The world in its rage, heaving oceans into buildings here, withholding rainwater there, lighting the night sky, sparking treetop fires that burn for days, has always struck me as enough fuel for nightmares without the need for dystopian dreamscapes, postapocalyptic pop songs, or science fiction inspired theme parks. But who am I to say? I was always a weird kid, and weird kids often emerge from their cocoons to become weird adults.
Here I am this morning parked in a dirt lot beside stacks of beehives, watching three people work their way through a maze of smaller boxes, checking labels. They’re wearing white protective jumpsuits, elbow-length leather gloves and helmets with mesh veils covering their faces and necks. A cloud of bees hangs over the scene.
When my turn comes, I roll my window down just far enough to greet a woman in full gear, but not far enough to allow any errant bees inside my car. I’m wearing a long-sleeved white shirt, but my own veil and leather gloves are heaped in the passenger’s seat. I tell the woman my name, and that I’ve ordered one nuc of bees. She walks over to retrieve her clipboard that’s perched on a heap of containers. Thin wisps of smoke rise from the bee smoker at her feet.
“I don’t have you down for a nuc,” she says.
I’ve driven an hour to be here and curse myself for becoming so comfortable placing orders online. Creatures who have performed the alchemy of turning nectar into honey for forty million years shouldn’t be summoned through fiberoptic cables and clouds that aren’t really clouds.
“Spell your name again,” she says.
I comply because it’s an unusual last name that begins with the letter “U,” which I think people often hear as “You” and so search their lists a few letters down from where my name should appear.
“As in Umbrella,” I say.
“Oh,” she says. “You ordered a package of bees, not a nuc.”
The confusion, then, is my fault caused by an attempt to disguise the fact it’s been twenty years since I’ve kept honeybees. The word nuc had nested in my subconscious sometime in the previous weeks while I was reading beekeeping articles. A three-pound package of bees, about the size of a large shoebox, holds workers, drones, and a queen. A nuc, on the other hand, in addition to bees, also contains frames complete with capped honey cells and brood. Decidedly more expensive, nucs are intended for keepers who want to jumpstart production. I’m buying bees for an observation hive with the sole purpose of studying, in the comforts of my sunroom, everything bees do when they do bee things. I’m in no particular hurry.
The world, on the other hand, is spinning out of control. We’ve done too much, too fast, razing and building, consuming and purging. Fast food and fast fashion. Demands that outpace supply chains. Box stores and big oil, big pharma, big tobacco, too-big-to-fail everything that, eventually of course, fails. When we realized we were capable of changing climate, reversing life expectancies, destroying entire species, we recovered quickly from the shock and shifted our attention to restoration, creating categories—extinct, critically endangered, endangered, vulnerable, and recovered. For every wolf that returns to Yellowstone, a Polar Bear starves to death on a melting glacier. At times, to ease the pain of loss, we entertain ourselves with dark fantasies of bringing the dead back to life. I’ve seen the movie. It never ends well.
Don’t misunderstand me; I don’t think I’m saving the world out here, idling in my car as I wait my turn to pick up honeybees. The average American vehicle emits four and a half metric tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere each year. That’s roughly the weight of several black rhinos.
The bee lady is knocking on my window, motioning for me to pull forward. My stomach flutters; it’s taken months to prepare my observation hive, modifying an entrance window, installing barriers outdoors to direct their flight paths, figuring the difference between raising bees in a vertical hive rather than horizontal boxes. I park the car, slip on my veil that is so old I had to duct tape parts of the screen together for it to serve any protective purpose. I have a brand-new bee suit at home, but wearing that seemed like overkill. I also thought the brittle veil gave me the appearance of a grizzled keeper.
“This your first time with bees?” the lady asks me.
“No.” I laugh. “It’s just been a few years.”
“Remember to face them forward in the back of your car,” she says, helping me wrap a bee net around the package to prevent any clever bees who might escape the carrying case from flying free while I drive.
I pause for a moment, confused.
“Which way, then, is forward?” I ask. I do have experience with bees, I silently protest. I’ve rescued swarms, removed them from sheds, but I’ve never heard of bees getting motion sickness. The bee lady pantomimes rotating a box, which I mimic with my actual box before stowing it in the backseat.
I need this—bees in my life again—or at least, I think I do.
The list of things bees need from us, in return, is short: stop. Stop spraying neonicotinoids on your golf courses, lawns and gardens; stop your incessant need for uninterrupted connections that require cell phone towers in every pasture; stop paving over plants that bloom. Stop disrupting, deforming, and destroying natural environments. Stop trying to sustain the unsustainable. Just stop.
