I’d been turning these questions over in my mind for some days when I remembered another equally baffling incident of insect direction-finding ability.
I was visiting my cousin Asher, an entomologist, when a neighbor stopped in with a stalk of milkweed on which munched a fine monarch butterfly caterpillar, handsome in his white, yellow and black bands. “When I found this, I thought of you,” she said, and we all laughed because in some company that might be a strange thing to say. Asher promptly named the caterpillar Henry, put the stalk of milkweed in a luminous green vase of water to keep it fresh and placed it on a table where we could watch.
We spent the afternoon sitting, talking and idly looking at Henry, who had already eaten several leaves. While we watched, a leaf on which heavy Henry was feeding gave way and he fell with a plop to the table. There were a variety of manmade objects there, but Henry paused only seconds to gather his caterpillar wits, then unerringly crawled toward the green vase and clumsily scaled its glassy, bulging surface to return to his milkweed leaves.
Asher’s specialty is moth ear mites, but he also has some knowledge of moths and butterflies; however, when I asked him for an explanation of what we had seen, he was as much at a loss as I was to understand how the caterpillar had found his way in what seemed such a purposeful manner amidst an environment in which his instincts could not have helped him. We talked back and forth about it for a bit, and in the end shook our heads in wonder.
Despite the commonness of their seasonal behavior, we have no real understanding of how birds find their way when they migrate. Theories have been put forward suggesting that birds make use of landmarks recognized by experienced members of a flock, use celestial and astronomical navigation or have a magnetic sense that allows them to detect slight variations in the earth’s electromagnetic field, but all of these theories are unsatisfactory in some respects. I recently read that researchers have discovered birds can hear sound traveling thousands of miles at frequencies which pass right through objects, and which emanate from air disturbances around large geographical features such as mountains or oceans. This means that birds migrating across my farm in Missouri may be hearing the Rocky Mountains or the Atlantic Ocean, and taking their bearings from what they hear.
Whatever clues they use, Robert Crawford, a young Florida researcher, said, “It’s like they have another dimension. We sit here in our comparatively dull world thinking that we know all and see all.”
He was talking about birds, but he might have been speaking of the monarch caterpillar or my honeybees. I believe it was Sir James Jeans, the physicist, who was supposed to have observed that we live in a world that is not only queerer than we think but queerer than we can think. I remembered this the afternoon I watched the bees streaming across the ceiling in the honey house, and was grateful that every once in a while I can have a glimpse of just how queer that might be.
AUTUMN
I spent the afternoon today astraddle the ridge of the new barn-loft roof laying down a ridgecap, a course of overlapping shingles that covers the seam where the shingles meet from each slanting roof face. It would have been difficult not to have been happy up there. The fall migration of monarch butterflies, stunning creatures of orange and black, has begun, and numbers of them flew past me while I worked. The sumac along the woodlot edge has started to redden. It was more vivid from up on the roof, and I could see deep into the woodlot as well. The new roof is three feet higher than the old one and, standing up, I could see north beyond the river, over ridge after wooded ridge, farther than I have been able to see before. After a few days of rain, the skies have cleared to the deep blue that reminds me that Missouri is a part of the West.
The old barn-loft roof, a cobbled construction of tin, was held, in some places by wire, to misplaced, undersized roof beams, and was not much of a barrier against wind, rain and snow. In storms parts of it often blew off, and I would gather them up and try to nail them back on the rotting beams. Every rainstorm meant a rearrangement of buckets to keep the leaks from puddling through the loft floor to damage my workshop below. I used the loft for storage, but everything in it had to be draped in plastic to keep it dry.
This past summer I had finally put together enough money to buy materials for framing and a new roof; my son, Brian, and his friend, Liddy, came from Boston, where they live and are finishing graduate degrees in architecture, to build it for me. They had been working together on a construction project all summer, and were tan and fit. They are both of small build, but muscular, well coordinated and strong. The first day they were here we went down to the lumberyard together, and on being introduced one of my friends there slipped his fingers across Liddy’s palm as he shook hands. “Well, she’s got calluses at least,” he said grudgingly. He had not believed in this lady carpenter I had been telling him about.
