Garnett Puett has spent his entire life among the honeybees. He was born in Georgia, the fourth generation in a family of apiarists, and he had his first hive by the time he was five years old. From the bees, Puett began to learn some of the more delicate, beautiful aspects of life: the way community could lead to purpose and hard work to nectar. Away from the bees, life was not so magical. Civil rights battles were raging in the South, and Puett’s father, who supported desegregation, watched the family’s prized bee yards burned to the ground during the strife. He died a year later, done in, says his son, by the heartbreak of it all.
Puett’s mother moved her children north to Idaho and married another beekeeper, Jim Powers, one of the largest honey producers in the United States. Powers had beehives all over the country, and in 1972 he pulled a trick “out of thin air,” says his stepson, and expanded his honey harvesting operation to Hawai‘i. Puett, who by this time was a teenager, came to the Islands during the summers. Hawai‘i offered a less taxing experience than the “grueling, torturous” six-days-a-week, ten-hours-a-day harvesting schedule in Idaho, and it was in the Islands that Puett truly “got mesmerized by bees.” Foreshadowing what was to come, it was the bees’ physical creations that inspired him the most.
“I was fascinated by how the bees constructed their homes,” he recalls today. “I loved the tactile quality of the wax. I loved watching them create these beautiful structures: How do they know to do it? How do they do it so perfectly?”
As much as he loved the bees, Puett was still ready, by the time he was headed for college, to leave the honey business behind him for a while. He wound up at the University of Washington where he studied art—sculpture, specifically, though if you’d asked him at the time whether that decision was down to the bees, he wouldn’t have made the connection. More likely he would have said it was because of his biological parents, who were not just apiarists, but artists: his mother a painter, his father a writer.
At UW, Puett worked in wax, then cast in bronze. But by the time he graduated the appeal of bronze had lost its luster, and toiling in wax Puett had found himself missing his childhood companions. “Maybe I’d just been stung too many times,” he laughs. “After a couple hundred thousand stings, you kind of miss it.” He’d also started studying “more esoteric artists, people working with the earth and natural processes,” and that too had inspired him to head in a different direction.
Degree in hand, Puett took off for New York City to continue his studies at the renowned Pratt Institute. It was the early 1980s, and “everything in the art world was happening in New York City,” he shrugs. As he drove east across the country to Pratt, he couldn’t stop thinking about doing “something radical and innovative.” By the time he arrived in Brooklyn, he’d figured out what that was. So he ordered a few thousand bees to join him in the Big Apple and once again started working with his old friends, this time collaborating on pieces with the planet’s most accomplished wax workers.
Puett found a 1,500-square-foot art space for $400 a month and installed an apiary with ten hives. He put rubber tubes through the walls to the outside world so the bees could come and go as they pleased (“My bees were all over Brooklyn!”) and began his experiment. Puett would start by crafting a piece—perhaps a wax casting or an edifice of found objects—and then cover it in a simple sugar syrup, put it in a wooden box and turn it over to the bees. They, in turn, would swarm all over it, building cells and shaping it with their own distinctive architecture. Suddenly rather than working solo, Puett was one of a pullulating multitude—not the queen bee, but perhaps the king—a director literally working with a cast of thousands, à la Lean on Lawrence of Arabia or Mankiewicz on Cleopatra.
Puett’s work quickly became a phenomenon in Manhattan’s art world, featured everywhere from The New Yorker to People magazine, which marveled at his “miniature Michelangelos.” He dropped out of Pratt and graduated from “little figurative things to full-size castings to more abstract pieces. I’d start with a simple form and let it grow,” he says. “You had to find the proper scale. For larger pieces you need large swarms. For a two-and-a-half-foot piece, for example, I’d work with twenty thousand to forty thousand bees. A six-foot piece might be a hundred thousand bees.” Puett would leave his collaborators on a piece anywhere from a few days to a couple of weeks, letting them “soften” it. It was all a sort of orchestration, as he calls it, that involved watching the bees’ creation and feeding them sugar syrup every day to inspire them.
Success continued throughout the ten years Puett spent in the East Coast art world. He had an agent and sold his pieces for as much as $10,000 each. One sculpture was featured on the cover of a Susan Sontag book; others were displayed in the Hirshhorn Museum—though there was always a risk any time the work went on exhibit, especially in the early days: Viewers, possibly overcome by memories from the breakfast table, would try to break off pieces of the beeswax and eat them.
At the height of it all, Puett, by this time married with children, bought Powers’ place in South Kona and left his self-described life of “playing Picasso” behind him. Or perhaps it is more accurate to say that he began to make art of a different sort: Over the last twenty years, since moving to the farm in 1993, he has transformed it into the largest organic honey operation in the United States. These days, rather than letting his bees loose in Brooklyn, Puett takes them all over the Big Island: into groves of macadamia nut trees, into forests filled with ‘öhi‘a lehua trees, into bush land dominated by christmasberry trees. The varying flavors of the trees’ nectars ensure that the honeys that result are distinct and unique.
At its zenith Puett’s operation, Big Island Bees, had 3,900 hives, and because each hive is home to some 50,000 bees, that meant 195 million bees. As busy as they proverbially are, the bees were producing more than a million pounds of honey for Puett each year. But that was in the good old days—and anyone who has been following bees in the twenty-first century knows that the story was taken a sharp turn. Bee populations are crashing around the world, and Hawai‘i, sadly, is witnessing the same devastation. These days Puett is preoccupied with doing everything he can to help the bees survive varroa mite and hive beetle infestations, which have thus far claimed more than half of his 3,900 hives. “You just want to walk away and cry,” he says of the experience of opening up a hive and finding all of the bees within it dead. “It’s carnage.” Last year his production was down to a quarter of its high: 260,000 pounds of organic honey.
Puett has had offers to sell, to propagators who would transform the farm into a queen bee breeding operation. He’s been sorely tempted to take them, he says, and leave behind the “war zone.” He is 54 now, his children are grown and he finds himself yearning to return to his “severe passion to make art” and go back to sculpture. And yet at the end of the day, he hasn’t been able to sell. He doesn’t know, he says, if he has the emotional stamina to stay—or how he could live with himself if he left. “Bees are extremely compelling, and once you get a connection with any animal …” He trails off. “When I open the hives, the bees are not aggressive. I think they know I’m there to help.” These days the bees teach Puett not so much about purpose and reward as about survival and adaptation—lessons they themselves are learning as fast as they can. For the time being, Puett is working with “the survivor stock,” the bees that have best been able to resist the beetles and the mites.
And so instead of leaving, he has just opened a small museum at the Big Island Bees headquarters in South Kona. There he has collected a history of the bees and his own life: Some of his New York sculpture can be found, and a framed portrait of his grandparents across the street from the White House in 1937 for an international beekeepers convention. The history of how honey has been collected over the years is laid out, and there are a few bee-related gewgaws, like an antiquated tea set made with a honeycomb pattern. Best of all are the latest collaborations between the apiarist and Apis mellifera: differing honeys collected across a vast, volcanic island, representing millions of miles flown and millions of flowers decanted—another creative triumph for Puett and the bees.