Yet here I am, arriving home, box under arm, with plans to manipulate bees in the most intrusive way possible. If you’re going to keep honeybees, though, you do owe them an environment conducive to their preferred living conditions. You’ve got to be mindful of three spaces: their greater foraging area, the immediate surroundings where their hive is located, and the interior of the hive itself. Much is flowering throughout my neighborhood, and I live in a town with little industry, so there are no smokestacks emitting toxic clouds. Developers are subdividing what little farmland remains, which will increase vehicle exhaust but also diminish chemical crop spray. Since the hive itself is indoors, it’s less susceptible to extreme temperatures, storms, and fire ants. What concerns me most, though, is perhaps the most crucial factor that will determine if they accept their new home: maintaining bee space within the hive.
Bees prefer passageways wide enough for only one or two bodies to pass at a time. They fill in any larger gaps with comb, additional construction that distracts them from maintaining cells for honey and brood. I’ve never had to give space within the hive much thought because all the bee boxes I’ve used to this point have notched spacers along the top ends that ensure the frames sit an ideal distance from one another. My observation hive has no such guides. To complicate matters, the frames are too long. I’ve fiddled with this dilemma for a few weeks, cutting thin slivers off the ends, which allowed me work the frames into the hive. However, in order to insert four vertical rows of three-deep frames, I needed to shave the ends so much that any movement causes the frames to shift and fall from the ledge. Bees can tolerate some disruptions, but having the walls of your home wobble and sink is more than most creatures will endure. My fear is I’ll have spent all this time preparing for their arrival, successfully introduce them to the hive, and then invertedly bump the table on which it sits, and the bees will set off in search of a water meter box, hollow tree, or wall where they can build to their own specifications. Fortunately, in the process of attempting to whack a frame into place, I knocked an unsecured side of the hive apart, which opened a gap large enough to insert full frames into place.
All this worry about maintaining a quarter inch space is somewhat ironic given that when bees are foraging, they move with an unfettered freedom known only to winged insects. While they typically don’t fly above a few hundred feet, they are capable of soaring to altitudes of 30,000. They might pollinate the flowers and plants in your immediate garden, but they search a three-mile radius for nectar and water sources that best suit their needs. And, while a swarm of bees is visible enough to evoke fear in non-beekeepers, for the most part, single bees go about their business flitting, floating, zipping, darting, and diving without anybody paying them much mind. So, it seems odd that, when they’re gathered in the hive, they prefer to be packed as close together as possible.
And I’m about to set ten thousand of them loose in my sunroom.
Which may strike you as a line of dialogue from a horror movie script. And, if it does, I’m sympathetic. As a child, I could not fathom how anyone found entertainment in haunted houses, horror films and novels, even science fiction that explores a terrifying future. The world as it was—starving children on my television screen, hostage crises, rivers afire, depleted ozone—was enough to cause anxiety. My years as a young adult were one long-take shot of the so-called global war on terror. And, the world as it is now—mass shootings while you shop and learn, deep fakes, pandemics, antidepressants in the drinking water, microplastics in our bloodstream—makes the threat of a zombie apocalypse seem quaint.
“And the bees will be inside your house?” a neighbor asked a few months back.
“Yes. Well, inside this contraption, inside my house,” I said.
“What if they get out?”
“They won’t,” I said. “Or shouldn’t.”
“Interesting,” my neighbor said, though I think what he wanted to say was, “terrifying.”
I didn’t share with my neighbor what I’m about to do now—intentionally release the bees in my sunroom, so they’ll enter the hive on their own accord. And, it might very well be terrifying except that these bees were transported across the state, then took an hour-long trip in my vehicle, and, while hopefully not carsick, they are certainly disoriented. They have a queen onboard, but she was hatched separately, so they are not inclined yet to protect her at all cost. They also have no honey or brood to guard. All these conditions render the honeybees relatively docile. You’d have to do something really stupid to get stung.
So, here we go.
Unfastening the screws to lift the lid is a moment that should be accompanied by violins, violas, cellos, and double basses. Cue the harpist. Shafts of ochre light should break through from above, but in reality, everything in my peripheral fades away; the past and present melt into this single moment, and the only sound is the low buzz of bees. This is what it should always feel like to be alive.
A few worker bees swirl around me as I remove the small queen cage and use a screw driver to pry out the cork wedged in one end. This does not immediately free the queen due to a large sugar cube blocking her exit. Over the next few days, she will eat her way through one end while worker bees gnaw their way through the other. During the liberation process, workers crawl over the queen’s screen window, poking their legs through, touching, communicating, getting to know this stranger so that when she emerges, they will claim her as their sovereign. While this work begins, I fashion a strand of wire into a hook and suspend the queen’s cage between two frames atop the observation hive.