Liddy and Brian tore down the old roof and raised the loft walls three feet for headroom. They framed up the new roof, put it on and shingled it. In the additional three feet of wall space, they set out, at a dramatic angle, all the old windows that I have accumulated at farm sales over the years and had painted with bright tractor paint, International Harvester red, John Deere green and yellow, Ford blue, and Allis-Chalmers orange. Now the space inside the loft is so cheerful, so light, so airy, that I want to live up there. They extended the ridgebeam from the peak both fore and aft, and with the addition to it of a few pieces of scrap wood cut in curves. Brian gave the roof a head and tail, transforming the barn into a large friendly animal crouching on my hilltop. With carefully bent and glued strips of thin wood, he laminated a graceful arch below the roof peak in front. My neighbors soon heard about the arch and have been dropping by for inspection. They stand for a few minutes looking at it, and then some of them say “Wow!” but others just nod in approval. It is now that sort of a barn.
Liddy and Brian work well together. It takes only few words for them to understand each other’s thoughts and intentions. I ran errands for them to the lumberyard and occasionally helped, but discovered soon enough that when I offered to either stay and help or go bake a pie, it was the pie that was more needed. It took six pies to finish the roof. I had not known that pies were such an important part of construction.
One day, when the temperature was nearly a hundred degrees, I talked them down off the roof and we took inner tubes to the river. We floated a couple of miles, splashed about and made the acquaintance of several gravel bars and the fish that swam near them. In the evenings after dinner we sat over coffee and talked and talked.
When I was pregnant with Brian, I was pleased, curious and interested, but somehow detached and objective about the baby I was carrying. I was young, and had no notion of what he would mean to me. I was anesthetized during his birth, as women were in those days, and anesthesia brought a dream, a revelation: the secret to mailing dogs was to make sure that their ears were in mailing tubes. That done, any dog could be mailed anywhere in the world. It was an epiphany I struggled to share with the nurses and the doctor as I slipped back into consciousness. I was irritated with them because they wouldn’t pay attention, and instead insisted that I look at the new baby. I was cross, loud, babbling about dog ears and mailing tubes until they forced the baby into my arms. I looked at him, blond, blue-eyed, beautiful, and was overwhelmed by the rush of emotion that traveled through my body. I was seized by motherhood, and unprepared, stunned by it.
There has always been a part of me that stood aside, watching, commenting, and that piece of me, despite the lingering anesthesia, was in good form. “What is happening to you?” it asked. “Pay attention. This is important.”
My baby. Mine. I became impossibly stubborn when the nurse suggested it was time to take the yet-unnamed boy back to the nursery. I wanted to hold him always. My baby.
There was a fierceness to the love that was born the instant I saw him that startled and bewildered me. It was uncivilized, crude, unquestioning, unreasoning. I first began to understand it when, several year
s later, we were on a family camping trip, and during the night were awakened by an old sow bear who had wandered into our campsite with her cub. Her baby had strayed to the other side of our tent. She was frantic, fierce, angry, and would have become dangerous had not the cub waddled back to his mother of his own accord.
Because I am not a sow bear I did allow the nurse to take Brian the evening he was born, but I cried when I let him go. In order to become an adequate mother, I had to learn to keep the old sow bear under control. Sow-bear love is a dark; hairy sort of thing. It wants to hold, to protect; it is all emotion and conservatism. Raising up a man child in the middle of twentieth-century America to be independent, strong, capable and free to use his wit, intellect and abilities required other kinds of love. Keeping the sow bear from making a nuisance of herself may be the hardest thing there is to being a mother. Over the years she snuffled about when he learned to walk and explored the edges of high places, whenever he was unhappy, when he went off to boarding school, when he started driving a car. It was the sow bear who fifteen years ago pushed me into organizing a chapter of a peace group, and to become a draft counselor on the Brown University campus where I was working. It seemed just possible in those days that Brian might turn eighteen with a war still in progress. Even if I had to organize a whole peace movement to keep it from happening, no government was going to be allowed to send my son off to war.
