The History of Bees

by Maja Lunde

  I’d have to begin nonetheless. I had to begin.

  “Get the children,” I said to Thilda.

  She nodded. In a low voice she began gathering the girls around her, while Charlotte was sent inside to get Edmund.

  I started walking calmly down towards the hives. My audience became aware that something was finally happening. The scattered conversations dissipated and everyone followed me.

  “Gentlemen, kindly take your places,” I said and gestured with my arm towards the chairs we had placed down there.

  They didn’t need convincing. The benches were in the shade, they had no doubt already been longing to move down there.

  When all those present had taken their seats, I saw that we had exaggerated. There were not nearly as many people as expected. But then the girls came, and Edmund also. They did a good job of filling up, spread out haphazardly, as only children can, and closed up the largest gaps.

  “So. It looks as if everyone has found a seat,” I said. But I wanted more than anything to scream out the opposite. Because he wasn’t here, without him the day was meaningless. Then I caught Edmund’s eye down there. No, not meaningless. It was, after all, for Edmund I was doing this.

  “Then you must just excuse me for one moment while I put on my protective suit.” I attempted a smile. “One is not, after all, a Wildman.” Everyone, even the farmers, laughed, both loud and long. And here I thought that I had served up a witticism for the initiated few, something that would set us apart from them. But it didn’t matter. What mattered now was the hive, and I knew that they had never seen anything like it.

  I hurried inside and changed, squirmed out of the heavy wool garments and into the white suit. The thin fabric was cool against my body and it was a relief to take off the black top hat and instead put on the white, lightweight beekeeper’s hat with the gauzy veil in front of my face.

  I looked out the window. They were sitting quietly on the chairs and benches. Now. I had to do it now. With or without him. To the devil with Rahm, of course I would manage without the droning of his superior knowledge!

  I went outside and down the path to the hives. It had become wider, with wheel ruts from Conolly’s battered-up old wagon, in some places deep holes. I had driven all the way down with the hives, as Conolly did not dare to approach them and I barely managed to get the vehicle up the hill again.

  Faces smiled at me, everyone in friendly expectation. It made me feel confident.

  And then I stood before them and spoke to them. Finally, for the first time, I could share my invention with the world, finally I could tell them about Savage’s Standard Hive.

  Afterwards they all came over, shook my hand, one after the next; fascinating, astonishing, impressive, words of praise were showered on me, I could not distinguish who said what, it was all a blur. But I did pick up on the most important thing: Edmund was there and he saw everything. His gaze was alert and clear, for once his body was neither restless nor lethargic, simply present. His attention was on me, at all times.

  He saw everything, all the hands, even the very last hand that was extended towards me.

  I had taken off my glove and the cool fingers met mine. A shock went through my entire body.

  “Congratulations, William Savage.”

  He smiled, not a flash of a smile, but a smile that lingered, that rested on his face, yes, that actually belonged there.

  “Rahm.”

  He held my hand and nodded towards the hives.

  “This was something else altogether.”

  I barely managed to speak.

  “But when did you come?”

  “In time to hear the most important part.”

  “I . . . I didn’t see you.”

  “But I saw you, William. And besides . . .” He stroked the sleeve of my suit with his left hand; I could feel the hairs on my arm underneath stand on end in a marvelous shudder.

  “You know I don’t dare to come close to the bees without being properly dressed. That’s why I stayed here, in the back.”

  “I didn’t think . . .”

  “No. But here I am.”

  He took my hand between both of his own. The warmth from them flowed through me, pumped by my blood out into every single component of me. And out of the corner of my eye I glimpsed Edmund. He was still there, still had his eyes on us, on me, was still just as attentive and alert. He saw.

  TAO

  I stayed at the library all day. Read books, old research articles, watched films on a clattering old projector on the ground floor. I had to be completely sure.

  A lot of it was primary school curriculum. I felt myself transported back to sluggish classes in natural science history, where the teacher lectured on our history with the voice of doom, an intoning drone that led to our renaming the classes the History of Sleep. We were too young to understand the scope of what she was trying to communicate. When the teacher bored her wrinkle-framed eyes into us, we turned towards the sunlight from the window and conjured up shapes in suitable fine-weather clouds or checked the clock on the wall to see how long it was until the next recess.

  Now I discovered anew all the facts the teacher had tried to drill into us back then. Some dates still remained in my memory.

  2007. That was the year The Collapse was given a name. CCD—Colony Collapse Disorder.

  But it had started long before that. I found a video about the development of beekeeping throughout the past century. After the Second World War, apiculture was a worldwide, flourishing economy. In the US alone there were 5.9 million colonies. But the figures dropped, both there and in the rest of the world. In 1988 the number of hives had been halved. Bee death had afflicted many places, in Sichuan as early as in the 1980s. But only when it struck in the US—and as dramatically as it did precisely in 2006 and 2007, farmers with several thousand hives suffered mass disappearances in the course of a few weeks—only then did The Collapse receive a name. Perhaps because it happened in the US, nothing was really important at that time until it happened in the US: mass death in China didn’t merit a worldwide diagnosis. That’s how it was back then. Later everything was turned around.

