This year my helper has been Ky, my nephew, who wanted to learn something about bees and beekeeping. He is a sweet, gentle, cooperative giant of a young man who, because of a series of physical problems, lacks confidence in his own ability to get on in the world.
As soon as he arrived, I set about to desensitize him to bee stings. The first day, I put a piece of ice on his arm to numb it; then, holding the bee carefully by her head, I placed her abdomen on the numbed spot and let her sting him there. A bee’s stinger is barbed and stays in the flesh, pulling loose from her body as she struggles to free herself. Lacking her stinger, the bee will live only a short time. The bulbous poison sac at the top of the stinger continues to pulsate after the bee has left, its muscles pumping the venom and forcing the barbed stinger deeper into the flesh.
I wanted Ky to have only a partial dose of venom that first day, so after a minute I scraped the stinger out with my fingernail and watched his reaction closely. A few people—about one percent of the population—are seriously sensitive to bee venom. Each sting they receive can cause a more severe reaction than the one before, reactions ranging from hives, difficulty in breathing and accelerated heartbeat, to choking, anaphylactic shock and death. Ky had been stung a few times in his life and didn’t think he was seriously allergic, but I wanted to make sure.
The spot where the stinger went in grew red and began to swell. This was a normal reaction, and so was the itchiness that Ky felt the next day. That time I let a bee sting him again, repeating the procedure, but leaving the stinger in his arm a full ten minutes, until the venom sac was emptied. Again the spot was red, swollen and itchy, but had disappeared the next day. Thereafter Ky decided that he didn’t need the ice cube any more, and began holding the bee himself to administer his own stings. I kept him at one sting a day until he had no redness or swelling from the full sting, and then had him increase to two stings daily. Again the greater amount of venom caused redness and swelling, but soon his body could tolerate them without an allergic reaction. I gradually had him build up to ten full stings a day with no reaction.
To encourage Ky, I had told him that what he was doing might help protect him from the arthritis that runs in our family. Beekeepers generally believe that getting stung by bees is a healthy thing, and that bee venom alleviates the symptoms of arthritis. When I first began keeping bees, I supposed this to be just another one of the old wives’ tales that make beekeeping such an entertaining occupation, but after my hands were stung the pain in my fingers disappeared and I too became a believer. Ky was polite, amused and skeptical of what I told him, but he welcomed my taking a few companionable stings on my knuckles along with him.
In desensitizing Ky to bee venom, I had simply been interested in building up his tolerance to stings so that he could be an effective helper when we took the honey from the hives, for I knew that he would be stung frequently. But I discovered that there had been a secondary effect on Ky that was more important: he was enormously pleased with himself for having passed through what he evidently regarded as a rite of initiation. He was proud and delighted in telling other people about the whole process. He was now one tough guy.
I hoped he was prepared well enough for our first day of work. I have had enough strong young men work for me to know what would happen the first day: he would be stung royally.
Some beekeepers insist that bees know their keeper—that they won’t sting that person, but will sting a stranger. This is nonsense, for summertime bees live only six weeks and I often open a particular hive less frequently than that, so I am usually a stranger to my bees; yet I am seldom stung. Others say that bees can sense fear or nervousness. I don’t know if this is true or not, but I do know that bees’ eyes are constructed in such a way that they can detect discontinuities and movement very well and stationary objects less well. This means that a person near their hives who moves with rapid, jerky motions attracts their attention and will more often be blamed by the bees when their hives are being meddled with than will the person whose motions are calm and easy. It has been my experience that the strong young man I hire for the honey harvest is always stung unmercifully for the first few days while he is new to the process and a bit tense. Then he learns to become easier with the bees and settles down to his job. As he gains confidence and assurance, the bees calm down too, and by the end of the harvest he usually is only stung a few times a day.
I knew that Ky very much wanted to do a good job with me that initial day working in the outyards. I had explained the procedures we would follow in taking the honey from the hives, but of course they were new to him and he was anxious. The bees from the first hive I opened flung themselves on him. Most of the stingers could not penetrate his bee suit, but in the act of stinging a bee leaves a chemical trace that marks the person stung as an enemy, a chemical sign other bees can read easily. This sign was read by the bees in each new hive I opened, and soon Ky’s bee suit began to look like a pincushion, bristling with stingers. In addition, the temperature was starting to climb and Ky was sweating. Honey oozing from combs broken between the supers was running down the front of his bee suit when he carried them to the truck. Honey and sweat made the suit cling to him, so that the stingers of angry bees could penetrate the suit and he could feel the prick of each one as it entered his skin. Hundreds of bees were assaulting him and finally drove him out of the beeyard, chasing him several hundred yards before they gave up the attack. There was little I could do to help him but try to complete the job quickly, so I took the supers off the next few hives myself, carried them to the truck and loaded them. Bravely, Ky returned to finish the last few hives. We tied down the load and drove away. His face was red with exertion when he unzipped his bee veil. He didn’t have much to say as we drove to the next yard, but sat beside me gulping down ice water from the thermos bottle.
