The coffin is simple, the kind he would have wanted if he had chosen it for himself: natural wood, quick to decompose, non-polluting when it’s burned. The shape is simple, like a packing crate. Like a container to be cleverly loaded on Charon’s ferry in tight stacks, an efficient, logistical use of space.
Eero’s hands are on his chest. They lie one on top of the other, naturally, without any reference to prayer, because he would shy away from that. I thought for a long time about the flowers, then I knew what they should be. Nothing shipped from somewhere else, nothing grown in a hothouse prison, nothing exotic or wasteful. I picked a single sprig of thick-blossoming heather in the woods around Hopevale and placed it under his hands. The fluff of pale-pink blossoms, the dark green of the tiny leaves and the grey patina of the stem create a pleasant, eye-catching, almost harsh contrast against the bright red of the shirt. It’s amazing how the shy purple of the heather doesn’t disappear into the red of the shirt but bursts out, defiantly bright.
*
Eero was maybe four years old. At that age when he had a clear sense of his body and a large, extremely independent desire to use it.
Anyone who has a child knows how it feels to hold an unwilling four-year-old in your arms, how the slim little body suddenly stiffens in an arch like a strung bow when he doesn’t want to put on his snow suit. How his narrow frame is full of will and slips out of your grasp as easily as a fish and, once free, runs so fast and changes direction so nimbly that an adult five times his size can’t do anything but puff and grope for the spot where he was a moment ago.
Eero’s energy was so great and irrepressible that I sometimes had to purposely tire him out before bath and bedtime.
‘Shall we dance?’
‘Yeah, Dad!’
So I marched in a circle, my hands under my arms to make wings, flapping my wings, bending and jumping, and Eero ran in his own wobbly circle behind, mimicking me.
Look, Dad. I’m dancing.
And I purposely kept repeating the motions, guiding him to the land of dreams, the honey sunset, the sweet, fragrant, blooming fields of sleep.
*
Before the coffin is closed and sent to the chapel cold room there’s one more thing to do.
In my searches I found a folklore site that collected stories related to bees from different parts of the world. A couple of themes repeated again and again, regardless of where they came from.
There were dozens of variations on one of the stories. Two young men are walking in the countryside. They stop to rest in a meadow, in the shade of a tree. One falls asleep; the other lies dozing with his eyes half closed. The boy who’s awake sees a bee fly into the open mouth of the one who’s sleeping and tries, of course, to wake his friend up, but the friend doesn’t respond, wrapped in a strangely deep sleep. Finally the companion is awakened, and at that moment the bee flies out from between the teeth of his yawning mouth. He isn’t at all pleased to be woken up and says to his friend that he was having the most wonderful, utterly entrancing dream. He was wandering in a pristine paradise that he never wanted to leave, and waking him up had torn him away from it, preventing him from ever returning.
The older stories of untouched paradise were the ones most likely to have bees in them. Euripides – whom I’d never really heard of until I did this research – wrote in Hippolytus of an untouched meadow where shepherds didn’t dare to pasture their flocks, where the earth had never been touched by the plough. In this meadow was a bee on the moist banks of a stream, but the flowers could only be plucked by one who was good by nature. Those who were evil didn’t have permission to set foot there.
In the same play he wrote: ‘Aphrodite’s breath is felt on all that has life, and she floats in the air like a bee.’
*
I take a tiny, resealable bag – the kind they use to sell individual screws or a few buttons – out of my pack. My hive tool is in the pack, too. I hold the plastic bag open.
I take the tool in my right hand and with the other hand carefully open Eero’s lips. I try not to startle at their coolness, although when I dressed him I shuddered at the lack of warmth. He has a slight overbite, so slight that there was never any reason to correct it, and it makes my task easier now. I put the hive tool under his front teeth and make a twisting motion – slowly, calmly, deliberately. Rigor mortis isn’t stiffening his face like it did in the time right after death, and his chin gives way without resistance.
I leave the hive tool between his teeth to keep his mouth open. I pick up the plastic bag and carefully shake out the queen bee.
I put the queen in Eero’s mouth.
I close the lid of the coffin and carefully put the plastic bag and the tool back in my bag.
PERFECTING THE HUMAN SPECIES
A BLOG ABOUT THE ANIMALIST REVOLUTIONARY ARMY AND ITS ACTIVITIES
OBSERVATIONS ON CCC, OR COLONY COLLAPSE
In his 2008 book A Spring Without Bees Michael Schacker asks whether the honeybee can be compared with the canary in the coal mine.
There were mysterious disappearances of honeybees well before herbicides or other by-products of modern life were even invented. The first case of unexplained colony abandonment was in 1869, and colony disappearances swept across the United States, Canada, Mexico and Australia in the nineteenth century. Before the modern term CCD (an abbreviation of Colony Collapse Disorder) the syndrome of hive or bee dis appearance was known by other names such as ‘disappearing disease’, ‘spring dwindle’ or ‘autumn collapse’.