  A good number of books were written about CCD. I leafed through them, but found no straightforward answer. Nobody agreed about the cause of The Collapse, because there was no one specific cause. There were many. Poisonous insecticides were the first thing considered. In Europe certain forms of pesticides were temporarily banned in 2013 and with time, also in the rest of the world. Only the US held back. Some scientists maintained that the poisons had an impact on the bees’ internal navigation system and prevented them from finding their way back to the hive. The toxins affected the nervous systems of small insects and many people were adamant in their belief that several of the causes of bee death stemmed from these toxins. The ban stemmed from a better-safe-than-sorry principle, it was said. But the research findings weren’t conclusive enough. The consequences of banning the toxins were too great. Entire crops were destroyed by vermin, with subsequent food shortages. It was impossible to carry out modern agriculture without the pesticides. And the overall impact of the ban was too negligible; the bees disappeared all the same. In 2014 it was established that Europe had lost 7 billion bees. Because the poison was in the soil, some claimed, the bees died because it still affected them. But there were few who listened. After a trial period the ban was lifted.

  Not only pesticides were to blame. Varroa destructor—a tiny parasite that attacked the bees—was also a cause. The parasitic mite attached itself to the body of the bee like a large ball, sucked the hemolymph out of it and spread a virus which was often not detected until much later.

  Then there was the extreme weather. The world gradually acquired a new climate. Starting in the year 2000 and onwards, it evolved faster and faster. Dry, hot summers without flowers and nectar killed the bees. Hard winters killed the bees. And rain. The bees stayed inside when it rained, like people. Wet summers meant slow death.

  Sin
gle-crop agriculture was a third factor. For the bees, the world was a green desert: mile after mile of fields where the same plant was cultivated, along with a lack of uncultivated areas. Man’s development took off, the bees didn’t keep up. And they disappeared.

  Without bees thousands of acres of cultivated fields suddenly lay fallow. Flowering fields without berries, trees without fruit. Suddenly farm produce which formerly had been everyday food became scarce: apples, almonds, oranges, onions, broccoli, carrots, blueberries, nuts and coffee beans.

  Meat production declined over the course of the 2030s, in that it was no longer possible to produce some of the formerly most important types of feed for domestic animals. Human beings likewise had to do without milk and cheese, because the animals no longer produced enough. And the production of biofuel, such as sunflower oil, which had been invested in heavily as an oil substitute, was suddenly out of the question, because it was dependent upon pollination. Once again there was a return to nonrenewable energy, which in turn accelerated global warming.

  At the same time, population growth stagnated. First it stopped, and then the curve began to descend. For the first time in the history of mankind, the human population was no longer on the increase. Our species was in decline.

  The disappearance of the bees affected the continents differently. American agriculture was the first in crisis. The Americans couldn’t manage, like the Chinese, to pollinate by hand. They didn’t have the workforce. People wouldn’t work cheaply enough, long enough, hard enough. An imported labor supply didn’t solve the problem, either. The workers also had to be fed, and although they were hardworking and persevering, the food they produced was not much more than what they consumed themselves.

  The collapse in the US led to a worldwide food crisis. Simultaneously, the bees died in Europe and Asia, too.

  Australia was the last nation to be affected. A documentary from 2028 explained how. Australia had been everyone’s hope, here the Varroa destructor mite was still not found, here it seemed as if the bees didn’t react to the contaminants to the same extent as elsewhere. Healthy bees came from Australia and with time apiculture grew into a large economy. Australia also developed into a leading research nation for bees, pollination and apiculture.

  Nobody knew how it happened, but on a spring day in 2027 a beekeeper in Avon Valley noticed that there were defects in one of his hives. Mark Arkadieff ran an organic honey farm. He did everything right. Pollination on a small scale, only a small number of hives were ever moved at a time, gently and carefully, and only to farms that could guarantee that they didn’t use pesticides. He took good care of his bees, changed the bottom boards when they were dirty, ensured that they always had enough to eat. Arkadieff himself said that the bees owned him, not the other way around. He was their humble servant, they controlled his life, his annual rhythm, when he got up and when he went to bed. He had proposed to his wife, Iris, while they were carefully trying to lead a swarming bee colony to a new hive.

  That Arkadieff’s farm, Happy Bees Honey Farm, would be the first place on the Australian continent to be affected by mites was a fate they didn’t deserve. Presumably it was the sister’s fault. She lived in California, and had recently spent two weeks on the farm. She must have carried the infection with her in her luggage. Or it could have been the work clothes they had ordered from South Korea. Nobody noticed anything when they opened the innocent-looking, gray-paper package and took out sensible overalls for use on the farm. Or could there have been something in the fertilizer the neighboring farm had just had delivered, large sacks of it, produced in Norway?

  Mark didn’t know, his wife didn’t know. All they knew was that that spring their bees became ill, and they didn’t discover it until it was too late.

