The climb back up the steep cliffs was harder than my sliding descent, and I had to stop once to catch my breath and peel off my sweatshirt. At the top I found a sunny niche among the lichens and moss and sat down, taking off my heavy boots and socks. Across the creek, the snowy, shadowed woods on the north face of the hollow insisted that it was still winter.
That was in January; now, in April, it is springtime everywhere. The kinglets and the rough-legged hawks are gone. The woods are full of migrating warblers, and the hummingbirds have returned to the feeder by the windows. There are wildflowers everywhere, even on the north face of the river’s gorge, on Pigeon Hawk Bluff, where spring comes last and most grudgingly of all. This slope is frosted with the feathery white blossoms of the small tree that as a child in Michigan I had known as shadblow. Ozarkers call it sarviceberry. The tree’s botanic name is Amelanchier arborea. On the ground under the trees are the pink and white blossoms of rue anemone and the white-blossomed, liver-leafed hepaticas.
In the grass around the cabin the bees are eagerly working golden dandelions and ignoring the bluets and violets. The violets, purple, blue and white, are growing in such profusion that the air is scented with their fragrance. From the upland woods, the sweet odor of wild plum blossoms comes in on every breeze. The bees like wild plum blossoms, and so do I. They smell exactly like cherry Life Savers taste.
The violets bloom along the dirt roads I drive down to get to my beeyards, and in one yard a special violet, the Johnny-jump-up, which looks like a little pansy, has taken over. I had fenced off these beehives, so that the cows cannot graze near the hives, and the Johnny-jump-ups have pushed out the pasture grasses and surrounded the hives with blossoms, blue and purple with yellow and white centers.
I have a friend, an amateur botanist, who carries a sketch pad with her and draws each flower she identifies. There is no surer way, she tells me, of learning a plant, simply because of the painstaking observation needed to put it on paper. She is right, and some day when I have fewer bees and more time I would like to do this too. But now I am so occupied with the bees that I have not even had time to walk back to the point at the juncture of the hollow and the river where I first found springtime. The season is well advanced there, and I know what I should find, for I have seen it in other years: the wildflower whose common name I like best of all, hoary puccoon. Puccoon is an Indian word. I do not know its meaning, but I like its sound. There are other puccoons, hairy and narrow-leaved, but mine, the hoary, has thick clusters of yellowish-orange blossoms. They are as pretty and showy as any cultivated flowers in a formal garden, and make the rocky glade overlooking the river and creek beautiful beyond telling.
This afternoon when I got back from the beeyards, Nancy was waiting for me. It was Thursday, she pointed out. Nancy works in the office of a small factory in town, and because she is competent she takes her job seriously and finds it hard to leave it behind when she locks the office door. Once, a few years ago, I was listening to her complaints about office politics, and pointed out to her that she was always in a bad mood by Thursday. I could remember what Thursday was like in an office. Friday is still ahead, and by Thursday work deadlines are overwhelming, co-workers have called in sick, and the stupidity of the boss and one’s own clear crystalline good sense seem in sharpest contrast. I told her that a good thing about working in an Ivy League university had been that on Thursday there was always a sherry hour to be found somewhere on campus to help put things back in perspective.
Nancy has not lived in university circles and did not know about sherry hours, so I introduced her to them. I now keep a bottle of sherry on hand. Word has gone round, and sometimes we are joined by others for a late-afternoon Thursday sherry hour. But today she was the only one waiting for me, and we decided to walk down to the river first. She wanted to tell me about the really dumb thing the new vendor had done, the terrible mixup with an invoice, what her supervisor had said to her, what she had said to the supervisor and how irritating it was when the computer broke down for the third time.
I nodded and said Umn. I remember what it was like to work in an office, particularly in the springtime.
Before we got to the river, we found patches of Dutchman’s-breeches, fern-leafed plants with pinkish-white blossoms shaped like a pair of tiny pantaloons. Nancy kneeled down to take a better look. The river’s banks were covered with Mertensia virginica, one of the many wildflowers that are called bluebells. The clusters of sky-blue, bell-like flowers were growing so thickly that we could not walk among them without crushing them, so we simply stood and admired.