The next part is surreal. Holding the container just above the hive, I tip it over to let bees ooze out like thick molasses, shaking it a few times to send more clumps of wriggling bodies into their new home. After a few minutes, they’re spilling over the sides, and even though more bees need to emerge, additional jostling and tapping will turn them aggressive. These bees need some time to figure which way is up. I set the container next to the hive, exit the screen door that leads outside, and stand, peering in the windows. Anyone passing by, catching a glimpse of me in my head-to-toe, bright white protective suit might think that my backyard is a toxic spill site, or perhaps that aliens have invaded.
And, in a way, honeybees, specifically Apis mellifera, are aliens in North America. Invasive, non-native, migrant insects. Of course, none of these descriptors are completely accurate when applied to bees any more than when the words are applied to humans. In the seventeenth century, honeybees were transported across the ocean to pollinate the landscape, and so efficient are they at building strong colonies that, in most areas, they’ve outcompeted feral, native bees. Their success in North America can be attributed largely to human interference.
As can the recent decline in honeybee populations. The usual suspect is threatening honeybees: climate change wreaking havoc on foraging areas, which also creates conditions favorable for parasites and disease. Though, within the past decade, a mysterious phenomenon has emerged that the Environmental Protection Agency calls Colony Collapse Disorder. Keepers checking on otherwise healthy hives find that most of the workers have disappeared, leaving behind the queen, a few attendants, and some brood, a paltry population not likely to survive. Colony Collapse Disorder isn’t like a swarm in which a portion of the hive strikes out with an aging queen, leaving behind the majority of the old colony to build a new regime. These colony collapses are full-scale evacuations.
It’s tempting to call them revolutions or rebellions against the monarchy, except for the obvious: honeybees, as far as we know, don’t ascribe the same significance to hierarchical structures and titles as have so many humans throughout history. There’s no symbolic power in the crown. No innate bee-belief in an inalienable right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
On the other hand, maybe there is.
Honeybees may be rebelling against the notion that they’re responsible for pollinating our apples, watermelons, cucumbers and onions, blueberries, broccoli, pumpkins and squash, milkweed, white clover, coneflowers, purple poppies and thistle, sunflowers, asters and ironweed. Just to name a few of the eighty percent of fruits and vegetables we rely on for food, and the vast number of flowering plants we turn to for beauty. Is it possible honeybees believe they bear no responsibility for maintaining the sad remains of our gardens of Eden? For flowering the landscapes that inspire poets’ imaginations? For ensuring our survival? Perhaps. And if so, then this is the stuff of nightmares.
Something’s not right. Two hours have passed, and while a mass of bees is draped over the queen’s cage inside the observation hive, small clusters have formed in the upper corners of the sunroom windows. I work my way around the room with a soft brush, whisking bees into a dust pan and pouring them into the hive. It’s going about as well as you might imagine. Most of the bees rise up to avoid my sweeping relocations. The good news is several bees are rocking back and forth outside the window next to the hive, which means they’ve found the plastic tube exit and are visually marking their new home before flying off to scout nectar, water, and pollen. Or at least I thought it was good news until I notice that some bees are exiting the sunroom in gaps between the window frame and the wooden entrance.
One might wonder why I don’t open the windows, free the bees uninterested in the hive I’ve provided, give them the chance to strike out anew, scope the neighborhood and return at their leisure. Exercise their own freewill. The problem with this approach is twofold: honeybees, as I understand it, reenter a space the same way they exit it, and so there’s little chance any bee that leaves through an open window will return to the one-inch tube in the specially-fitted window entrance I built, and thus will not make it inside the hive. Which leads to the second reason I’m not allowing them to forge their own path: I need as many of these bees as possible to survive; otherwise, my burgeoning colony will collapse before it even has a chance to build.
As the day progresses, if you peeked inside the sunroom, you might think it’s raining in reverse. Droplets of bees are streaming in rows up all seven window panes, and while some make it to cluster with the splinter groups forming in each corner, quite a few lose their purchase, half-flying, half-falling back to the floor or the window ledge where, as soon as they collect themselves, they restart their frenetic and futile crawl upwards.
Near sundown, the entire room looks like a crime scene.
Splotches are sprayed across the glass, the window ledges, walls, floor, lampshades, books stacked on my desk and shelves, and all along the piano’s open keyboard. I scrape a spot with my thumbnail; it’s waxy and perhaps odorless; I can’t really tell because the entire room is filled with the earthy sweetness of bees. It might be propolis, a substance bees secrete to use as a sealing agent within hives to keep out breezes and intruders. It might be, but it isn’t because they’re in constant motion, seeking an exit, not caulking trim. It might be, but it isn’t because it’s excrement—a beautiful rust-yellow shade—but excrement nonetheless. The bees and I both agree on our assessment of the day.
