‘I hope you will be joining us,’ I said, after outlining the occasion once more.
‘How we would love to see you, to come to your party, but my tender heart is really quite ill’ was Marie-Gabrielle’s unexpected response. ‘I doubt we will be able to be there. It’s a long drive down and too tiring for him. Everything exhausts him these days.’
I knew that, for over a year, she had been under a great deal of stress, since she had begun nursing her ailing mother who lived somewhere in the Var, closer to us and the coast than to their remote, high-altitude quarters. So at first I understood her to be telling me that her heart had weakened under the strain.
‘How is your mother?’ I enquired tentatively.
‘Oh, she plods along. She’s as hardy as I am,’ laughed Marie-Gabrielle.
It was only as the conversation developed that it dawned upon me that she was talking about François. When they were in our company, it had always tickled me to hear her call him, ‘mon cœur’, or ‘mon tendre cœur’, ‘my heart’ or ‘my tender heart’. What she was now relating to me was that her beloved François was unwell. It seemed that he had suffered a breakdown. He was experiencing an acute form of grief over the loss of his ‘girls’.
I tried hard to remember, shuffling through past conversations, to recall whether he had any daughters. Yes, I thought he had, from a first unsuccessful marriage to an African lady, but I was not certain of these facts. It simply did not occur to me that Marie-Gabrielle was speaking about the bees. It was only when she said, ‘all his life he had dreamed of keeping hives. The loss has hit him deeply. Well, it has hit us both, of course, because we have forfeited everything; all our savings, all our investments. We have nothing but our pensions now. Even once we have managed to sell our apiary equipment, the hives, extractor and so forth, we will be obliged to convert that space and rent it out as a gîte.’
François and Marie-Gabrielle had been the proud owners of more than one hundred hives. The fourteen that wintered with us, housing 280,000 bees that shared our grounds, pollinating our flowers as well as those of our neighbours and environs, were but a small percentage of their stock.
‘We have three hives left and they are here with us and that is it. I have put my foot down and told him, no more. We cannot go through this again. It is both emotionally and financially bankrupting. But for François, life without all those bees, “his little girls”, is a lonely and inconsolable experience. Even I had not understood how profoundly such a collapse would hit him.’
‘What has happened?’ I asked, dreading the answers for I feared I might know the worst already.
In the interstice of time before she offered her explanation, a memory swept back. It had been a sunny early March afternoon a few years earlier when I had been alone at the farm and our apiarists had paid a visit, to see me, of course, but more importantly to confirm that their bee stock was wintering well, that the swarms had plenty to eat and were in fine fettle. After a cup of tea together on the upper terrace in the milky, early season sunshine, I strolled down with them to the lower citrus grove to assist with the uncapping of the hives. Marie-Gabrielle lit the aromatic smoke gun, the enfumoir, used to calm the colonies because, if they are agitated, they can sting or become aggressive, and we carefully unhooked the lid and lifted it off the first home. All was well within. Here was a very healthy and active swarm and there still remained honey for them to feed themselves on. No concerns there. The neighbouring hive presented us with a similar scenario, but then we came to the third. François was alerted even before I had removed the metal roof. His keen apiarist’s instincts sensed that all was too still, too silent. We gathered as one and waited. Slowly, gingerly, I unhooked and revealed. Standing together we were, a trio of silenced onlookers. His gut feeling had been spot-on. Here was a different tale, a bleaker scenario. This entire colony of Apis mellifera, the Latin name meaning honey-carrying bees, lay still and lifeless. Sixty thousand lost lives.
‘Such a carpet of death,’ murmured Marie-Gabrielle, stroking her husband gently on the shoulder.
My colleagues spoke barely another word, but moved on in a businesslike fashion to visit the remaining families. Three out of the fourteen hives were gone, every bee dead. I was devastated. I felt that in some way we had been responsible, that some element or presence on our land had undone them, but François shook his head.