Back at the cabin we poured glasses of sherry and took lawn chairs to the deck of the barn loft. It is high up there, so we could still have sunshine.
We drank a toast to springtime. The low rays of the sun spread golden light across the greening fields. The breeze was fragrant with wild plum blossoms and violets. There was no more talk of invoices. Instead we sat silently, sipping sherry and watching the buds swell in the western woods until the sun went down behind them.
Today’s mail has a notice in it that my first spring shipment of queen bees will be here next Wednesday. I have them shipped each April in batches of twenty-five and there is always a lot of excitement in the post office when they arrive.
They come by airmail from a honeybee breeder in Georgia, each queen in her own small wood-and-screen-wire cage with three or four attendant worker bees to feed and take care of her; she cannot take care of herself, for she is a specialist, an egg layer and nothing more. Each cage has a plug of sugar candy at the end, which the bees use for feed. If the weather is too bad for me to put the queens out in the hives, I must coat the screen wire with water so that they will have something to drink, too.
The cages are banded together, and the bees can be heard buzzing in a disturbed-sounding way inside; my mailman always calls me promptly when they come in, for he believes that they will somehow get out and he is a little afraid of them.
After I pick them up from the post office, I bring them home and pry apart the individual shipping cages to see that each queen, long and elegant, is alive. (The bee breeder will replace any that arrive dead.) I buy ordinary Italian queen bees, the usual commercial strain, but even these cost seven dollars each, so I can’t afford to lose any. If I bought hybrid queens, as many amateur beekeepers do, the cost would be higher, and an artificially inseminated queen would be thirty-five dollars or more. After I check each queen in her cage, I put the cage down carefully on the kitchen table. Queen bees are jealous, and would kill one another if they could. Sensing the presence of the rest of the queens, they shriek in challenging, high-pitched voices—ze-eee-eep, ze-eee-eep, ze-eee-eeep. There is murder in their hearts.
If left to their own devices, the bees in my hives raise a new queen for themselves every few years, when the one that they have becomes too old to lay fertile eggs. To raise a new queen, the worker bees—females with atrophied sexual capacities—select a freshly laid fertile egg, one that would develop into a sister worker bee, and feed the larva that develops from it royal jelly, a glandular secretion of their own making that is rich in B vitamins. It is this food and this food alone that creates a queen bee, who will emerge from pupation less than two weeks after the egg is laid.
During most of their lives queen bees shun the light; they run and hide when a hive is opened. But the newly emerged queen is a virgin and is attracted toward light. Urged on by the worker bees, she flies out of the hive high up in the air on her mating flight. Surrounded by drones—male bees—she will mate ten or more times serially, securing a lifetime supply of spermatozoa which she will use to fertilize the eggs she will lay. In mating, a drone everts his penis into the queen’s sting chamber, where it remains as the drone pulls away and falls lifeless to the ground, his function in the bee colony completed. Drones are not physiologically suited to forage for nectar or pollen, nor do they have stingers with which to defend the colony. Their role is solely to mate with a nubile que
en. After the spring and early summer mating season, drones are seldom to be found in a colony of bees; the workers bar them from the hive, and without its food stores they starve. A colony of bees with a failing queen will tolerate drones for a much longer time, so that they will be available for mating. Drones are large, stout, furry bees with huge eyes and are easy to distinguish at a glance. Their obvious presence late in the summer or during the fall means that a colony has queen problems, is in trouble and needs checking.
I let most of my colonies of bees raise their own queens, believing that they are a better judge of when they need a new queen than I am. The strains of bees that develop in such manner are best suited for this area and this climate. I keep records on each hive, and as long as it produces an average amount of honey or better, I let the bees go their own way. But when a hive ceases to be productive I investigate, and if it appears that the queen is a poor one, I mark the colony for re-queening during the following spring.
