Bugged

by David MacNeal

  There is, of course, an equally compelling reason for my overnight visit: the Buckfast bee.

  In 1915, a mysterious outbreak called the Isle of Wight disease wiped out about 90 percent of England’s hives. The native British black bee suffered the most casualties during the epidemic, which was caused by tracheal mites that entered the bees’ airways, suffocating them. However, bees at Buckfast Abbey were resistant. It turns out their breed was a mix of black bee and a nonnative A. mellifera subspecies known as the Italian honeybee. Seeing the devastation, a then-17-year-old Carl Kehrle, known as Brother Adam, decided to breed disease-resistant, docile bees that could survive Dartmoor’s hard winters.

  Brother Adam had come to the monastery at age 11. The church was still in the middle of reconstruction, and after Brother Adam fell from a scaffold, the abbot assigned him to their beekeeping department. He learned apiculture from a monk who also made hive-shaped cakes of honey ginger bread. After the Isle of Wight epidemic, Brother Adam tampered with genetics, opening an isolation station near the abbey in 1925 where Italian and English black bees could mate, free from other subspecies abuzz nearby. It kept the disease-resistant strain pure and the honey bountiful. One colony alone was said to have produced 400 pounds of honey in a year, according to the 1986 documentary The Monk and the Honey Bee. During that time, local thieves rustled several hives. Adam told police that the missing bees, if seen, were “three-quarters of an inch in length, with dark brown and dark gray stripes.” The Buckfast bees grew extremely popular. The abbey would at times have at least 500 colonies, and beekeepers favored the bee because of its lower rate of swarming from the hive. The innate sense of mystery monks possess also helped, which is why it may surprise some to learn that this once-famous, disease-resistant bee is rarely found today. The Buckfast bee is no longer at Buckfast. In fact, their Bee Department stopped breeding them, making a shift toward education in 2010.

  I came here for an explanation.

  From the Gospel of Maurice: “For beyond all the desires of this strange god who has taken possession of them, who is too vast to be seen and too alien to be understood, their eyes see further than the eyes of the god himself; and their one thought is the accomplishment, with untiring sacrifice, of the mysterious duty of their race.”

  I drop my black duffel bag on the cobblestones in front of the grand, hardwood, double-door entrance of the monastery. Minutes later, one side opens to reveal Brother Daniel, an accommodating monk with peppery white hair and a voice temporarily handicapped by a virus all the monks have come down with. (This brings to mind sick bees in a hive.) Brother Daniel worked with Brother Adam until he died. Like all monks at Buckfast Abbey, he’s extremely kind, offering to carry my bag, which I respectfully refuse.

  The monastery has a very distinct smell—what I can only call holy musk. A bit maple and churchy. The stone staircase spirals and turns. Our voices echo among the religious paintings, decorative tiles, and stained glass window of Jesus on the cross. It’s an overcast day, and I ask how the bees are doing. Brother Daniel isn’t too hopeful about how active they’ll be. The weather makes it difficult to predict. “It’s those nights where you can’t sleep with the bed sheets on,” he says of the humid evenings. After hot weather, “are the days when you get high honey crops. Our bees used to be able to get 17 pounds of nectar a day.” Then he leaves me to myself.

  Thirty minutes before dinner, I walk down a trapezoidal hallway. Paintings of nuns line the walls. Out the window I can see the dragon-scale roof shingles aged with rust and lichen and beyond that the high clerestory church windows. Since Brother Daniel left, I’ve felt a great sense of quiet and curiosity. There’s a door at the end of the long hall. Monastic hums ring high, muffled in the distance like smothered power lines carrying holy energy. Vespers before supper. I’m not quite sure if I’m permitted here,10 but I open the door to one of their libraries.

  The silence weighs heavily as I leaf through the library’s index booklet, which creaks when I open it. I find nothing on Brother Adam or the Buckfast bee. Rummaging through the books, I come across a history of the abbey from 1018 CE to 1968. There is no direct mention of Brother Adam according to the chapters, though his name is in the index. Finally, though, I discover a 1946 article, “The Culture of the Honey Bee” by Brother Adam. I get a sense of just how much the bees meant to this young boy who traveled from Germany. Halfway through, he emphasizes one of the most important aspects of apiculture: “The essential point of all beekeeping,” he writes, “is to ensure a supply of first-rate queens.”

