The question of bees

I was really tired on my last day in England. We’d been doing so much for so long and in England the dawn comes up at a merciless 5am at this time of year and sleep is difficult afterwards.

 And my packing wasn’t done and I couldn’t see how I could ever sufficiently tame all the crap I’d acquired and make it fit into 30 kilos worth of suitcase.  Such silly things there were – shards of pottery picked up from the muddy pebbles by the Thames.  Really silly presents. Postcards that never got posted.  A bowl with olives on it.  A clever collapsible garden hose.  A bottle of olive oil and Greek spices.  An empty Golden Syrup tin with 90 and “Happy Birthday Your Majesty” on it. I told Sarah I was so tired I could cry, thinking maybe she’d let me off going to her bee meeting that night but she said I could sleep on the plane – and I’m so glad she did.

We set off in the car to Twickenham over the narrow streets cluttered with parked cars and punctuated by bone shaking speed bumps and we got stuck in traffic which made Sarah faster and more daring in her driving.  She cunningly took back roads which other cunning people had already gone up and so it didn’t help at all.

Maybe it was my tiredness or the stress of the journey but arriving at the bee place seemed like reaching a paradise complete with angels. The peace was palpable. The bee people didn’t have wings but wore white suits and had nets over their heads. We were a bit late, what with the traffic, and they were already going about their business in the garden.  One person was burning ferns in a smoke puffer.  Everyone emanated a caring, absorbed attentiveness as they worked around the stacked wooden towers full of glistening unquiet bees.  There was love and a measure of awe as well as expertise.  It felt a good safe place to be.

Sarah and I got into white suits too and she nobly gave me the one she usually wore and put on a slightly small one that left her black sweater showing at her wrists.  We donned special protective gloves and joined the group on the grass clustered around the furthest hive. They were easing out the honeycomb frames one by one to see how they were progressing and if the verroa beetle had got in.  Bees were flying in and out their of their entrance and I warmed to them because of their perturbation and turmoil which had earlier been so much part of my own state of mind.  They seemed like kin and yet seeing them had changed me into something else. I’d joined the throng of angels and I was calm and happy. For a little while I had left my own colony and was looking down from a higher place on to the diminutive confusion and frenzy that I knew so well from when I was there.  I loved the bees for being like us and allowing me to feel so good.

Suddenly I heard Sarah’s voice, panicky, saying “Can someone smoke me.  I’m being stung badly”.  And she was too.  Bees are attracted to black and thanks to her giving up her suit to me, her sweatered wrists were exposed. Lots of bees picked on her, making stinging bracelets. She was smoked with a puffer and made light of it. “Just like sticking your hands in nettles – no worse”  I stopped being sentimental then and got out of the flight path but I was impressed by the fierceness of the little things too.

My turn came to use a hive tool to ease a frame full of bees out of the box and it was a stirring feeling to have so much life, so many little houses in my hands, some of them with roofs on and inhabited by the white grubs, bees to be.

The next frame had the queen in it – a bigger bee and the heart of the colony.  I was told that she had once been just an ordinary worker, selected and fed royal jelly by her colleagues.  She had then become fat and fertile and gone on a mating flight. Now she will create more bees but never take flight again. For some reason St Paul’s Cathedral and the Blue Mosque come to mind. We humans make our gods too and feed them a sweet diet of hymns and incense so they grow huge and special and require a lot of dedicated servants but they don’t come out amongst us any more except for that odd exception Jesus.  What kind of bee was he? 

There is excitement round the hive.  A nasty wax moth has been discovered and disposed of and we have reached the level of the eke, a shallow box with no frame in it and I learn something rather horrible.  We are to witness what is known in the trade as a “drone sacrifice”.  We have reached the level of the “eke”, a shallow box with no frames in it.  Some bigger waxy cells had been built there in a freehand sort of way.  They were drone cells, lawlessly constructed outside the normal honeycomb foundations and were permitted for a special reason.  Verroa beetles love big drone grubs above all else and are lured away from the main frames to feast on this disposable clump of cells.  Our teacher hacked off the outcrop and autopsied the cells to show us grubs, dead and alive being munched by verroa.  Bees born to die for their colony, it seems.

Verroa amongst the bee larvae

So many things in this micro world seem to echo our own.  What was Brexit but a badly managed swarm after all?  Nobody saw the signs or made proper provision for the restless Leavers and it all ended in tears.

Just as we finished  checking the hive it began to rain and everybody was glad it had held off thus far because bees hate getting wet, just like cats.  We went into the club house and had a cup of tea and talked bee talk.  I was told not to fall into the error of thinking of bees as individuals. “It is the colony that is the individual.  People who have a weak queen feel bad about killing her and getting another one, but the truth is no one bee is anything on its own.”  Getting a new queen is like a heart transplant I suppose.  A bunch of bees squashed in the inspection process is less than a bruise would be to a person.  A little nagging part of me thinks “From whose point of view”

All this was both unnerving and exhilarating and I had fallen under the spell. I myself am going to have a hive up on the roof to watch and talk to and get solace from.

Sarah was taking pleasure in all those bees having stung her to so little effect and I hoped that I would have her genes when I got stung as apparently everyone does sooner or later.  We went home and opened a bottle of wine and promised to share news of  the hives we were going to set up on either side of the planet.

Tomorrow seems to soon to take up our separate lives again and though I long to go home I shall miss my dear sister bee, and who knows when or if our flight paths will cross again.  I bracingly think, however that we are just two small workers and our earth colony is not such a big place.  I will not be so very far away.