Bees’ aggressiveness, their quickness to sting, is a genetic characteristic, and often beekeepers, especially those with only a few hives in the backyard, re-queen colonies that have become aggressive. But I never re-queen a colony that makes lots of honey just because the bees are fast to sting me. They know how to make honey, and for that I am grateful; I will be extra gentle with them, use a bit more smoke from my bee smoker to quiet them when I open the hive and accept a few more stings than usual.
I also use the queen bees I buy to start new replacement colonies for ones that have died out during the previous year. To start a new hive or to re-queen one, I follow the same procedure. I take three frames, or honeycombs, that are filled with eggs, larvae (called brood), and young bees, and put them in a single-story empty hive. Then I add two more frames filled with honey and four empty frames of honeycomb. In between two of the frames of brood in the center, I wedge the new queen in her cage, after poking a little hole through the sugar plug at the end. If I let the queen out of her cage and put her into the hive directly, the bees on the brood frames would kill her, for they still consider themselves loyal to the queen from whose hive I have taken them. By leaving her in her cage, they have a chance to become acquainted with her through the screen wire which protects her. Gradually the memory of their old queen fades, and by the time they have chewed through the sugar plug at the end of her cage, they are ready to accept her as their own. In warm, fair weather the process takes a day or two. If the new queen is a good one, she immediately starts to lay eggs and the single-story hive is then ready to take to a permanent location or to use to re-queen a poor hive. I do this by finding the old queen and killing her, putting the new nucleus hive in the place of the old one, and adding the old bees to the new.
Spring beework requires time, patience, some skill and a strong back. It also requires a clear mind and concentration. There is nothing that so focuses the attention as opening a hive of bees. At full summertime strength, a bee colony has about 60,000 bees in it, and in the springtime half or three quarters of that. When I open a hive, the sheer number of bees fussily tending to their business makes me tend to mine, which is their care.
In recent years, because more and more of the honey market is being taken over by cheap imported honey, there are fewer U.S. commercial honey producers than there used to be. At last count, I saw we were down to twelve hundred, which is four hundred fewer than six years ago. A day is coming—probably quite soon—when I may have to admit that in a price-conscious market I can’t meet the competition of South American honey, and will have to make a living some other way.
But after keeping bees, whatever will I do?
My bees cover one thousand square miles of land that I do not own in their foraging flights, flying from flower to flower for which I pay no rent, stealing nectar but pollinating plants in return. It is an unruly, benign kind of agriculture, and making a living by it has such a wild, anarchistic, raffish appeal that it unsuits me for any other, except possibly robbing banks.
Then there is that other appeal, the stronger one, of spending, during certain parts of the year, a ten-or twelve-hour working day with bees, which are, when all is said and done, simply a bunch of bugs. But spending my days in close and intimate contact with creatures who are structured so differently from humans, and who get on with life in such a different way, is like being a visitor in an alien but ineffably engaging world.
In town I am known as the Bee Lady. Whatever could I do to equal that?
Hoohoo-hoohoo … hoohoo-hoohooaww. My neighbor across the river is doing his barred owl imitation in hopes of rousing a turkey from the roost. It is turkey-hunting season, and at dawn the hunters are trying to outwit wild turkeys and I listen to them as I drink my coffee under the oak trees.
Hoohoo-hoohoo … hoohoo-hoohooawww.
GahgahGAHgah replies an imitation turkey from another direction. I know that neighbor, too. Yesterday he showed me the hand-held wooden box with which he made the noise that is supposed to sound like a turkey cock gobbling. It doesn’t. After the turkey cocks are down from their roosts, the hunters, by imitating hen turkeys, try to call them close enough to shoot them. The barred owl across the river once showed me his turkey caller. He held it in his mouth and made a soft clucking noise with it.
“Now this is the really sexy one,” he said, arching one eyebrow, “Putput … putterputput.”