‘Make us some more tea, Carol, please, and I will explain.’
That afternoon, as spring was beginning to unfold upon the world, I learned and witnessed the first details, just a sketch of the facts that, collected together, were today beginning to read like a gruesome science-fiction story.
‘There is a mite. He is known as Varroa and he feeds off honeybee larvae and pupae and the damage he causes can decimate colonies. He has been on the scene as far as we know since the early 1960s but a healthy colony can usually withstand his intrusion, can fight back. It will be damaged but it is resistant and, more frequently than not, it will rally.’
‘Is that what has killed off these hives?’ I begged, hoping that it was and that we had not in some way destroyed or poisoned the ‘girls’.
François shook his head. I saw then how upset he was though he was struggling hard to contain his emotions. A glossy black bee, quite large, that I had mistakenly taken for a small hornet, alighted on one of the flowering racemes on our magnificent wisteria climbing heavenwards alongside the front verandah. In fact, it was a Blue Carpenter bee. François leapt to his feet to point it out to me and tell me a little about it. ‘It’s a solitary species. They are vital pollinators for certain flowers such as that Passiflora edulis you have growing over there, Carol, but these little girls can also be robbers,’ he was explaining excitedly. ‘These Blue Carpenters are capable of slitting open the sides of flowers and stealing the pollen from within, as though emptying a safe box. It really is a neat trick! You must try and observe it. They make their homes in dead logs and dried-out, perished tree trunks. Watch out for them in your wood store, but don’t be alarmed. They are not aggressive, they seldom sting.’
I was not aware of ever having spotted one before. ‘Are they rare?’ I asked.
‘There has been a decline in their populations, too.’ François ran his hands through his thinning hair and sat down again, sinking into himself.
‘We have friends, fellow beekeepers who have already lost all their hives and been driven out of business altogether, but, until now, these unfortunates have tended to be living in the Var. Others over in the south-west towards the Pyrenees have also experienced traumatic results.’
‘But why have they lost their hives?’
‘There is an insecticide used on sunflowers, Gaucho is its name, that many believe is the culprit, but we are having difficulties proving it. And we do not have the financial resources to pit ourselves against the giant chemical companies, with their armies of lawyers.
‘A healthy honeybee has an innate sense of direction and will always find her way back to her own hive. However, this product damages the bee’s nervous system. She becomes stunned and is unable to locate her home. Turning in circles, disarranged, dislocated, confused, she eventually dies of exhaustion, never returning to hive. In my opinion, this behaviour pattern has most certainly been caused by an external poison.’
Still on the telephone now, several years later, a tad wiser perhaps after my travels and a little more knowledgeable on the subject, known as CCD or Colony Collapse Disorder, I listened as Marie-Gabrielle confirmed that they had lost all their hives, save the three they were now keeping in their chalet garden. A total loss of ninety-eight previously healthy hives. And they were fairly certain, although they had not proved it, that the bees had been destroyed by legally approved chemical products used by agriculturalists on crops.
‘I have already explained all this to Michel and he understands our situation. François is incapable of discussing it at present. He is too depressed. But I have refused to allow us to borrow any m
ore money to buy new bees. They will simply be killed off. So, we will not be bringing hives to winter with you any more, Carol, though I hope you will want to stay in touch with us. We have thoroughly enjoyed our little arrangement.’
‘But, of course,’ I blurted, ‘we count you as friends and if you possibly can I would love it if you could make it next weekend for the festivities. Otherwise, we’ll find a day to drive up into the mountains and visit you both. Is there anything being done about this crisis?’
‘As recently as last June, an emergency motion in the European Parliament called for certain pesticides, the neonicotinoids, to be banned in Europe until they better understand the role they play in the deaths or disappearance of honeybees. We are all hoping something will come of that.’
