Eventually the bees settled down in the cluster. Regaining a more suitable sense of my human condition and responsibilities, I went over to my pickup and got the empty hive that I always carry with me during swarming season. I propped it up so that its entrance was just under the swarm. A frame of comb from another hive was inside and the bees in the cluster could smell it, so they began to walk up into the entrance. I watched, looking for the queen, for without her the swarm would die. It took perhaps twenty minutes for all of them to file in, and the queen, a long, elegant bee, was one of the last to enter.
I screened up the entrance and put the hive in the back of the pickup. After I was finished with my work with the other hives in the beeyard, I drove back home with my new swarm.
I should have ordered a new queen bee, killed the old one and replaced her, but in doing that I would have destroyed the identity of the swarm. Every colony of bees takes its essence, character and personality from the queen who is mother to all its members. As a commercial beekeeper, it was certainly my business to kill the old queen and replace her with a vigorous new one so that the colony would become a good honey producer.
But I did not.
The local VFW has a campground on the river directly below my farm. During the warm weather, its members and their families come there to swim, cook out and sometimes camp overnight.
The VFW is an important social organization in town and sponsors civic events as well as fish fries, barbecues and pig roasts at the slightest hint of a patriotic occasion. The members are mostly World War II veterans. Here as elsewhere, many of the veterans of Vietnam are a bitter lot, not interested in socializing in an organization reminding them of war. One of them, who was repairing a tire for me at a gas station in town, asked if I wasn’t the Bee Lady who lived up by the VFW campground? I was. Was he a member of the VFW?
“Nah, I can’t stand listening to those old guys sitting around telling about how a war should be fought,” he said savagely.
None of the VFW members or their wives are close friends of mine, but I know many in the group and they often invite me to join them at their cookouts. The invitations are a friendly gesture, not meant to be accepted, but a politeness that establishes that we are good neighbors. But, like my mother, the VFW seems to believe that I don’t eat properly, because every time they cook out down there, one of the veterans drives back up the hill with a box full of barbecued meat, fried potatoes, baked beans, and salad, enough food for days.
“Brought you some groceries,” the veteran will say with a grin, and drive back down the hill to his friends.
At the end of the summer, the VFW holds a stag party on a Saturday. There is very little real hell-raising from what I ever hear, but much talk of it beforehand. One member told me that the wife of a new recruit was upset because they had told her that on the night of the stag party a canoe full of naked women always floated down the river at precisely 10 P.M. The man’s wife was just a young thing and she believed them and got pretty riled up, the veteran told me, laughing hard, and then added, “Hell, by ten o’clock we’re all so drunk we wouldn’t know if the Queen of Sheba floated down the river.”
One afternoon last summer, Virgil, a VFW member, and his wife, Mary Lou, whom I know well, stopped by my place and said they were roasting a goat down there for a few friends and really would like me to join them. I hadn’t seen them for a while and had been working hard, so the prospect of an evening of roasted goat and good-old-boy banter was a welcome one; I thanked them and said I’d come down later. Before I left I searched for something to contribute to the feast. The refrigerator held some scraps of raw vegetables, just enough for the salad I had intended to have for supper, an opened jar of mustard that was evolving into a higher life form, and half a jug of red wine left over from dinner with friends the week before. The cupboard was no better: some stale crackers and half a bottle of teriyaki sauce. Half a jug of wine seemed more festive than half a bottle of teriyaki sauce, so I slung it over my shoulder and walked down the hill to the campground. When I got there, Virgil peered at the level of wine in the jug.
“I knew it was a long walk down the hill, but I didn’t know it was that long,” he said, his face innocent of a smile.
The evening was a pleasant one. The goat, roasted in herbs, was delicious, the company good, and Virgil kept everyone limp with laughter with his straight-faced stories. I was glad I had accepted their invitation.
Last Friday night a tired and troubled veteran shot and killed himself at the campground. I did not hear the shot and did not know the man, but I did know the two veterans who were pounding on my door minutes later.
I was in bed reading when I heard them. I got up, put on a robe, and answered the door. The two men were incoherent and weeping. I knew something was terribly wrong but I couldn’t find out what. I brought them into the living room and had them sit down, and gradually made out what had happened. They had been trying for two hours to talk the man out of suicide, but he had gone ahead with it and they were racking themselves for their failure.
They wanted to use my telephone to call the sheriff and the man’s family, but the horror still in front of their eyes made it impossible for them to read the telephone book. I looked up the numbers for them, helped them to place their calls and tried to find something to say, but there were no words that could undo what had been done. Then they asked me to call Virgil, a good man in a crisis. They wanted him with them. I said I would, and asked them to stay with me for the half hour that it would take the sheriff to get here. I would make some coffee. I did not think it was good for them to go back and sit alone with that body whose head had been ripped apart with a shotgun blast, but they would not stay, and drove their pickup down to the river, the wheels spinning gravel in the darkness. I made the call to Virgil, and he said he would go to them immediately.
Then my telephone began to ring. Here in the country, listening to the police scanner vies with television as an evening’s entertainment. People throughout the neighborhood had heard the sheriff saying he was on his way to investigate a reported death at the VFW campground, and the curious were calling to ask what had happened.
