It is a clubby thing, this frog mating, and the frogs are so many and their calls so shrill and intense that I like to walk up to the pond in the evenings and listen to the chorus, which, to a human, is both exhilarating and oddly disturbing at close range. One evening I walked there with a friend, and we sat by the edge of the pond for a long time. Conversation was inappropriate, but even if it had not been it would have been impossible. The bell-like chorus completely surrounded us, filled us. It seemed to reverberate with the shrill insistence of hysteria, driving focused thought from our heads, forcing us not only to hear sound but to feel it.
Comparing notes as we walked back to my cabin, we were startled to discover that we had both wondered, independently, whether that was what it was like to go mad.
A slightly larger cousin of the spring peeper that belongs to the same genus, the gray tree frog, commonly lives in my beehives during the summer months. These frogs cling under the protective overhang of the hive cover, and as I pry up the lid, they hop calmly to the white inner cover and sit there placidly eying me.
They are a pleasing soft grayish-green, marked with darker moss-colored patches, and look like a bit of lichen-covered bark when they are on a tree. Having evolved this wonderfully successful protective coloration, the safest behavior for a gray tree frog in a tight spot is to stay still and pretend to be a piece of bark. Sitting on the white inner cover of the beehive, the frog’s protective coloration serves him not at all, but of course he doesn’t know that, and not having learned any value in conspicuously hopping away, he continues to sit there looking at me with what appears to be smug self-satisfaction and righteous spunk.
Last evening I was reading in bed and felt rather than heard a soft plop on the bed next to me. Peering over the top of my glasses, I saw a plump, proud gray tree frog inspecting me. We studied each other for quite a time, the gray tree frog seemingly at ease, until I picked him up, carried him out the back door and put him on the hickory tree there. But even in my cupped hands he moved very little, and after I put him on the tree he sat quietly, blending in beautifully with the bark. A serene frog.
The sills in my bedroom are rotten, so I supposed that he had found a hole to come through and wondered if he’d had friends. I looked under the bed and discovered three more gray tree frogs, possibly each one a frog prince. Nevertheless, I transferred them to the hickory.
There was something in the back of my mind from childhood Sunday-school classes about a plague of frogs, so I took down my Bible and settled back in bed to search for it. I found the story in Exodus. It was one of those plagues that God sent to convince the Pharaoh to let the Jews leave Egypt.
And the Lord spake unto Moses, Go unto Pharaoh, and say unto him, Thus saith the Lord, Let my people go, that they may serve me.
And if thou refuse to let them go, behold, I will smite all thy borders with frogs:
And the river shall bring forth frogs abundantly, which shall go up and come into thine house, and into thy bedchamber, and upon thy bed …
This was exciting stuff; my evening had taken on a positively biblical quality. I was having a plague of frogs, and had obviously had another the evening that the spring peepers had crawled up the living-room windows. Actually, I enjoyed both plagues, but Pharaoh didn’t. The writer of Exodus tells us that Pharaoh was so distressed by frogs in his bed that he called Moses and said,
Intreat the Lord, that he may take away the frogs from me, and from my people; and I will let the people go, that they may do sacrifice unto the Lord.
A fussy man, that Pharaoh, and one easily unnerved.
I once knew a pickerel frog, Rana palustris, frog of the marshes, who might have changed Pharaoh’s mind. The pickerel frog was an appealing creature who lived in my barn one whole summer. He was handsome, grayish with dark, square blotches highlighted with yellow on his legs. I found him in the barn one morning trying to escape the attentions of the cat and the dogs. At some point he had lost the foot from his right front leg, and although the stump was well healed, his hop was awkward and lopsided. I decided that he would be better off taking his chances with wild things, so I carried him out to the pond and left him under the protective bramble thicket that grows there. But the next day he was back in the barn, having hopped the length of a football field to get there. So I let him stay, giving him a dish of water and a few dead flies.