But then it struck with a vengeance. In 2007 800,000 colonies were lost in the United States, and in 2008 a million. Some bee-keepers reported losses of 90 per cent of their hives. Although colony collapse was most noticeable in the United States it was certainly not confined to the USA. A great number of colonies were also lost in Canada, Asia, South America and various parts of Europe. In Croatia five million bees were lost in a period of forty-eight hours.
Of course, there have been theories as to the causes of Colony Collapse Disorder ever since the phenomenon first appeared. For a time there was a rumour spread in the world press that radiation from mobile-phone masts interfered with bees’ navigation systems, but this was later written off as an exaggerated misinterpretation of the facts. The most fantastical speculation even posited that the bee disappearances were part of a devilish plot by al-Qaeda to cripple American agriculture.
One of the worst threats to beehives is the mite known as the varroa pheromonal destructor, which has spread virtually everywhere in the world. Australia was believed to be free of varroa mites until the inevitable spread reached its shores as well.
But the varroa mite doesn’t explain everything. Long before it found a foothold in Australia in 2015 the continent was already experiencing a mysterious ‘disappearing disease’. Colonies were disappearing now and then, just like they did in other places.
In addition to mites, fungus and other parasites and disease-causing organisms the health of bee colonies is affected by dozens of other factors. Bees are sensitive to agricultural chemicals. Certain fungi and viruses in combination with varroa mites can weaken a colony’s vitality. And bees have fewer genes associated with resistance to diseases and toxic substances than other insects.
Colony collapse doesn’t mean that you look at a hive and find the bees dead or weakened. The hives are mysteriously empty. This new phenomenon, CCC, or Colony Collapse Catastrophe, is more widespread, destructive and mysterious than any previous wave of bee dis appearances.
At the beginning of the 2000s there didn’t seem to be any interest in the United States in serious studies of the phenomenon like those already begun in France. The wave of bee disappearances had, in fact, prompted the French government to ban a popular herbicide. (Although it is interesting to note that colony collapse has also occurred in areas where they don’t use agricultural chemicals at all.) No single cause for colony collapse was found in France either, but there is strong evidence that points to agricultural
chemicals and their weakening of bees’ immune systems.
So why was the subject studied in earnest in Europe and not brushed away? Simply because scientific research in Europe is not dependent on the support of large corporations. In the United States companies that sell pesticides, fertilizers and genetically modified plant varieties saw to it that colony collapse wasn’t researched. It was a myth, a riddle – and it ought to stay that way.
There were similar attempts during those years to prove that climate change was a hoax; the intensity of the sun’s rays fluctuate, ergo the temperature of the Earth will tend to fluctuate naturally over long periods of time, ergo climate change is not caused by people.
The key is to confuse, to create doubt.
To get back to smart phones, and their predecessor the ordinary mobile phone, there was a time when half the world believed that radiation from mobile-phone masts was to blame for the bee disappearances. I’m sure this belief was very welcome to makers of pesticides, fertilizers and GMOs.
Later that belief was overturned. (One might assume that phone manufacturers and service providers had a part in this. In a world poisoned by disinformation anything is possible, but it’s more likely down to the rumour’s origins in German studies of how bees behaved when cordless phones were placed in their hives. The electromagnetic radiation emanating from the device did disturb the bees, but the device in question wasn’t a mobile phone. Since the article had the bylines of real scientists and the Independent published a long article based on this misconception the theory quickly spread around the world only to be discredited later.)
The horrifying thing about this rumour was that, in spite of the fact that half the people in the world believed it, nothing was done about it.
Bill McKibben has this to say about colony collapse: ‘I don’t think anyone really has a clue as to what’s going on, but if it turns out to be cell phones, it’s the greatest metaphor in the history of metaphors. Starving the planet in pursuit of one more text message with your broker seems the very epitome of going out with a whimper, not a bang.’
And what about genetic modification? GM corn has an added gene borrowed from the Bacillus thuringiensus bacteria that produces a protein that repels insects. It doesn’t take a great stretch of logic to come up with the idea that such a protein might very well be harmful to bees, and in the United States 40 per cent of the corn grown is genetically modified. GM plant developers naturally strive to emphasize their harmlessness to the environment and may indeed believe it themselves, but history has shown that even the most thorough research can’t predict every complication that occurs when you fiddle with nature. The infamous Thomas Midgley, Jr, who graced us with the creation of lead-additive gasoline, also invented freons. Mr Midgley gave assurances that the coolant was in every way harmless to humans and chemically non-reactive and demonstrated this by, among other things, publicly breathing freon gas. Neither he nor anyone else was able to predict that freon would damage the ozone in the upper atmosphere and would eventually be completely banned.
The only large corporation in the United States that showed any sign of concern about the effects of colony collapse was General Mills. Its daughter company, the well-known ice cream manufacturer Häagen Dazs, announced in 2008 that it was concerned about the disappearance of bees. Nearly half of the flavours of ice cream the company manufactured depended on bee-pollinated plants such as strawberries, pecans and bananas.