I did learn to live with the old bear. Fortunately, so did Brian; he and I understand one another pretty well.
Liddy and Brian finished the most important parts of the barn before they left, but they ran out of time and the lumberyard had not received some of the materials Brian had ordered, ridgecap shingles among them. Liddy showed me how to use several tools that I had not used before, and laid out the angles for me to cut the remaining window supports. Brian showed me how to cut and lap the shingles for the ridgecap, and reminded me several times how necessary it was to make the roof tight from rain.
When they got ready to leave we all agreed that we had spent a fine time together, that the barn was a thing of beauty, that the pies had been good, that we all loved one another. We hugged and kissed. And there was no need at all for the old sow-bear tears in my eyes.
Brian put his arm around my shoulder one last time.
“Ridgecap,” he said, smiling gently down at me. “Remember, no guarantee on the job without a ridgecap.” I laughed, nodded, and promised that I would take care of it.
And today, up there in the bright sunshine with the monarch butterflies, I did just that.
I keep detailed records arranged by outyard on all my beehives. In this way I can tell how the hives are coming along and what needs to be done with them, and also how productive the bees are in each yard. Sometimes bees in one place stop making much honey because a nearby farmer has cleared a piece of land of wild nectar-producing flowers and has turned it into pasture. When this happens I move the hives out in the autumn to overwinter here, and set them in what I hope will be a better yard the following spring.
I have had an outyard upriver from me that has been consistently poor. I should have moved the bees long ago, but I kept finding excuses for leaving them there because the old man who owned the farm liked them so much. He has lived alone for many years, and some people say he is a bit tetched. I never found him so; he was lonely, however, and liked to talk when I would take him his gallon of honey each autumn. We spoke about bees, for at one time he had kept them. We discussed cows, for he had been a dairy farmer and knew a lot about them and I didn’t, so I liked hearing his stories. He had a productive orchard which he never sprayed for fear of hurting the bees who pollinated his fruit, and I always was interested in how it was coming along. Once he told me about his son, who had died twenty-five years ago. He cried when he talked about him. I didn’t know what to say. He loved the farm, one of the prettiest along the river. It was all he had left, but it was becoming too much work for him, and for several years he has been trying to sell it.
When I went to take the honey from the bees in August, a SOLD sign was by the edge of the road and a heavy chain lay across the roadway leading down to the farmhouse. Fortunately it was on the ground, so I drove across it, down the road and then into the woods where the bees are. The day I went to take the gallon of honey as rent, the chain was stretched tautly from two new posts and held in place by a padlock. A freshly painted sign said KEEP OUT. I reminded myself to find out who the owners were and to telephone them.
Before I had a chance to do so, the new man phoned me. He sounded irritated. He had been out walking his boundaries, he said, had seen some beehives with my name and telephone number on them, and wanted to know what they were doing there. I explained the arrangement that I’d had with the old man, and that I had a gallon of honey rent to pay if I could get in. He wasn’t interested in any honey, and he wanted those bees out of there right away. I told him I had been intending to move them for some time, and would be doing so later this fall, when it got a bit cooler and the bees were easier to move. Mollified, he asked me to telephone him before I came so he could open the roadway; he said he’d also like me to stop by the house because he’d like to have some advice about how to deal with all the wild bees around.
“Wild bees in trees?” I asked. Sometimes my bees do swarm and take up homes in hollow trees.
“No, wild bees hanging all over in those … those whatyou-callums … cocoons … hanging all over on bushes,” he said.