I cannot see the road from my cabin, but soon I heard traffic on it and knew that the sheriff, Virgil and perhaps some of the other veterans were arriving; I felt a little easier about the two men who had been here. Sleep was impossible that night, and I thought with sorrow of the unknown man whose life had become such pain to him that he had to leave it.
The next afternoon, one of the veterans who had knocked on my door the night before came to see me. His eyes were red, his face was creased with fatigue and he was staggeringly drunk. He told me that all the boys had decided the best thing to do was to have a family party at the campground for the rest of the weekend and to camp out there that night, or else no one would ever be able to go there again. It was important that I come down for dinner. It was important. Very. Very. Important. Very important. Very.
I said I would come, and assured him that I understood.
The campground had been taken over by death; it had to be returned to life and parties before it grew a ghost. The two men needed to talk to me at a party there. The night before they had not been just a pair of good old boys, but two men who had seen horror and had brought it into my living room. I had not been the Bee Lady on the hill, but a woman who had put her arms around them when they cried. Now it was time for us to go back to what we had all been before.
When the sun set, I walked down the hill to the campground. We all ate something or other. I sat with the circle of wives and daughters, and we talked of something or other. The men sat by themselves, drinking. After a while I talked with the two men who had come to my cabin. We agreed that what had happened was bad, but that time would help a person to forget. They thanked me for letting them use the telephone, and then I walked back up the hill.
SUMMER
I am an early riser, and now that the weather is warm I like to take a cup of
coffee out under the oak trees in back of the cabin and get a feel for the kind of day it is going to be. Today the night creatures were still about when I went out there—katydids, whippoorwills, night-flying moths, owls and mosquitoes. By the time I had had a sip or two of coffee and my eyes had adjusted well enough to pick out the shapes of the trees, the mosquitoes had discovered me and gathered in an annoying buzz around my head. But before they had a chance to bite, a small furry shape appeared from nowhere. I heard the soft rush of wings beside my ear and the mosquitoes were gone. A few moments of silence. More mosquitoes, and once again a bat swooped in.
The arrangement was a pleasant one for both the bat and me. I don’t like mosquitoes but the bat does. I served as bait to gather the mosquitoes in one rich spot, and the bat ate them before they bit me. For the mosquitoes the plan was not such a good one; they were kept from dinner and were turned into one instead. All this gives me a fine, friendly feeling toward bats. In their way, I suppose, they also approve of me.
The bats are quick, and in the dim light before dawn it is difficult to identify them, but I believe them to be Myotis lucifugus, more comfortably known as little brown bats. These, at least, are the ones I often see taking their daytime sleep hanging upside down from the rafters in the barn loft. They are common around here, and also sleep in caves or hollow trees. Like other bats, they belong to the order Chiroptera, which means wing-handed, a good word for an animal with wings made of a membrane of skin covering the hand and fingerbones. But I also like the old English name of flittermouse, an apt description of our only flying mammal.
Bats are mammals like we are. They suckle their young, and have such wizened ancient-looking faces that they seem strangely akin and familiar. Yet they find their way and locate their food by using sound that we cannot hear. They hunt by night, and in cold weather some migrate and others hibernate. They are odd and alien to us, too, so much so that we have made up fancies about them—that they are evil and ill-omened, or at the very least will fly into our hair. Anyone who has read Dracula will remember that young ladies should not moon around graveyards at night, or they will be in big trouble with bats.
The truth is that, from a human point of view, bats are beneficial. On the North American continent, the little brown bat and other temperate-zone bats have a diet made up almost exclusively of night-flying insects. Farther south, in tropical regions, there are bats that eat fruit, and even vampire bats, which have incisors that allow them to feed on the blood of large animals, but our northern bats have nothing to do with such fare, eating, instead, the kinds of insects that are often a bother to us.
Bats find their food by producing high-pitched sounds that echo against insects or other solid objects. The echos return to the bats’ ears and give them a precise and vivid aural map of whatever is out there.
These cries are beyond our human range of hearing, but when translated to frequencies low enough for us, they sound like a series of short clicks or chirps. The short ultrasound wave-lengths allow bats to locate exactly even very small moving objects, such as mosquito-sized insects. They pluck the mosquitoes out of the air close to my head, and would never be so clumsy as to blunder into my hair.
What is more, the bats’ discrimination is so fine that they can separate the echos of their own clicks from those of another bat. This is important, because they often fly and hunt in groups, and such accuracy allows them to do so without muddle or confusion. It may not be our way to get dinner, but it does strike me as wonderfully clever, efficient and simple. However, as with most things in life, it is not all that simple, and dinner is not always a sure thing.
Night-flying moths are one of the chief items in bat diet, and over a long time span of eating and being eaten, bat and moth have worked out a complex relationship.
My cousin Asher, whose academic specialty is moth ear mites, has during the course of a lifetime of work discovered a good deal about moths’ ears, a structure that some of us never knew existed. He tells me that some moths who are night fliers and therefore potential bat dinners can hear the high-pitched noises made by bats and stand a good chance of escaping. What is even more remarkable is that certain moths have the ability to make sounds that the bats, in turn, can hear. In a sense, they can talk back to bats.