At the second yard the bees didn’t bother Ky as we set up the equipment. I hoped that much of the chemical marker the bees had left on him had evaporated, but as soon as I began to open the hives they were after him again. Soon a cloud of angry bees enveloped him, accompanying him to the truck and back. Because of the terrain, the truck had to be parked at an odd angle and Ky had to bend from the hips as he loaded it, stretching the fabric of the bee suit taut across the entire length of his back and rear, allowing the bees to sting through it easily. We couldn’t talk over the noise of the beeblower’s engine, but I was worried about how he was taking hundreds more stings. I was removing the bees from the supers as quickly as I could, but the yard was a good one and there were a lot of supers there.
In about an hour’s time Ky carried and stacked what we later weighed in as a load of 2,500 pounds. The temperature must have been nearly a hundred degrees. After he had stacked the last super, I drove the truck away from the hives and we tied down the load. Ky’s long hair was plastered to his face and I couldn’t see the expression on it, but I knew he had been pushed to his limits and I was concerned about him. He tried to brush some of the stingers out of the seat of his bee suit before he sat down next to me in the truck in an uncommonly gingerly way. Unzipping his bee veil, he tossed it aside, pushed the hair back from his sweaty face, reached for the thermos bottle, gave me a sunny and triumphant grin and said, “If I ever get arthritis of the ass, I’ll know all that stuff you’ve been telling me is a lot of baloney.”
Snakes again. Black rat snakes this time. I can’t tell one five-foot black rat snake from another, so I don’t know if the one that has been showing up in the chicken coop each and every Friday all summer long is the same individual or not, but I rather think he is. My theory is that a week is the time it takes him to digest his meal of mice and an occasional egg. This is theory only, for none of my books tell me when mealtime is for five-foot black rat snakes; it is something I must ask my herpetologist friend the next time I see him.
Black rat snakes are some of the largest common snakes found around here. I estimate the one in the chicken coop to be five feet, but they can grow six
feet or more. They are shiny black as adults, but patterned strikingly with brownish and blackish markings when they are young. The vaguest hint of blotchings can sometimes be seen on adults, and this gives them their scientific name, Elaphe obsoleta obsoleta. Elaphe allies them with their kind, the other rat and corn snakes, and obsoleta is a term used in biology to mean indistinct. Their common name hints at their diet.
I have named this one Friday.
Far be it from me to wish a mouse ill, but the mice were rather out of hand in the chicken coop this spring, eating so much of the chopped corn put out for the chickens that I was keeping more mice than chickens. The trouble was that I was fresh out of cats, my pair of barn cats having died within months of each other last winter after fifteen and seventeen years of full and inscrutable lives. Late in the spring, I adopted a kitten, but he had some growing to do before he became a mouser; in the meantime, the mice, unchecked, multiplied rapidly until they became a bold nuisance to me and the chickens.
So I was pleased when I saw the first black rat snake in the spring. There were mice in the barn, mice in the chicken coop, and soon there were black rat snakes of all sizes everywhere. One of the reasons I think Friday must be the same snake is that he has grown self-assured in his sense of possession of the chicken coop, where he soon had the mouse population reduced to tolerable levels. His species can be fierce and will bite if attacked, but Friday seems to understand that I do not intend to hurt him and he ignores me. The day that I found him coiled up in a nest, the three eggs he had swallowed clearly apparent in his midsection, he looked at me calmly; he was too lumpy to slither away quickly. Last Friday, when I went out to gather the eggs, he was in the coop again. The day was a hot one, and the two-inch-wide circle of water at the base of the chicken-watering fountain had enticed him to try a bit of a bath. He looked me square in the eye as I stood laughing at him. No supposed serpentine dignity could keep him from being anything but ridiculous as he tried to loop and jam his entire five-foot length into the small circle of available water.
Black rat snakes also feed on birds, and in deference to their tastes I brood the dozen pullets I buy each spring in the cabin. I keep them under an electric light in a refrigerator carton near the wood stove. Their downy softness is a delight for a week or so, but they grow gawky rapidly, and stupidly peck one another if they do not have enough space. Their sawdust litter needs constant replenishing; they are untidy with their feed and water, and I soon grow weary of them as roommates. One spring I put them out too soon and the next morning found a dead pullet, too big for a black rat snake to swallow, but small enough for it to kill. They kill animals that size by constriction, and the snake’s spiral grip was clearly printed on the pullet’s strangely elongated corpse. Now I keep the pullets in the cabin until they are too big to be a snake’s prey.
Another time I was able to save a pair of baby phoebes from a black rat snake. The parent birds had built their nest just under the eaves of the honey house, and I had been watching them off and on all spring through the window. The two eggs had hatched, and there were two fledglings in the nest when I was working in the honey house one day and heard a terrible ruckus outside. The parent birds were in a nearby persimmon tree crying out in distress. A black rat snake, like the good climber his breed is, had slithered up the side of the honey house and was looped around the nest calmly swallowing the two baby birds. I ran outside, grabbed the snake by the tail and shook him hard. The baby birds dropped from his mouth, wet but undigested. I threw the snake as far as I could, scooped up the babies and put them back in the nest. The parent birds remained in a state of ineffectual confusion all day, alternately repelled by and drawn to their offspring. At nightfall they finally returned, and the pair of young phoebes lived to fly from the nest on their own.
