The History of Bees

by Maja Lunde

  He asked questions like an adult. As if he were the adult. I squirmed, my behind was stiff, the chair pressed rudely against the small of my back.

  “Well, somebody’s sure taking a powerful interest all of a sudden,” I said.

  He put down his fork, wiped carefully around his mouth with the napkin.

  “I’ve read quite a lot about CCD lately. But it’s all just speculations. I thought maybe you, being out there, every single day, have some other thoughts about why . . .”

  “I see, so it’s the journalist who has come to call. Are you going to write an article about all this, then?”

  He blinked, he made a wry face. That struck a nerve.

  “No, Dad. No. That’s not why.”

  Then he was silent.

  Suddenly I couldn’t bear the smell of fish anymore, it irritated my nose, settled into my hair and clothing. I stood up abruptly.

  “Do we have anything else?”

  “There’s more fish,” Emma said and put down the book that she’d been holding on to until now.

  I walked towards the refrigerator, didn’t look at either of them.

  “I meant something other than fish.”

  “There’s dessert.” Her voice was still cheerful and light.

  “Dessert won’t fill me up.”

  I turned around and stared at her. Then I glanced at Tom. They were both looking at me, sitting there side by side at the table and just staring, sort of kindly, even though they probably thought I was an idiot.

  Tom turned towards Emma.

  “You didn’t need to prepare fish for my sake. It’s your birthday, after all. You should have made something you like instead.”

  “I like fish just fine,” she said. It sounded like she was reading something aloud from a book.

  “Tomorrow the two of you should go ahead and have what you usually have for dinner,” Tom continued. Just as damned polite. Was there no end to all of this?

  “Aren’t you leaving tomorrow anyway?” I said.

  “Supposed to,” Tom said in a low voice.

  “But he’ll have time for an early dinner,” Emma said. “Right, Tom?”

  “Sure,” he said.

  “How early?” I said. “I’d like to get a decent stint of work in before I eat.” My voice was rough and grating against their bright, cozy chatter.

  “Around two, wasn’t that what we’d talked about?” Emma said to Tom.

  “I might be able to stay a little longer,” Tom said.

  I ignored him. “Around two? I call that lunch,” I said to Emma.

  “Don’t go to any trouble for my sake,” Tom said.

  “A simple dinner is no trouble,” Emma chirped.

  “There’s actually a lot to do around here these days, as you might have understood,” I said. At least one of us could be honest.

  “I’d be happy to help out while I’m here,” Tom said quickly.

  “Half a day of college muscles won’t exactly do the trick.”

  Emma didn’t even answer me, just kept talking to Tom in a sugary-sweet voice. “It would be great if you could help Dad a little.”

  “GREAT,” I said.

  Nobody responded to that. Luckily. I’d throw up if I heard any more of that sugary-sweet voice.

  Tom picked up his knife and fork again, scraped at his food. Poked at some fish bones and glistening fish skin with his fork.

  “I would have liked to have stayed a little longer.”

  Would have . . . As if it were something that had already happened. Something he couldn’t do anything about.

  “Maybe you could call and ask if you could stay a few more days?” Emma said.

  “I was one of thirty-eight applicants for that job,” Tom said softly.

  I stepped towards the door. Couldn’t stand to hear any more of his excuses.

  I’d made it all the way to the yard when he caught up with me.

  “Dad, wait.”

  I didn’t turn around, just kept going towards the barn. “Have to work.”

  “Can I come along?”’

  “There’s a lot to take in. No point for such a short time.”

  “But I want to. I want to.”

  Wow. This insistence was new. The words snuck their way in and coaxed out a bothersome lump in my throat. Did he mean it? I had to turn around and look at him.

  “It’ll just be a mess,” I said.

  “Dad. It’s not because I’m a journalist. It’s because . . . I care. Really.”

  He looked at me. Large, wide-open eyes. “It’s my farm, too.”

  Then he was silent. Just stood there. Apparently wasn’t going to say anything more. Just stare me down. I couldn’t bear that gaze, the beautiful eyes, my child. Child and adult at the same time.

  He meant it.

  “Fine.” I nodded, my voice gruff. “That’s fine.” I cleared my throat in an effort to purge my voice, but there was apparently nothing more to be said.

  Then we walked in there together.

  WILLIAM

  The letter arrived with the afternoon coach. I was still flying after yesterday, when everything had gone as I’d wished, yes, perhaps even better, when my new life had begun. I could still feel the moment inside me, the moment between Edmund, Rahm and I, that period of time when everything was completely as it was meant to be, where the Idea about the moment and the Moment itself ascended to become a higher entity.

  I started trembling when I saw the postmark. Karlowice. It was from him—an acknowledgment—it couldn’t be anything else. It had been weeks since I’d sent my letter, his answer could have come on any other day, but imagine, it arrived just now, exactly today. I was shaking. It was too much. Was I Icarus? Would my wings catch fire? No, this wasn’t hubris, this was the result of hard work. I had earned this.

  I brought the letter into my room, where I settled into my chair, and with just as much reverence as in meeting with St. Peter himself, I broke the seal.

  Karlowice, 29 August 1852

  Honorable William Savage,

  It was with great enthusiasm that I received your letter. It is an incredibly interesting enterprise you have undertaken. I would imagine the local beekeepers in your district will benefit greatly from your hives.

  Be that as it may: I assume a great deal has changed since you wrote me your letter, and that you have now learned about Reverend Lorenzo Langstroth’s achievements. Perhaps you have even already received a denial on your patent application. Forgive me if I am now giving you information with which you are already familiar.