Bee fossils discovered in amber have been dated to forty-five million years old. Feral bees have flown this planet, foraging for their food and pollinating plants, since long before man was even a whispered thought. We know they were producing honey during the Cretaceous period (approximately one hundred million years ago) when, it is believed, flowering plants first appeared. The art of apiculture was practised in Egypt and Greece before man knew how to write, before, as far as we know, we had alphabets. In the long, slow journey of evolution, the role that Apis mellifera has played through its ability to pollinate has changed the physical structure of plant life. Bees are one of the earliest, if not the earliest, of earth’s pollinators and, without them, the earth and all who inhabit it will be in grave trouble.
When I replaced the receiver and came to my senses, I remembered that the men, Michel and Quashia, had two weeks previously sprayed the olive trees with insecticide. The second showering of the season was due to take place the week after the party. I knew that the product they were using, though recommended to olive farmers by the Chambre d’Agriculture, was toxic. Its precise effect on bees I did not know. But as a responsible farmer, I should have taken the trouble to find out.
In the past, for one or two of our olive-growing summers, we had, at my fervent behest, relinquished the use of chemicals and had left the olives to develop naturally, without intervention, allowing Nature to take its course. Unfortunately, the results had been disastrous and we had lost the crops entirely. The fact of the matter was that no efficient, organic alternative had been found to counter the damage to the drupes caused by Bactrocera (Dacus) oleae, the olive fly. Dousing the trees with pesticides remained the only effective and proven method available to us.
Olive groves, especially those situated within hot, humid coastal regions such as ours, are particularly susceptible to the olive fly. It lays its eggs within the olive and the growing larva feeds off the fruit’s pulp until it eventually destroys it.
The insecticide that had purportedly been causing the mass destruction of honeybees was not the same product as that used on olive crops, but the fact of the matter was that we were still engaged in the business of chemical use, covering our trees’ canopies with a poison aimed not at bees, but flies, but a poison nonetheless. Our four or five sprays a year were, whether to a minor or greater degree, contributing to the problems that the planet was facing. I, who had logged my own maps of the olive’s heritage and had looked full into the face of the future and seen the warning signs, was a contributor to this destruction. How could I audaciously put pen to paper if I was ignoring my own hand in the game?
It was Tuesday. The arrival of guests was imminent and we seemed far from prepared. On top of which, the pool was beginning to turn a little green; the water was crystal clear but the corners, the walls were tainted … It was topping thirty-five degrees in the noonday sun. Michel had cleaned it twice over the weekend, but the algae simply returned. Jacques, our handsome swimming-pool magician, a man I had counted as friend, had slipped off the radar screen. ‘Not been by for weeks,’ according to Quashia. Four, even five, emails, had raised no response and his phone was permanently switched to its answering machine. We had invited him to the party but even to that he had not replied. I sent one last message: We need you!
Silence. Jacques had disappeared into thin air.
I was now occupied with armfuls of plants because we had decided to adorn the house with flowers growing on the land. Quite out of the blue, as I was hurrying through the upstairs hallway, in a frenzied frame of mind – beyond the open doors, a never-ending succession of delivery vans up and down the drive – dragging swags of eucalyptus branches clustered with tiny pink and dusty-green buds that I had salvaged from an overzealous and illicit pruning by Quashia, I was halted by the ringing telephone. I picked up the receiver, hoping it might be Jacques, and jammed it under my chin while still moving on through the cool open-plan rooms, tiny blossoms falling about my feet.
‘Madame, I hope you and your husband are keeping well?’
It was our notaire, the notary who had handled the purchase of the house and, later, the land that we had been unable to afford at the outset.
‘Yes, fine, thank you …’
‘I have phoned to inform you that I will be sending an expert to inspect your house and grounds.’
‘What on earth for?’
‘It is the law. We must register any irregularities.’
‘What sort of irregularities are you referring to, Maître?’ We were all pressed for time and this unexpected intrusion was not what we needed at present.
‘Have you ever had an inspection for termites?’
‘No, but we don’t …’
‘How about subsidence?’