And there we are, with my meddling, back to the human responsible for putting a flock of chickens in prime mouse habitat, setting the process in motion in the first place. I like to think of it as a circle. If I take one step out of the center, I find myself a part of that circle—a circle made of chickens, chopped corn, mice, snakes, phoebes, me, and back to the chickens again, a tidy diagram that only hints at the complexity of the whole. For each of us is a part of other figures, too, the resulting interconnecting whole faceted, weblike, subtle, flexible, fragile. As a human being I am a great meddler; I fiddle, alter, modify. This is neither good nor bad, merely human, in the same way that the snake who eats mice and phoebes is merely serpentish. But being human I have the kind of mind which can recognize that when I fiddle and twitch any part of the circle there are reverberations throughout the whole.
My honey house is a lean-to on the south side of the barn, with windows on all free sides. Fastened to the east and west windows there are bee escapes—twists of wire that the bees can leave by but not come through—and out of these go the bees who were reluctant to leave the honey supers in the bee yards and have returned to the honey house with Ky and me. We stack the supers in the honey house while they are awaiting processing, and gradually the leftover bees crawl up through the frames. They are dispirited when they get to the top because they do not know where they are, but bees instinctively fly toward light, and so, gradually, over a period of days, they discover the bee escapes on the eastern window during the morning when the light comes from that direction and the western one in the afternoon when the sun shines on that side of the honey house. Outside they are as confused as ever, but above the bee escapes I keep half-sized hive boxes with a few frames of honeycomb in them, and the bees enter them gratefully. After the honey harvest is done, I take the bees who have gathered in those two boxes and shake them into some of the hives I keep back by the woodlot.
Doing this is putting bee biology to work in a textbook way to clear the honey house of bees. But this year I had some bees who hadn’t read the textbooks, and their behavior puzzled me.
For the first week of honey processing, the loose bees inside the honey house were finding their way out at the bee escapes, and the usual hordes of bees were on the outside of the screens, smelling the honey inside and yearning to get in. Sometimes the ones on the outside and those on the inside would feed one another, poking their long tongues through the wire to make contact. In addition to feeding, I knew that they were telling one another things, for chemical communication in the process of food exchange is one of the regulators of bee behavior inside the hive. One day as I watched them I idly wondered what information they could possibly have about a world as artificial to them as the honey house.
During the second week, a small cluster of bees stubbornly refused to leave one of the southern windows. The cluster grew larger each day as more and more bees gathered. Bees are intensely social, and the more that join together, the better their morale becomes. They even built a few inches of honeycomb on that southern window with which to cheer themselves. The outside bees began coming more often to the spot on the screen where the obstinate bees inside were clustered. Feeding between the two groups was constant. Having bees on the inside of the honey house is cruel and untidy, and I tried a number of tricks to get them to move, cutting down their comb and dispersing them, trying to entice them onto a frame of comb that I could shake outside. But they defeated me and returned to build back the comb, several thousand strong by this time. In twelve years of keeping bees I have learned that I can’t make bees do what they don’t want to do, so I gave up and watched the cluster of bees grow. By the third week of bringing back new supers from the outyards, it had grown to the size of a small swarm.
We spent the following week processing. One day I was alone in the honey house at sunset emptying the 1,200-pound storage tanks, draining the honey out and putting it into 60-pound plastic buckets. The sun was shining low into the western window, and some newcomer bees were finding the bee escape there just as they were supposed to do, so I did not turn on the overhead lights lest I confuse them. The big cluster of bees still hung perversely on the southern window. I stopped my work to lo
ok at them, for there were more than the usual number of bees opposite them outside the screen. They were agitated, their excitement palpable. Suddenly, as if on cue, most of the bees in the cluster started walking away from the southern window, leaving just a few behind on the solacing bit of honeycomb, walking across the ceiling purposefully, not toward the western window and the light, but the opposite way, into the shadows. They walked in long lines across the darkened ceiling toward the eastern window, where they massed at the bee escape, piling on top of one another. They jostled and pushed their way through the bee escape, and within fifteen minutes those thousands of bees were outside.
What had happened? What made the bees leave their bit of comb, the only happiness they had been able to contrive in the honey house? Why did a few stay behind? Why had they walked away from the light? How did they know that there was a way out in the shadows? Why did they walk in lines? What signal made them all move together?
I have no answers to those questions, but I presume that the constant communication with the bees outside the screen had something to do with their behavior, and this suggests a greater complexity of information conveyed and understood than I feel comfortable about. An entomologist I asked had no answers, either.
It was less of a puzzle to a fellow beekeeper to whom I talked. “Those bees on the outside just told the bees on the inside how to get out, that’s what happened,” he said. I said I didn’t know. He shook his head. “It’s spooky, that’s what it is. Just plain spooky.” And we both agreed that the longer we keep bees the less we understand them.
A Country Year Page 6