  This leaves me with the lingering question: what happened?

  Chimes in the bell tower indicate it’s 7:00 p.m., so I hurry to the refectory on the lower level. The archways and ceilings curve. Long, linen-covered tables line the hall in a U shape. The abbot sits at the head of the table among the brothers in their black frocks. Brother Daniel nods to me as I sit by my place card away from the others at my own table. Dinner—a delicious minestrone soup—is eaten in silence to facilitate reflection. A dark ale is served, and I smear my bread with the honey specially harvested for the monks. It’s sweet and bright.

  Later I go into the monastery’s guest reading lounge to work on some notes, and Brother Daniel is there reading the newspaper. I poke around the books on the shelf near the fireplace and see a gilded folio edition of Maurice Maeterlinck’s The Life of the Bee. I turn to Daniel, and we talk about his time working alongside Brother Adam.

  “With Brother Adam, he always had you as a smoker,” Daniel remembers. “If you didn’t pester him with questions, he would volunteer information as he was working. And that’s the best way to learn.” Daniel looks down for a moment. “He was a nice chap, actually.”

  “Is there a prayer for the bees?” I ask.

  None that he can think of, he says, his voice hoarse. But he does mention a poem by Victoria Sackville-West he particularly likes called “Bee-Master.” She speaks of bees, these “captious folk,” who leave their hive in a swarm. “Follow,” she writes, “for if beyond your sight they stray / Your bees are lost, and you must take your way…”

  * * *

  The following afternoon, we drive half a mile away to the mini-warehouse Bee Department, an education center with a corrugated metal roof. Stacks of empty antique shipping crates advertising “BUCKFAST CLOVER HONEY” sit atop the shelves. Next to the door is a workman’s rack of apiculture tools and miniature honeycomb knives. A small group of locals are here for today’s educational session. Overseeing it all is Clare Densley, a youthful middle-aged woman wearing Crocs and loose pajama pants that look cut from a hippie’s Persian rug. With her stylishly graying hair cropped short, she projects a warm yet firm disposition.

  Brother Daniel sniffs the burnt hay tarred inside the collection of beekeeper smoker canisters on a nearby table. “Once a beekeeper, always a beekeeper,” he says. “Even now the smell of smoke—it’s a nice beekeeping aroma.”

  Clare turns to me. “I’ve got a bit of a beginner’s class this morning,” she tells me. “Do you mind sitting in?”

  Daniel mentions how the overcast weather won’t be optimal for viewing the apiary. “They’ll be a bit stingy today.” I look dreamily at the cotton bee suits and cage veils hanging at the entryway.

  “No, they won’t enjoy us,” says Clare. “They’ll all be doing housework today, sorting the honey.”

  Brother Daniel heads back to the monastery. Before the Beekeeping 101 class begins I ask Clare about Brother Adam and why his Buckfast bee began to disappear in the 2000s. We walk toward the table in the back, passing an observation hive, and she says, “It all started going to pieces.”

  The Buckfast hybrid bee was able to obtain its maker’s pure design through what’s called an isolated mating station—a land site filled with bees of the same breed. It also meant incestuous breeding. Brother Adam had traveled to several Mediterranean countries in search of species he could mold into ideal hybrids. And as Hannah Nordhaus mentions in her book Th
e Beekeeper’s Lament, he was “credited” for the breeding method, although less notable beekeepers had succeeded before him. (According to Clare, one magazine from 1903 advertises similar bees.) While he did license his bee-rearing technique, and some beekeepers in Denmark, Holland, and Germany currently maintain variations of the breed, the colonies at Buckfast Abbey fell victim to infectious disease. They experienced a massive American foulbrood problem—a bacteria in the guts of larvae that germinate and kill in the process. Antibiotics couldn’t save the hundreds of colonies. Large holes were dug in the ground and the hives were set aflame in what must’ve looked like a funeral pyre.

  “I chose not to breed the Buckfast bee,” says Clare, “because I think a designer bee is weaker in lots of ways.”

