The Creator may be seen in all the works of his hands; but in few more directly than in the wise economy of the Honey-Bee. - L.L. Langstroth
There are rarely dull moments on a homestead, but on the occasion you should find yourself having one, it would be wise to rise from your restful repose and investigate the disquieting numbness. You are likely to find Obi (our disobedient dog) walking around the yard, drooling all over the living chicken in his mouth. The poor girl has already submitted to whatever fate awaits her.
Or perhaps Madelynn is stuck on the shed roof again because she forgot I parked a box blade on her normal landing pad of soft gravel. Or perhaps Zeb is trying to strike a Bic lighter to see if pine straw burns.
One such Saturday things were going too smoothly. The chores were mostly complete. The kids played in Radagast, their ancient oak that looks more like a broken-down old wizard losing his footing than it does a tree. Mae Lynn hung laundry. I rummaged through the garden, squeezing stinkbugs and cropping the suckers off tomato vines. I still had a compost pile to turn, cardboard to scatter and bury with mulch in the garden; rabbit manure awaited scattering to fertilize the garden.
From the 20-foot perch of the tree, Kathryn noticed the mayhem. Across the way at the northernmost point of the fenced half-acre, both of our beehives lay collapsed on their backsides. A cloud of angry bees swirled like diesel exhaust when one of those drivers annoyingly punches the pedal and spews a choke storm of smoke everywhere. You could hear their violent buzzing from a hundred feet away. They were mad as, well, a bunch of very angry bees. Kathryn yelled, “Papa, look!”
For a moment I thought I was trapped in the Matrix. The world was the spoon and the hives were upright while everything around them went sideways. I looked at the hives the same way you look at a jury summons or a water bill that inexplicably increased four-fold.
Snap out of it, Adam. I had to get to work. Questions of how this happened were irrelevant at this point. Was it a small earthquake that caused the fall? Highly doubtful. Did they do such a good job of storing honey in those boxes that everything became top heavy? That’s more likely the cause. It’s also highly likely there was some shoddy structural engineering by said beekeeper when I originally set up the hives.
I wasn’t sure how long the bees would impatiently wait for their world to be righted but I didn’t want to find out. I ran to the shed where I keep my smoker and hive tool, as well as my hood, veil, gloves and extra long sleeve shirts. I began donning my getup and yelled for Graham to get me some pine straw. Zeb didn’t actually have any this time.
I stuffed the smoker with thick, balled up layers of dry pine straw, lit the little pokers and started working the bellows to feed the flame with air until I could close the lid and have a steady effervescent trail of cool smoke.
This all happened back in the deep throes of summer heat. The mid-morning humidity was already forcing the chickens to find shady spots for dust baths.
My honeybees are normally gentle. Bees, especially workers, when out foraging in the garden or along the roadside, are so inclined to perform their innate work of brilliance that they seem oblivious to your presence. They remain so docile that they allow for a gentle pat on the thorax while they are stinger deep in the stamen of a flower.
Even working the hives, scanning for predation and any sign of danger, is usually a harmless task. I do wear a veil and gloves because when I am stung I quickly look like Sloth from “The Goonies.” Once I was stung on my right forefinger knuckle and before the day’s end, I looked like I had a baseball glove surgically attached to my hand.
When “working” a hive, the bees patiently work around you as you meddle through their labor, pulling frames, examining for brood, capped honey and small hive beetles scurrying as if to flee from the sunlight like tiny vampires.
With my gear on, my tool handy and my smoker billowing, I cautiously approached, giving the bees a wide berth. Their buzz and rumble sounded like an idling moped, an old one with a dinged up muffler. One of the wonders of honeybees is how they glue everything together with what is called propolis, also known as “bee glue.” With a mixture of saliva and beeswax the bees glue everything inside the bee boxes. They glue the frames to the edges of the boxes. They glue the boxes to each other. This is why your hive tool is so important; you literally use it like a crow bar to pry all of this stuff apart to be able to inspect the hives. My two hives are setup very similarly. Each hive has two deep brood boxes which contain 10 deep frames each. This is where the queen lays her eggs and the bees store the honey they’ll consume throughout the winter drought of pollen and nectar. Then there are two medium boxes on top of the second deep box, separated by a metal screen called a queen excluder. Think of this like a chain link fence; a kitten can squeeze through one of the openings but the mama cat can’t get through. The worker bees store lots of honey in these top two boxes and this is what we “robbed” for this year’s late harvest. Four boxes and forty frames (give or take) of capped honey provided nearly 10 gallons for us. It was an amazing experience, and it all happened just a few months after both towers collapsed, sending the bees in all manner of dizzying directions.
There are times for celebration. This day, despite being Mae Lynn’s birthday, wasn’t one while erecting the bee towers. In the summer heat, sweating furiously, I continued my work of reassembling the boxes. Occasionally, I would retreat when the bees revved up their little engines, too furious with the war torn conditions of their homes. I was an alien invader from a foreign land; they didn’t ask for this war but, by God, they would let me know they were fighters.
I took my time. After about two hours and 13 stings in various places, everything was corrected. (Thank God, the bee that managed to get inside my veil was just as confused and scared as I was and didn’t sting my face).
Because some of the frames broke loose from the boxes, honey and broken bits of comb naturally ran everywhere. Graham brought me a silver bowl and I placed broken chunks of honeycomb in the bowls. Once the cloud of angry bees settled down I left the hives to place the bowl of honeycomb in the freezer. Still wearing my veil, I tried to scurry away the bees who must have saw the broken comb and felt a hundred tiny dreams crumble. The few bees that remained on the comb were unwilling to abandon their beautiful work and in the freezer they went, along with the honeycomb, where they ultimately died, frozen in their final positions, fussing over their work.
Bees never stop working. They work themselves to death. In the deep beautiful periods of honey flow, when flowers of all types are flushing on trees, bushes and weeds, the bees work so feverishly they destroy their brittle paper-like wings and die in less than six weeks from birth.
It’s strange to think that the generation of bees that crashed on that June morning are now gone and several generations of the queen’s offspring now carry on the same life-giving work. New generations keep the colony alive, and in doing so, keep the world and all its furtive, uncelebrated wonders alive, too.
Something completely different that I didn’t write, a poem by W.S. Merwin. Perhaps a honeybee equipped with the mind to do so would appreciate the temporal nature detailed in the poem:
For the Anniversary of My Death
Every year without knowing it I have passed the day
When the last fires will wave to me
And the silence will set out
Tireless traveler
Like the beam of a lightless star
Then I will no longer
Find myself in life as in a strange garment
Surprised at the earth
And the love of one woman
And the shamelessness of men
As today writing after three days of rain
Hearing the wren sing and the falling cease
And bowing not knowing to what