All summer long I kept his water fresh, killed flies for him and kept an eye out for his safety. Pickerel frogs sometimes live in caves, and I wondered if the dim light of the barn and the cool concrete floor made him think he had discovered a cave where the service was particularly good. That part of the barn serves as a passageway to my honey house, and I grew accustomed to seeing him as I went in and out of it. I came to regard him as a tutelary sprite, the guardian of the honey house, the Penate Melissus.
Then one day the health inspector came for his annual tour. Like Pharaoh, the health inspector is a fussy man. Once he gave me a hard time because there were a few stray honeybees in the honey house. Bees, he explained patiently, were insects, and regulations forbade insects in a food-processing plant. I pointed out, perhaps not so patiently, that these insects had made the food, and that until I took it from them, they were in continuous, complete and intimate contact with it. He gave up, but I know he didn’t like it. So I wasn’t sure how he’d react to the pickerel frog squatting outside the honey-house door with his bowl of water and mason-jar lid full of dead flies. But the health inspector is a brisk man, and he walked briskly by the frog and never saw him. I was thankful.
Years ago, in an introductory biology class, I cut up a frog, carefully laying aside the muscles, tracing the nerves and identifying the organs. I remember that as I discarded the carcass I was quite pleased with myself, for now I knew all about frogs and could go on to learn the remaining one or two things about which I still had some small ignorance. I was just about as smug as a gray tree frog on a white beehive.
In the years after that, and before I moved to the Ozarks, I also lived a brisk life, and although I never had much reason to doubt that I still knew all about frogs, I don’t think I ever thought about them, for, like the health inspector, I never saw any.
Today my life has frogs aplenty and this delights me, but I am not so pleased with myself. My life hasn’t turned out as I expected it would, for one thing. For another, I no longer know all about anything. I don’t even know the first thing about frogs, for instance. There’s nothing like having frogs fill up my windows or share my bed or require my protection to convince me of that.
I don’t cut up frogs anymore, and I read more poetry than I did when I was twenty. I just read a couplet about the natural world by an anonymous Japanese poet. I copied it out and put it up on the wall above my desk today:
Unknown to me what resideth here
Tears flow from a sense of unworthiness and gratitude.
My three hundred hives of bees are scattered across the hills of southern Missouri in outyards on farmers’ pastures or at the edge of their woodlots. I give each family who has one of those outyards a gallon of honey a year as rent, but mostly farmers just like having the hives around, for the bees pollinate their fruit and vegetables and the clover in their pastures.
Bees fly two miles or more as they forage for nectar. I once calculated that the eighteen million bees in my hives cover a thousand square miles of the Ozarks in their flights. In the spring I spend most of my time driving to the outyards, taking care of the bees and getting them ready for the major nectar flows from which they will make the honey crop.
I use a big truck to haul the honey to market, but for the work around here I drive a courageous 1954 red Chevy halfton pickup named “Press on Regardless” because it runs zestfully without many parts that are normally considered to be automotive necessities. That pickup and I have been over some rough spots, through mud and hard times, and I like to take good care of it.
Today was cold and rainy, not good weather for bee work,
so I spent the day working on the pickup. I went out to the center part of the barn where I keep it, made a fire in the wood stove and turned the radio on to the public station I can get from the university eighty miles to the north. The radio promised that it would give me Albinoni’s Concerto in C for Two Oboes and Strings. I started checking the pickup’s vital fluids. The transmission oil was okay, but I had to add half a can of brake fluid to the master cylinder. I let out the crankcase oil, as it was time to change it. While the oil was draining, I jacked up the front of the pickup, rolled under it on my creeper and with bits of caked mud and grease falling into my eyes, greased the front end. My pickup has twenty grease points, and they have to be tended often in a truck that old.