His rapid speech suggested that he was not an Ozarker, and if he was talking about hornets, his lack of knowledge suggested he was not a countryman. I asked him if he meant large football-sized, round, gray, papery-looking nests.
“Yes, yes,” he said, sounding pleased for the first time. “Those are the cocoons.”
“Those aren’t really cocoons,” I explained. “Those are nests, but bees don’t live in them. They’re hornets, bald-faced hornets.”
“Well, bees, hornets, whatever. I don’t want ’em around. Nests either.”
This has been an ideal year for bald-faced hornets and they have been unusually numerous, a fact that should make an orchardist happy. But when I tried to explain this to him, he brushed it aside and asked me how to get rid of them. I advised him to do nothing until the weather got colder because the hornets might still be in the nests. I promised to stop and talk with him when I moved the bees, and we ended our conversation on cordial enough terms.
Adult bald-faced hornets can eat only liquids because of the structure of their mouthparts. Their diet, chiefly carbohydrates, is usually flower nectar, but they must have a source of protein for developing larvae, and for this they kill enormous quantities of caterpillars. I often see them in the summer when their brood-rearing is at its peak, flying low over the ground or around tree trunks looking for prey. When they find a caterpillar, they do not sting it but butcher it alive. First the hornet kneads the caterpillar with her mandibles to soften the muscles and other tissues, then cuts it up with her mouth. She swallows the liquid parts herself, and forms the solid parts into pellets which she carries back to the nest. Here nurse hornets take over the bits of flesh to break into still smaller morsels with which to feed the developing brood. Considering that there may be 10,000 hornets in one of the big nests, the requirements of a single colony may serve as a considerable check on destructive caterpillars in an orchard. A number of nests should cheer an orchardist.
Bald-faced hornets, Vespula maculata (vespa is Latin for wasp and maculata means spotted), are big stout insects, three quarters of an inch long, black with whitish yellow markings on the head, thorax and abdomen. A mated female who overwinters on the ground under a bit of leaf litter or stone starts a new colony afresh each spring, chewing up pieces of wood to make the papery material she needs to construct a small, hanging starter nest of closely arranged cells in which she lays the first eggs. The tubular cells are covered with another protective layer of the same gray, papery material. The first eggs develop into work
ers, sterile females. They enlarge the nest and start killing caterpillars for the next generation. By summer’s end, males, who grow from unfertilized eggs and lack stingers, are born, and they fertilize a new generation of females. In the autumn all of them die except for the fertilized females, who abandon the nest for better protection against winter’s cold.
Adult worker hornets are extremely protective of their nests and are more aggressive than most wasps. Unlike honeybees, they do not lose their stingers after they have used them and they will sting repeatedly. A few summers ago, bald-faced hornets would sting and chase away anyone who tried to sit under the big oak trees out in back of my cabin. I never found their nest, but I was stung a number of times. Their venom, different from a honeybee’s, triggered a reaction in me, and I found the stings painful.
I asked the new man at the beeyard if he had been stung, thinking perhaps that this was the reason for his dislike of hornets as well as honeybees. No, he had not; he just didn’t like having bugs and bugs’ nests around.
Moving beehives is a two-person job. The shape of two-story beehives makes them impossibly unwieldly for one person to lift into a pickup; besides, they are heavy. At Thanksgiving, the son of some friends of mine will be home from college, and he has agreed to help me move the bees from the outyard. I will be glad to bring them home, and next spring will take them to a better yard on a farm where people really want them.
I shall stop in to see the new man whom I talked to. I am curious to meet him, and I shall show him how to make a torch to burn the old empty hornet nests. The café in town has an especially big one nailed up in a corner and I shall tell him about it, but I do not know if he will be interested.
Andy Beagle was out at dawn this morning doing a bit of rabbit work. He is twelve years old now, and stiff in the joints sometimes, but on a misty morning when scents cling to the grasses there is nothing like hunting rabbit after breakfast to keep an old guy in shape.
A Country Year Page 7