  He showed the news team around the farm while he told his story. He couldn’t hide the tears when he opened empty hives, with just a few dying bees on the bottom. Now there were no longer any safe countries. The world was facing the greatest challenge in the history of the human race. A final all-out effort was made. The Varroa destructor mite was fought off to a degree. In some places attempts were made to diversify single-crop farming. Flower borders were planted between the fields. Pesticides were once again banned. But because of this ban, entire crops were eaten by vermin.

  English scientists had experimented with the creation of genetically modified plants, plants that carried the pests’ own pheromone, (E)-betafarnesene, a substance the insects secreted to signal to others that there was danger nearby. Now these genetically modified plants were used to a far-reaching extent. China was the first to implement this new standard, in desperation because of the food shortage. The pheromones wouldn’t affect the bees, it was said, they wouldn’t notice. The environmentalists protested loudly, held that the bees would react to the pheromones in the same way as the insect pests. But they weren’t heard. It was a win-win situation, it was claimed. People could continue with their industrial farming—nobody knew of anything else—the bees would be spared the nerve poison in the pesticides.

  So the fields were filled with genetically modified plants and the results were good—so good that chances were taken all over the world. And the genetically modified plants spread like wildfire. They took over. But the bee death continued, and escalated. By 2029 China had lost 100 billion bees.

  Whether the bees in fact reacted to the pheromone was never established. It was too late anyway. The plants were growing like crazy. On the edge of every ditch there were plants that scared away the insects.

  The world came to a halt.

  In the library I found interviews with beekeepers from every part of the world. There was no mistaking their fear. They had become spokespersons and representatives for the crisis. Some were furious, swore to keep fighting, but the later the interviews were done, the more evident was their resignation. Had I seen these films earlier, they wouldn’t have made any impression on me. They were testimonies from another time. Worn-out men in worn-out work clothes, coarse facial features, sun-baked skin, banal language, they had nothing to do with me. But now every single person stood out, every single personal catastrophe meant my own.

  GEORGE

  One day he just showed up. Maybe Emma had called him. I heard his voice when I opened the front door. I’d been in the barn; with my earmuffs on I couldn’t hear anything, not whether cars came or went, no voices in the yard, couldn’t hear Emma calling.

  A grown man’s voice. At first I didn’t understand who it was. Then I realized it was him. That was what his voice was like now.

  I jogged across the yard. He was here! Emma had probably told him how things stood. They talked to each other all the time, I guess, and now he’d come to lend a hand! With him here everything would be easier. With him I could manage everything. Do carpentry twenty hours a day. Work harder than ever before.

  But then I heard what he was talking about. He was talking about his summer job. Enthusiastically. I stopped, stood there, couldn’t bring myself to go inside.

  “It was about tomatoes, but still,” he said. “Everything is exciting in its own way when you learn more about it. I have never seen such big tomatoes before. Neither had the photographer. And the farmer who won the contest was so proud. The article was printed on the front page, imagine that! The very first article I wrote went straight onto the front page!”

  I rested my hand on the door handle.

  Emma laughed and praised him effusively, as if he were a five-year-old who had just learned how to ride a bicycle.

  I pushed the handle down quickly and opened the door. They fell silent right away.

  “Hi,” I said. “Didn’t know you were coming.”

  “There you are,” Emma said to me.

  “I wanted to surprise Mom,” Tom said.

  “He’s made that whole long trip even though he has to go back on Sunday,” Emma said.

  “Was there any point?” I said.

  “It’s Mom’s birthday,” Tom said.

>   I’d forgotten about it. I calculated quickly and deduced to my relief that it wasn’t until tomorrow.

  “And I wanted to see how things are going,” he said softly.

  “What’s the point of that?”

  “George,” Emma said sharply.

  “Everything’s fine here,” I said to Tom. “But it’s nice that you’ve come home for her birthday.”

  We celebrated with a fish meal the next day, hadn’t had fish since the last time he was home. Tom told stories from the local newspaper where he was working. He didn’t come right out and say it, but I understood that he received a lot of praise. The editor held that he had “a knack for it,” whatever “it” actually was. Emma laughed the whole time. I’d almost forgotten how her laughter sounded.

  I’d rushed into town and bought an expensive pair of pantyhose and some hand lotion as a present.

  “Oh. I didn’t need anything this year,” she said when she opened the present.

  “Of course you need a present,” I said. “Besides, they’re useful things, things you can use.”

  She nodded, mumbled thanks, but I could see that her eyes swept over the price tag that was half scraped off, probably wondering how much I’d spent of money we didn’t have.

  Tom gave her a thick book with a picture of a farm in the fog on the cover. She likes books that take a long time to read.

  “Paid for out of my first paycheck,” he said and smiled.

  She gushed over the gift, all smiles. Then all of a sudden it was silent. Tom took a bite of fish. Chewed slowly. I noticed his eyes on me.

  “Tell me about it, Dad,” he said suddenly.

  Did he mean about the bees? He probably just wanted to be polite.

  “Well, let’s see. Once upon a time . . . ,” I said.

  “George,” Emma said.

  Tom kept looking at me, the same open gaze.

  “Mom and I have been talking a little, but she said you had to tell me properly, that you’re the expert.”