Again, I responded with a negative, while scrabbling for my tallest vase. Someone was hooting impatiently beyond the window. I placed the vase on the draining board and hurried through to my den to take a look, wondering where everyone else had got to.
‘And what about asbestos? Yours is an old property. I fear you are living in a habitation where there could well be asbestos linings in the roof. I see by your records that it has never been checked.’
I was baffled by this uncalled-for concern. ‘But our house is built of stone, built out of the limestone rock upon which it stands, and it has a flat roof. There is no asbestos here. I wonder, could we deal with this matter next week? I don’t wish to sound rude, but we are—’
‘It can be hidden in the most unexpected corners. I will send someone.’
‘Excuse me, is this essential?’ I protested impatiently. ‘I mean, it is not as though we are planning to sell the property.’
‘Please take down the following name and number. Telephone the expert and make an appointment for the coming week.’
I sighed, rooting beneath newspapers for pencil and paper. I would do as I had been bidden, before it slipped my mind, but first I had to deal with the squat fellow waving a hand from out of the window of his white Renault van and after I had put the eucalyptus boughs in water. Where was everybody?
The driver was refusing to get out of the car until I chained up the dogs. ‘They’re quite harmless when we’re here,’ I assured him.
‘I don’t give a damn. Three Alsatians! Man, give me a break! Chain them or I’ll be taking this load back with me.’
‘What is it?’
‘One hundred wooden fold-up chairs.’
‘Did we order these?’
‘Someone has.’
‘Righto.’ I called off the dogs which, at my approach, had begun circling the van more out of curiosity than malevolence. They came panting obediently towards me. Until my arrival on the scene, Homer and Cleo, the youngsters, had been lying in the shade right by their chains and were puzzled when I returned them to the very same spot.
‘Voilà! Attached.’
The little man in shorts and snazzy beach shirt stepped out of his vehicle and was now grinding his cigarette stub on to our courtyard tiles.
‘I’ve got papers to be signed,’ he snapped as a lorry came paddling up towards us, belching black smoke. I could hear the crack of branches as it made its laborious approach.
‘Mind the trees, the ol
ives, the young figs! Oh, for heaven’s sake!’
An elongated blue cube, rather like a telephone kiosk, was the master of the destruction. What on earth was it? Where was everybody?
‘Lady, do you want these chairs or not? I’ve got another delivery to make before lunch. If so, sign the invoice and I’ll be back for them next Monday, all right?’
‘Yes, yes, of course.’ My concentration was still with the kiosk. I signed without reading the paper and bid the chap bonne journée.
‘I’ve got to unload them yet. Where do you want them?’
‘Erm, anywhere,’ I sighed. He took me at my word and unpacked them smack bang in the centre of the parking area, then, swerving by the old lorry, shot off down the drive. The pile of chairs would now hinder the newly arrived’s exit when it was ready to go. In fact, until they had been restacked elsewhere, they would hinder all traffic. I began to shift them two by two, stacking them up against the garage wall.
A bloke with pencil-thin moustache and round fat face beaded with sweat poked his head from out of the cab.
‘Oi, lady! Are those Alsatians attached? Cos, if they’re not, I’m out of here. What a sodding entrance. No one mentioned that the drop-off would be as difficult as this. It would’ve cost extra. Anyway, I’m ’ere now. So, are they chained?’
‘Yes, they are.’ I was wilting. ‘Could you tell me what you have, please?’
‘Portaloo, mate. Where do you want it? I’ll install it, like it says in the contract, but it has to be on flat land or it leaks. That’s what was signed and quoted for and I’m not carrying it anywhere over those bleedin’ terraces.’
‘No, of course not.’
‘So, where do you want it?’
It was big and ugly. I did not want it at all and could not imagine why it had been ordered. ‘If I reverse that old VW, could we position it in there, hide it behind those hanging fig branches, so that it’s out of sight?’
‘Anywhere you want, sweetheart. Which way do you want the door then?’
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