Before too long, the sun will set; six or so hours have passed since I first released the bees into the room, and those who have chosen to rally around the queen are inside the observation hive. I’ve sealed cracks and holes around window frames. An increasingly steady stream of bees has been moving through the one-inch plastic tube entrance, so I’m optimistic there’s enough life to sustain this colony. I brush a few stragglers onto the frames, set the lid in place, and screw the hive shut. Conventional wisdom tells me the recalcitrant bees still clinging to their separate windows are too few in number to regroup outside, locate new living quarters, and adopt a wayward queen to ensure their survival. More than likely, these errant bees will die within a day. It might be naïve, certainly unscientific, irresponsible or cruel, perhaps recklessly romantic, but I can’t, in good conscience, keep these bees that don’t want to be kept confined indoors any longer. I slide open the sunroom windows, pop out the screens, and throw the outer door wide.
If you’re going to keep honeybees in semi-captivity, creating ecosystems that encourage them to live on your property, in addition to providing a level of care to meet their needs and reduces suffering, you also need to justify your choices.
My first justification for beekeeping is deeply rooted in a desire to do, in this world, more good than harm. Attempt to offset my own consumption and waste: the glass bottles dutifully placed in recycling bins that I suspect wind up in landfills; the trendy shirts and wingtip shoes I adore that, once faded and frayed, wend their way to places like Ghana, leaching toxins into the water supply; the petroleum that propels me through time and space, hundreds of miles each week, exhausting the atmosphere; and the plastic, plastic, plastic electronics, packaging, cups and bottles and pens, the two, three, four bags with every purchase, every errand, in route to the massive, plastic vortex swirling in the North Pacific Ocean. If I can tip the scales of the damage I do on a daily basis, make even a miniscule difference, then it’s worth attempting a strange symbiotic relationship with honeybees.
My second justification stems from my dislike, in general, of dystopian fiction, postapocalyptic fantasies, and nightmare dreamscapes. I am as starstruck as anyone on those rare occasions I am thrust into near darkness beyond the confines of light pollution, and am reminded the night sky is host to billions of heavenly bodies. However, I’ve never had the urge to break the bounds of this earth, travel into outer space, discover new worlds, let my imagination soar upwards. I’d much rather look down. At heart, I’m still the weird kid lying alone in a field, watching a solitary bee hover and dance around the head of white clover.
I am fascinated by slivers of goodness still found in the world as it is now.
“Come look,” my wife says, pointing to the top frame of the observation hive. A month has passed since we brought bees back into our lives. In that time, we’ve watched in wonder as bees buzz through the entrance with such urgency their legs momentarily entangle before they tumble their separate ways; the outbound workers zipping over our rooftop, the immense pecan tree, the chicken coop; returners with pollen-pellet heavy legs or bodies dusted, barely making it inside before others gather round for the harvest. We’ve watched them cling to the sugar syrup feeder, and seen them draw out wax foundation, forming interlocking hexagons for storage. One Sunday morning, we witnessed the queen herself inspecting cells with her imposing figure and shiny black bald spot between her wings. We’ve observed evidence of their work as open cells one day become capped the next, darker ones incubating larvae, lighter ones holding honey. We’ve seen them waggle and dance, and also drag dead bodies of spent bees to the entrance. We’ve been satisfied as they’ve blocked off areas where frames press too close to glass, built up places too airy, and established routes through passageways where exists—the ideal bee space.
Unfortunately, we’ve also sighted hive beetles who’ve lodged themselves in cervices just outside the bees’ reach, interlopers waiting to lay their eggs. When the beetle larvae hatch, they are apparently insatiable, wending their way through honey and bee larvae alike. Once sated, they drop from the hive entrance to find soil and metamorphize. A large section of frame that a few days ago held dark covered cells, this morning is pocked with empty holes. The beetles, I am afraid, have begun to undo all the good work the honeybees have done.
“Come look,” my wife says again.
“Yes, I know,” I say. “It’s distressing. The beetles.”
“No,” she says. “Look closer at this cell.”
“I can’t see anything.”
“Closer,” she insists.
“It’s just a jumble of movement,” I protest.
“Focus. Right. There.”
She presses her finger to the glass and leans sideways, so I can get a better view of a capped cell with what appears to be a small perforation on top. Bees are crawling over the spot, momentarily obstructing my view, but once you’ve seen something, it’s easier to relocate it in the chaos. We wait and we watch as the hole grows larger, chewed around the edges, until an antenna pokes through, followed by one leg, then another, and then an entirely new bee pulls herself into the wide world. She shakes herself a bit, buzzes her wings. A few other bees finally stop, run their legs over her to communicate—something—a guess would probably find me mistaken. The new bee scurries out of sight, lost in the crowd, but I can’t look away from the spot where she emerged, that moments ago was simply a hive frame, drawn out and worked, discolored from hundreds of feet passing over, some cells seeded and capped while others sat empty in expectation that now seem strange and mysterious yet also as familiar as craters scattered across the surface of the moon.