While lying there on the creeper, Albinoni drifting through my brain, I noticed that I had been careless with the right rear shock absorber. Not only was it missing, but the bracket that held it in place had ripped loose. I added five quarts of new oil to the crankcase, reversed the truck, checked the oil level in the rear end, and then jacked it up to grease the rear springs. Afterwards I replaced the starter button above the starter assembly. The foot starter has been balky recently, and Ermon, my neighbor, a mechanic who lives across the hollow, had told me that the button needed replacing and showed me how to do it. The old one came out easily enough, but screwing in the new one with my fingertips backed up against the engine block while I sprawled over the fender was hard and took me past Albinoni, through Mozart, Beethoven and right on up to the Romantics before I was done. I wondered how the mechanic with his bigger fingers could manage it so deftly.
After I was finished, I peeled off my greasy coveralls, pleased and mildly surprised as I always am to find myself clean enough underneath to receive company in a parlor.
Outdoors the weather had still not improved for beework, so I drove into town to do errands. I stopped at the auto-parts store to buy a new set of shock absorbers, and then went over to my favorite salvage yard to buy a spare universal joint. The kind of driving that I do is hard on universal joints, and the last time I sheared one in two my neighbor mechanic had replaced it with the last one he had and told me to find another that I could carry as a spare in my glove box.
The salvage-yard man is a friend of mine, and I knew that buying the universal joint would take some time, just the thing that both he and I would enjoy on a rainy day. When I went into his shop he was cutting a junked Pontiac into usable parts with a welding torch. I leaned up against his tool bench to wait for him to finish a cut. When he stopped, he pushed back his welding helmet and nodded to me. He poured a cup of coffee for me and another for himself. We talked about the weather, discussing the pros and cons of rain past, present and future. Then he wondered what I was a-needing. I mentioned the universal joint for my Chevy. No, no, he seldom got those old rigs in nowadays, and they were always stripped clean of good parts when he did.
I have lived in the Ozarks twelve years now, so I did not say thank you and leave. I knew that so far he had just said howdy. I asked him how he was getting along with the 1934 pickup he had bought and was restoring.
“Not getting along worth a damn,” he said. “Seems like folks come in looking for parts and interrupting all the time. Got me as fussed as a fart in a mitten.” He looked hard at me. I took his comment for what it was worth and settled back more comfortably against the toolbench.
“Want to get to work on it, too,” he said. “It’s just like the first pickup that I ever did own. Say, did I tell you about that rig?”
No, he hadn’t.
He leaned back against a crumpled fender. “It was a thirty-four Chevy that I’d bought from old Peg-Leg Potter,” he said. “It was a pretty thing, and I was proud to drive that pickup home. But the next day I noticed that it was making a knocking noise that just wasn’t right at all, so I crawled under that pickup and took the oil pan off. Well, old Peg-Leg Potter, whatever else he was, he wasn’t much of a mechanic, because he’d worn out a bearing and just wrapped a piece of bacon rind round the rod to make do. Why, you cain’t run no pickup on bacon rind! Well, I caught my daddy asleep one day and I cut me a piece of shoe leather right out of the tongue of his shoe, and I took out that bacon rind and put the shoe leather in its place, and then I drove that thirty-four Chevy on down the road and traded it for a 1948 Ford. The old boy that I traded to, he come round to see me the next week complaining about the shoe leather. I says to him, I says, ‘Don’t talk to me about it. Why, I improved that pickup. You go talk to old Peg-Leg Potter. He thinks you can run a pickup on bacon rind.’”
If I had laughed or even smiled I would have ruined the transaction, so I tried to arrange my face in a way that acknowledged that I’d heard a good story but that I still knew a joke from a jaybird and that I still lacked a universal joint. I said that the rain appeared to be letting up some and I guessed I’d get going.
“If you wasn’t in such an all-fired hurry, I expect I might find you a U-joint somewheres,” he said, and rummaged around on a shelf until he found one.
The only time I have ever wished I were a man was at that moment, for what I should have said next was, “How much would a man have to give for that old U-joint now?” But I’m not and I couldn’t and I didn’t. And the word “woman” won’t work in that question. So instead I asked him how much it was, he told me, I paid him and he returned to his cutting torch.