“And what,” I asked Asher, “do they say?”
“They say, ‘I am not good to eat,’” he replied.
This makes life harder for the bats and easier for the moths, but the moths’ advantage is only preserved by a highly specialized relationship with yet another creature.
The moth ear mites Asher studies, the North American species, harm their hosts’ ears, and if they were not careful, they would deafen them and make the moths and themselves easy prey. But they are careful.
The mites are tiny arachnids, scarcely visible to the naked eye. When they are ready to lay their eggs, they climb on the moth and make their way to the moth’s ear, a safe and protected spot for their eggs. In the process of laying the eggs, they damage the delicate structure of the moth’s ear. Since many mites may be present on a single moth, the moth would be deaf if they were to lay their eggs in both ears. So, in a stunning example of evolutionary respect, a case where courtesy and self-interest are one and the same, the first mite aboard makes a trail, in a manner not yet clearly understood, and all the mites who come later follow her trail, laying all their eggs in the same ear and leaving the opposite ear undamaged. This allows the moth to retain partial hearing, and may improve his chances of escaping bats during the time the mites’ eggs hatch.
So there we are out under the oak trees in the dim light—the mites, the moths, the bats, the mosquitoes, and me. We are a text of suitability one for another, and that text is as good as any I know by which to drink my coffee and watch the dawn.
I was bitten by a brown recluse spider a couple of weeks ago and lived to tell about it, so I shall. Brown recluses are the most poisonous spiders in the United States. Unlike black widows, the bite of both sexes is venomous; also unlike black widows, they are common in houses throughout the Southeast and Southwest.
The one that bit me was hiding between the folds of a towel that I picked up and flung over my shoulder as I got ready to go for a swim with a friend. We were walking along the pathway down to the river when I felt a sharp, burning bite on my upper arm. I dropped the towel and saw a brown recluse scurry away. They are easy to recognize: grayish-brown leggy spiders half an inch or so in size, with the distinctive brown violin-shaped marking on the top of their broad cephalothorax that gives them their other common name—violin or fiddle spider. My friend was horrified when I told him it was a brown recluse that had bitten me. He asked if I wanted to go back to the cabin. “Why?” I said. “If I’m going to die, I might better die down at the river than back in the cabin.” So we continued on our way and spent the afternoon swimming and lying on a gravel bank.
I died hardly at all, and the bite never amounted to much, nothing like one from a tick or a mosquito. Within a few days the pimple-like mark had disappeared without a trace. Many people—most, as a matter of fact—have a reaction no worse than mine to the bite of a brown recluse, but some lack immunity to the venom, and although death from the bite is extremely rare, they can have a severe reaction. The spider’s enzymes produce neurotoxins that break down cell membranes, destroying blood vessels and causing clotting. The surrounding tissue dies, creating an ever-widening wound that is so stubborn in healing that in exceptional cases skin grafts are required to repair the damage. In addition, a susceptible person may experience chills, nausea and fever. The reaction is highly variable, but fortunately can be medically treated.
Although they spin untidy webs under rocks and logs, brown recluses are for the most part common indoor spiders. Their scientific name, Loxosceles reclusa (Loxosceles means slant-legged), dubs them reclusive, but although they may be solitary, they can be seen frequently throughout the house. To be sure, they prefer to hide in the folds of clothes in a drawer o
r in towels on the shelf, as did the one who bit me, but they come out to explore and forage for small crawling insects. They cannot climb smooth surfaces, and I often find them trapped in the bathtub or sink, skittering about trying to escape. A friend and her daughter stopped in for tea not long ago. I made the tea in a pot and handed out cups. Accustomed to country living, the daughter wisely peered into her cup before I poured the tea. “Hmm! A brown recluse,” she said calmly, and we dumped out the spider and rinsed the cup before we had our tea party.
Most people are not as unflappable as my young friend. Descriptions of skin rotting off from terrible brown recluse bites circulate from time to time, and are greeted with horrified shudders. The brown recluse is one of our modern monsters. The day after I was bitten, I read in one of my spider books something that at first surprised me: Although the bites of other brown spiders in South America, other species of Loxosceles, were known to make people sick, it wasn’t until the 1950s, as a result of bites in Texas, Kansas, Missouri and Oklahoma, that the brown recluse was recognized to be similarly toxic. Upon reflection, I realized that it was testimony to how minor the bite is for most people. Humans and brown recluse spiders have been sharing living quarters for a long time, and people must have been bitten now and again, but it wasn’t until the occasional toxicity of the bite was established that the creature was turned into a Scary Beast.
A newspaper story appeared in several cities recently about the development of an antidote for brown recluse bites. After reading the story, a city friend telephoned me and asked if I’d ever seen a brown recluse. I told her that they were common, and now she refuses to visit me, although she has been here a number of times and has returned home in perfect health after each visit. She is a good friend and I shall miss her company.
A Country Year Page 3