It is past dawn now, and I imagine both men are exasperated. I have not heard one real turkey yet this morning. The hunting season is set by the calendar but the turkeys breed by the weather, and the spring has been so wet and cold that their mating has been delayed this year. In the last few mornings I have started hearing turkeys gobbling occasionally, and it will be another week or two before a wise and wary turkey cock could be fooled by a man with a caller.
There are other birds out there this morning. The indigo buntings, who will be the first birds to sing in the dawn later on, have not yet returned to the Ozarks, but I can hear cardinals and Carolina chickadees. They wintered here, but today their songs are of springtime. There are chipping sparrows above me in the oak trees and field sparrows nearby. There are warblers, too; some of their songs are familiar, and others, those of the migrators, are not. I hear one of the most beautiful of birdsongs, that of the white-throated sparrow. He is supposed to sing “Old Sam Peabody, Peabody, Peabody.” This is the cadence, to be sure, but it gives no hint of the lyrical clarity and sweetness of the descending notes of his song.
I slept outdoors last night because I could not bear to go in. The cabin, which only last winter seemed cozy and inviting, has begun to seem stuffy and limiting, so I spread a piece of plastic on the ground to keep off the damp, put my sleeping bag on it and dropped off to sleep watching the stars. Tazzie likes to be near me, and with me on the ground she could press right up to my back. But Andy is a conservative dog who worries a lot, and he thought it was unsound to sleep outside where there might be snakes and beetles. He whined uneasily as I settled in, and once during the night he woke me up, nuzzling me and whimpering, begging to be allowed to go inside to his rug. I think he may be more domesticated than I am. I wonder if I am becoming feral. Wild things and wild places pull me more strongly than they did a few years ago, and domesticity, dusting and cookery interest me not at all.
Sometimes I wonder where we older women fit into the social scheme of things once nest building has lost its charm. A generation ago Margaret Mead, who had a good enough personal answer to this question, wondered the same thing, and pointed out that in other times and other cultures we have had a role.
There are so many of us that it is tempting to think of us as a class. We are past our reproductive years. Men don’t want us; they prefer younger women. It makes good biological sense for males to be attracted to females who are at an earlier point in their breeding years and who still want to build nests, and if that leaves us no longer able to lose ourselves in the pleasures and closeness of pairing, well, we have gained our Selves. We have another valuable t
hing, too. We have Time, or at least the awareness of it. We have lived long enough and seen enough to understand in a more than intellectual way that we will die, and so we have learned to live as though we are mortal, making our decisions with care and thought because we will not be able to make them again. Time for us will have an end; it is precious, and we have learned its value.
Yes, there are many of us, but we are all so different that I am uncomfortable with a sociobiological analysis, and I suspect that, as with Margaret Mead, the solution is a personal and individual one. Because our culture has assigned us no real role, we can make up our own. It is a good time to be a grown-up woman with individuality, strength and crotchets. We are wonderfully free. We live long. Our children are the independent adults we helped them to become, and though they may still want our love they do not need our care. Social rules are so flexible today that nothing we do is shocking. There are no political barriers to us anymore. Provided we stay healthy and can support ourselves, we can do anything, have anything and spend our talents any way that we please.
Hoohoo-hoohoo … hoohoo-hooaww.
The sun is up now, and it is too late for a barred owl. I know that man across the river, and I know he must be getting cross. He is probably sitting on a damp log, his feet and legs cold and cramped from keeping still. I also know the other hunter, the one with the wooden turkey caller. This week what both men want is a dead turkey.
I want a turkey too, but I want mine alive, and in a week I’ll have my wish, hearing them gobbling at dawn. I want more, however. I want indigo buntings singing their couplets when I wake in the morning. I want to read Joseph and His Brothers again. I want oak leaves and dogwood blossoms and fireflies. I want to know how the land lies up Coon Hollow. I want Asher to find out what happens to moth-ear mites in the winter. I want to show Liddy and Brian the big rocks down in the creek hollow. I want to know much more about grand-daddy-longlegs. I want to write a novel. I want to go swimming naked in the hot sun down at the river.
A Country Year Page 14