*
Michael Schacker, mentioned above, and many other authors have discussed colony collapse in their work. Every possible factor is suspected as its cause – the GM crops already mentioned, wireless mobile devices, agricultural chemicals, environmental stresses, pathogens, mites, viruses and combinations of any or all of these. One listener who called into a radio programme discussing colony collapse informed them that what was happening was a ‘bee rapture’. The bees were being swept up into heaven because God had called them all to be taken up and to fly to him.
What’s interesting is that no one seems to pay any attention to the fact that bee-keepers committed to using natural methods to care for their bees haven’t really been reporting any abandoned hives. Natural growers leave more honey in the hives and bee pollen for winter feed – they don’t replace it with corn syrup, sugar or soy. They don’t use pesticides or other chemicals. Natural bee farms tend to be in the country side where nectar can be gathered from wild flowers that haven’t been treated with agricultural chemicals.
Unfortunately, natural bee-keeping is more complicated and demands more work than artificial methods.
It feels as if I’ve heard that before.
Fur-bearing animals. Farmed salmon. Chickens, pigs, cows.
Minimize the space; maximize production; skimp on feed and hygiene; limit to the best of your ability the animals’ natural behaviours; respond to all the symptoms you yourself are causing with harsh, artificial treatments; use shortcuts wherever possible; don’t worry about attrition, so long as you’re profitable.
The shipping of beehives all over the country in the United States causes so much stress that the basic health and immune systems of the bees are weakened. Encounters between bee colonies coming from all around the country also increase viral infections, fungi such as nosema, mites and bacteria, which easily spread from one colony to another.
Selective breeding of bees for certain species characteristics (lower aggression, for example) may have produced a one-faceted genetic bottleneck that doesn’t leave any room for adaptive mutations.
The corn syrup used as feed for bees in the winter is not at all comparable in its content of nutrients, trace elements and enzymes to the honey and bee pollen that bees themselves would enjoy in the winter if humans didn’t plunder it.
*
In order to get the maximum possible pollination work out of a hive of bees, they are continuously, professionally and shamelessly deceived.
In the United States, for example, the hives are moved to a warmer climate so that the bees won’t shift to their wintering behaviour but will instead continue working and reproducing. Sometimes the hives are given additional food because the more food a hive has at its disposal the more eggs the queen will lay, and when the colony’s population grows more honey is produced to feed them. Some bee-keepers have reported that this interruption of their annual rhythm and artificially induced extra labour is driving queen bees to actual burn-out.
What takes the cake is that in California the almond-growers’ association is paying scientists to do tests on beehives with artificial phero mones that trick the colony into believing that there are more larvae in the nest than there really are. That way the bees will haul in more nectar than ever and thus pollinate the trees with previously unheard-of effectiveness.
Am I the only one who hears this and is reminded of our work life nowadays?
Could it be that somewhere in the background we, too, are having a great hoax perpetrated on us, living against a fake backdrop, our nests doused with spurious pheromones so that we’ll agree to work for someone else’s benefit until we collapse?
*
There’s another sense in which I’ve long pondered the way animals perceive us. Bees aren’t necessarily able to fathom our existence. I’m sure they don’t ‘apianize’ us, thinking of us as some other kind of bee. To bees, humans must be a malignant, tyrannical force of nature, a spiteful god who torments his servants like Yahweh did poor Job – paying faithfulness and obedience with evermore burdens piled on their backs. What amazes me is why the bees haven’t risen in rebellion long ago.
LEAVE A COMMENT (total comments: 14)
USER NAME: Why always the USA?
What I find interesting in this outpouring is its opposition to America. Surely there’s all manner of mistreatment and skulduggery happening to animals anywhere you go. Why is it always the Yanks’ fault?
SHOW ALL 13 COMMENTS
DAY TWELVE
When I get home the console monitor is staring at
me from the wall with its taunting black eye. Twelve days ago it was a window into my son’s life, an opening I could look through at his doings, opinions, sometimes with a warm feeling somewhere under my heart when I caught a reference to myself.
The console’s eye is asking if I still want to keep my son inside it. Should I delete his official blog, the one under his own name, or perhaps make it a memorial page?
The Singers have probably already put up some sort of virtual monument to him.
*
I remember once in the early 2010s a loved one came into the shop and mentioned the shock he’d got when he learned a social network site was suggesting to people that they friend his sister, who had just died. I immediately took the bait.
Not long after that social media sites started to respond quickly to similar complaints, allowing families to cancel their loved ones’ profiles or convert them into memorial pages without too much trouble.
Port of Departure was one of the first funeral director’s to take on cleaning up the net – for a fee. Nothing can ever be completely removed from the web, of course, but you can delete home pages and cancel automatic feeds and maintenance programs. We also offered virtual testaments that could be created ahead of time, recorded confidentially and left unopened, in which the departed could list his or her internet activities, whether public or used under a pseudonym, and provide user names and passwords. Then when the person died their testament would be opened and our experts would delete or cancel the virtual life of the departed according to their wishes. Some people wanted to leave things like social network profiles to serve as memorials. In those cases the testament would include a ‘final greeting’ service, where the person, while they were still alive, could leave a message for those left behind, to be published on their profile or a separate virtual memorial grove after their death.
The Blood of Angels Page 11