ve starved to death and died. You have anywhere from forty- to eighty thousand bees dead in every one of those hives. Twenty of the twenty-five hives you bought last year, are gone.”
Mary gasped, her hands flying to her mouth, her eyes huge with shock and grief.
Chase bit back a curse. He’d spent a lot of money buying those hives and stocking them. Each hive cost a thousand dollars, not to mention three hundred dollars for three pounds of live bees that were a nuclear colony or nuc, plus a queen bee. In all, each of those hives easily cost over one thousand dollars. And Court had just destroyed twenty thousand dollars of their money and walked off to parts unknown. Chase felt guilty as hell that all those bees were dead. He had no idea of what Court had been doing out there. Dammit !
“I’m sorry,” Theresa said, sadness in her tone. “The other five hives are lean and close to collapsing. I would suggest that you let us give the honey stored in your barn to the bees to eat. We’ll remove the fructose, which is starving them, and they will have a chance to survive.”