  “I thought people viewed the honeybee as perfection,” I say.

  “It’s so difficult to keep it perfect without getting inbreeding,” she says. The makings of a healthy queen require genetic diversity, which is why she can mate with an average of 14 drones at times. If you don’t let queens mate with a variety of suitors, says Clare, “you weaken her. You’re looking at thousands of years before they can change any kind of characteristic.”

  The bees mean more to Clare than the honey they produce. The sentiments are shared by her friends, some of whom call them “hug bunnies.” And like them, Clare talks to her bees. “I can imagine being a bee,” she tells me later. “Sniffing around and being with all my sisters.” In fact, each colony in Buckfast’s apiary has a name: Mattie, Zoltana, Natasha, Layla, Aurora. The queen in the observation hive, connected with a plastic hose to an outside entrance and primed to swarm, is called Roseanne.

  “My bees are mongrels,” Clare continues, “but they’re lovely. They may produce a little less honey, and they may have a slightly variable temper—but they’re healthy.” And while we’ll soon see that designer bees aren’t necessarily a bad thing, nature may have already done enough genetic grooming to deliver a reliable end product. “I just prefer middle-of-the-road bees that need less intervention,” she says.

  Clare turns her attention to the rookie beekeeper hobbyists. A sign with the 3-D word “WAX” covered in candle drips hangs above a metallic honey extractor. The naturalist-type woman about my age sitting next to me is named Ellie. She tells me she’s started beekeeping recently because she’s following “the Shamanic path of the pollen.” Ellie whispers as Clare gets situated with today’s handouts of helpful tips. “Have you ever chewed fresh wax with a bit of honey?” she asks, her voice breathy. “It’s like gum.”

  “No,” I say, “but I once chewed wax in a dessert.” (Admittedly more labor-intensive than a Juicy Fruit stick.)

  “Ooo,” she sits back, impressed. “Swanky.”

  Class begins.

  Clare brings up swarming—one of the most complex aspects of honeybees. Their division of labor is equally as impressive. Foraging, cell cleaning, resting, patrolling, attending the brood. These are all job positions that cycle through their life span. But swarming occurs once the hive is near max capacity with primary queens and virgin queens disbanding into new homes. No one better understands this process than entomologist Thomas Seeley, author of Honeybee Democracy.

  In 1974, Seeley watched a scout bee pitch a “prospective” new home to the colony. “The bees demonstrate to us several principles of effective group decision-making,” he writes, “and that by implementing them we can raise the reliability of decision making by human groups.” He goes on to compare what happens to a “New England town meeting in which registered voters who are interested in local affairs meet in face-to-face assemblies.”

  It starts with the queen. Her eggs—these microscopic polished grains of rice—plop into empty cells. Semen from her nuptial flight with 12 to 14 or so beaux has been stored in her spherical spermatheca. Viewed under a microscope, it resembles a murky crystal ball. With only a fraction of the volume stored there, she can birth 150,000 bees in a summer. The internal colony temperature is in the mid-90s thanks to bees vibrating11 for warmth or fanning with their wings near the entrance. About 45 pounds of stored honey keeps the bees’ heat-generating metabolism going through the winter. Depending on the hive commercial keepers use, each colony can produce up to 220 pounds of honey annually. At some point, the bees’ numbers grow so large that their home just won’t accommodate anymore. Enter the realtors.

  Senior foragers with their experience gathering nectar and pollen now move into the role of scouting. They’re especially good at this because of their keen eye and astute sense of direction. Once the hive is full, the whole lot of them abandon ship.

  A hollow tree, caves, and buildings12 with big enough knotholes all make for viable homes. The scouts take several inspection trips. They walk around the surface and note the dimensions of the cavity’s volume upon return flights, all while rallying bees to their cause back at the temporary home base, returning to potential buyers (i.e., the colony), and stirring intrigue. They perform a “friendly … dance off,” for the crowd, which will decide the winner.

  (In one of Seeley’s experiments, he tested two types of hives: a 40-liter and a 15-liter box. The dance judges had to decide which scout had the better find. One bee performing stronger consecutive dance circuits, lasting 85 seconds compared to the other bee’s dance in half that time, was convincing enough. The superb dancer found the 40-liter box.)