Anyone who has kept bees is a pushover for a swarm of them. We always drop whatever we are doing and go off to pick one up when asked to do so. It doesn’t make sense, because from a standpoint of serious beekeeping and honey production a swarm isn’t much good. Swarms are headed up by old queens with not much vitality or egg-laying potential left, and so a beekeeper should replace her with a new queen from a queen breeder. He will probably have to feed and coddle the swarm through its first year; it will seldom produce any extra honey the first season. And yet we always hive them.
There is something really odd about swarms, and I notice that beekeepers don’t talk about it much, probably because it is the sort of thing we don’t feel comfortable about trying to put into words, something the other side of rationality.
The second year I kept bees, I picked up my first swarm. I was in the middle of the spring beework, putting in ten to twelve hours a day, and very attuned to what the bees were doing out there in their hives. That day had begun with a heavy rainstorm, and so rather than working out in the beeyards, I was in the honey house making new equipment. By afternoon the rain had stopped, but the air was warm and heavy, charged and expectant. I began to feel odd, tense and anticipatory, and when the back of my neck began to prickle I decided to take a walk out to the new hives I had started. Near them, hanging pendulously from the branch of an apple tree, was a swarm of bees. Individual bees were still flying in from all directions, adding their numbers to those clinging around their queen.
In the springtime some colonies of bees, for reasons not well understood, obey an impulse to split in two and thus multiply by swarming. The worker bees thoughtfully raise a new queen bee for the parent colony, and then a portion of the bees gather with the old queen, gorge themselves with honey and fly out of the hive, never to return, leaving all memory of their old home behind. They cluster somewhere temporarily, such as on the branch of my apple tree. If a beekeeper doesn’t hive them, scout bees fly from the cluster and investigate nearby holes and spaces, and report back to the cluster on the suitability of new quarters.
We know about two forms of honeybee communication. One is chemical: information about food sources and the wellbeing of the queen and colony is exchanged as bees continually feed one another with droplets of nectar which they have begun to process and chemically tag. The other form of communication is tactile: bees tell other bees about good things such as food or the location of a new home by patterned motions. These elaborate movements, which amount to a highly stylized map of landmarks, direction and the sun’s position, are called the bee dance.
Different scout bees
may find different locations for the swarm and return to dance about their finds. Eventually, sometimes after several days, an agreement is reached, rather like the arrival of the Sense of the Meeting among Quakers, and all the bees in the cluster fly off to their new home.
I watched the bees on my apple tree for a while with delight and pleasure, and then returned to the barn to gather up enough equipment to hive them. As I did so, I glanced up at the sky. It was still dark from the receding thunderstorm, but a perfect and dazzling rainbow arched shimmering against the deep blue sky, its curve making a stunning and pleasing contrast with the sharp inverted V of the barn roof. I returned to the apple tree and shook the bees into the new beehive, noticing that I was singing snatches of one of Handel’s coronation anthems. It seemed as appropriate music to hive a swarm by as any I knew.
Since then, I have learned to pay attention in the springtime when the air feels electric and full of excitement. It was just so one day last week. I had been working quietly along the row of twelve hives in an outyard when the hair on the back of my neck began to stand on end. I looked up to see the air thick with bees flying in toward me from the north. The swarm was not from any of my hives, but for some reason bees often cluster near existing hives while they scout a new location. I closed up the hive I was working on and stood back to watch. I was near a slender post oak sapling, and the bees began to light on one of its lower limbs right next to my elbow. They came flying in, swirling as they descended, spiraling around me and the post oak until I was enveloped by the swarm, the air moving gently from the beat of their wings. I am not sure how long I stood there. I lost all sense of time and felt only elation, a kind of human emotional counterpart of the springlike, optimistic, burgeoning state that the bees were in. I stood quietly; I was nothing more to the bees than an object to be encircled on their way to the spot where they had decided, in a way I could not know, to cluster. In another sense I was not remote from them at all, but was receiving all sorts of meaningful messages in the strongest way imaginable outside of human mental process and language. My skin was tingling as the bees brushed past and I felt almost a part of the swarm.
A Country Year Page 2