  Bees rallying for the losing options either switch or give up entirely. Other members of the colony cast their votes, and the decision is made. Now the bees will help their queen lose weight before the flight. Workers bumping into her will vigorously shake her around like a fat man on a jiggling belt machine. Slimmed up from “increased exercised,” the primary swarm is prepped to relocate.

  Before a swarm flight, the bees’ body temperature increases to 95 degrees. Scouts signal to other bees that it’s time for their “buzz-run.” Life of the Bee author Maurice Maeterlinck called them “winged quartermasters.” Soon a fleet of 10,000 bees in the hive are in frantic launch mode like an airfield of World War I fighter planes eager to hightail. Only 5 percent of them know the location of their new home. As this organic cloud travels at about five miles per hour, the real estate agents, aka “streaker bees,” steer the swarm, rapidly zipping back and forth like cattle ranchers steering a herd. Until the 2000s, the streaker bee—which clocks speeds of 20 miles per hour—was only a hypothesis, but advances in digital photography and computer simulations using point-tracking algorithms confirmed its existence.

  From the Gospel of Maurice: “The bees have followed what at first was an audacious idea, based on observation, probably on experience and reasoning. And this idea might be almost declared to have been as important to the destinies of the domestic bee as was the invention of fire to the destinies of man.”

  Clare Densley focuses on the external, apiculture side of this phenomenon with her class. The top of one of her handout sheets reads, “Oooops! Your bees have swarmed. What to do?” Rehiving colonies involves carefully cutting the nearby branch the bees have swarmed to and emptying them into a new brood box so they may continue to thrive.

  Clare dismayingly adds, “It could all go pear-shaped as well” (“not good” in British-ese) if the secondary new virgins aren’t properly mated with, ending that original colony’s story right there. Regardless, other virgins have branched off from the original colony by then and started to transform. “She gains in stature,” says Clare, “and becomes not more regal—but—”

  “Queenly?” one keeper inputs.

  “Yes, a bit more assured. More confident about herself. Virgins just zip around everywhere because…” She hesitates because of the two young boys in the class. “You know, they’re—”

  “Horny?” Ellie, sitting beside me, offers.

  “Um, yeah.” Clare looks at the mothers. “They haven’t been, um, fulfilled yet.”

  Part of today’s lesson includes an interlude of constructing wood frames. Bees will later use these to buil
d their combs. Clare hands out nails and hammers and a waxy sheet to jump-start the honeycomb-building. As the students work, I walk to the observation hive where Roseanne, the queen, has lost her pre-swarm weight. I press my nose to the foundation where an exhaust vent wafts scents of dried forest moss.

  After the arts and crafts session, everyone suits up to visit the apiary. The 13 of us step out of the Bee Department and walk down a dirt trail into the Exmoor woods. The white-uniformed procession follows a muddy path through a lush tunnel of trees, the hive smoker filled with burnt wood shavings incensing us. We arrive at the apiary and choose two of the students’ frames. Clare Densley touches upon how mongrels have better gut bacteria, and therefore healthier hives. As she mentioned earlier, the problem comes when you decrease genetic diversity. “And particularly in America they’ve got a very small gene pool. We wonder why we’ve got problems,” she says, sounding more sincere. “It’s our fault.”

  One time her hive was struck with chronic bee paralysis virus (i.e., hair loss, flightlessness, trembles). She fed the bees probiotics and garlic, and they recovered in two weeks. “I think it’s the way forward,” she says. But there are other afflictions still confounding entomologists. The problems certainly dwell within the bees’ genes. On the walk back to the department, Clare and I revisit the legacy of the Buckfast bee. “[Brother] Daniel will never tell you, but Adam was a bit of a task master,” she explains. “I think it’s because Adam came here when he was eleven … Things were lonely for him,” she adds tenderly. “He’s very intelligent. And bees were a major distraction for him. It was his world, wasn’t it? And I think he poured his whole life into the bees.”

  Bees are therapeutic. And monks can be just as mystical as bees: escaping from the modern world in search of tranquility.