  It appears to me as if you have had exactly the same thoughts as an apiarist on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean. I must say it was with surprise that I read the description of your hive, as it is very similar to the Reverend’s. I have personally had the pleasure of corresponding with Reverend Langstroth during the past year and know with certainty that he has now received the patent on the frames, exactly the same as those described in your letter. He, too, has made calculations to arrive at the golden measurement for the distance between the hive’s walls and frames and the mutual measurement between each individual frame, although the figure he has arrived at is 9.5 millimeters.

  I hope you will continue with your extremely fruitful research, as I am wholly convinced that as regards knowledge about the life of bees, we have barely scratched the surface. I would enjoy hearing more from you and hope we can hereby commence a mutual correspondence as two peers within the field.

  Yours sincerely,

  Johann Dzierzon

  I gripped the letter with both hands, but still it trembled, the letters shook, they were scarcely legible. Laughter reverberated in my ears.

  Mutual correspondence. Peers within the field. I repeated the words to myself, but they had no meaning.

  It was too late. I was nobody’s peer.

  I was the one who should be placed in a box with a lid where I could be observed and controlled from above. I was tamed now, by life itself.

&n
bsp; I dropped the letter and stood up. I had to knock something down, destroy something, tear something apart. Whatever it took to stop the hurricane inside me. Suddenly my hands flew out from my body and pulled down books, the inkwell and drawings from the desk. Everything fell to the floor, the ink gushed out, becoming a bottomless lake against the wooden floorboards, which could never be removed, and would remain there like a staring reminder of my defeat. As if that were necessary. All of me, my entire indistinct, inert body, was a reminder.

  The bookshelves suffered the same fate as the inkwell, the desk chair followed. The wall charts were next, I tore them to pieces. Swammerdam’s sea monsters were shredded, never again would I fix my gaze on them, see God in the tiniest of components of Creation.

  Then the wallpaper, the blasted, yellow wallpaper. I tore it off the walls, strip by strip, till it hung in shreds and left behind large wounds upon the raw brick wall behind.

  And then, finally I stood with them in my hands, the drawings of the hive. Worthless. They had to be destroyed forever.

  I flexed the muscles in my hands. I wanted to crumple them, tear them apart, but wasn’t equal to it.

  I wasn’t equal to it.

  Because I wasn’t the one who should do it. They weren’t mine to destroy, but rather his. Everything was his fault and therefore also his responsibility. I leapt out into the hallway.

  “Edmund!”

  I didn’t knock, just stormed in; he hadn’t gone to the trouble of locking the door.

  He popped out of bed. His hair bristled, his eyes bloodshot. He stank of spirits. I turned away from the stench almost without thinking, as I had no doubt done before, deluding myself, pretending it didn’t exist.

  No. Not today and not ever again. He should receive a thrashing. A thrashing over his back with the belt buckle, until his skin was full of gashes and bleeding.

  But first this. “Look here!” I threw the drawings onto his bed. “Here they are!”

  “What?”

  “You’re the one who got me started. Here they are! What am I supposed to do with them?”

  “Father, I was sleeping.”

  “They’re worthless. Do you understand?”

  His gaze became clear, he pulled himself together. Picked up one of them.

  “What is this?”

  “Not worth the paper they are drawn on! Worthless!”

  He looked over the meaningless blotches of ink.

  “Oh. The hive. It’s the hive,” he said softly.

  I breathed heavily, tried to compose myself. “They’re yours now. The drawings. You were the one who wanted me to begin this. You can do what you want with them.”

  “Wanted you to begin . . . what do you mean?”

  “You started it all. Now you can destroy it. Burn them. Tear them to pieces, do what you want.”

  He stood up slowly and took a sip of water from a cup, with an astoundingly steady hand.

  “I don’t understand what you mean, Father.”

  “It is your work. I created them for you.”

  “But why?” He stared at me. I couldn’t remember the last time I had met his gaze. Now his eyes were narrow. He looked older than his sixteen years.

  “The book!” I cried.

  “What book? What are you talking about?”

  “Huber’s book. François Huber! New Observations on the Natural History of Bees!”

  “Father. I don’t understand.” He stared at me as if I were insane, as if I belonged in an asylum.

  My body slumped. He didn’t even remember. This moment that had meant so infinitely much to me. “The book you left with me after that Sunday, when the others were in church.”

  All of a sudden it was as if something dawned on him.

  “That day, yes. In spring.”

  I nodded. “It is something I will never forget. That you, of your own free will, came to see me that day.”

  His eyes slipped away, his hands moved, as if he wanted to grasp something, but found nothing but dust particles in the air.

  “It was Mother who asked me to go see you,” he said finally. “She thought it would help.”

  Thilda. He was still hers, now and forever.

  GEORGE

  We kept building hives for the rest of the day. Until it got dark. He worked hard. But not with the same reluctance as before. He wanted to work now. He asked questions, probing away, learned quickly, was accurate and quick.

  The sound of the hammer against nails, rhythmic. The whining saw, music. And at times, silence. The wind, the birds out there.

  The sun beat down on the barn roof, the sweat poured off us. He held his head under the faucet to cool off, shook it like a dog and laughed. Thousands of cold drops of water hit me, cooled me off, and I was somehow unable to keep from laughing back at him.

  Sunday went the same way. We worked, talked about little but beehives. It seemed as if he was enjoying himself. I hadn’t seen him like this since he was a little boy. He ate well, too. Even had a piece of ham for lunch.

  I looked at my watch. We were sitting outdoors, having a cup of coffee. It was almost two. The bus would be leaving soon. I didn’t say anything. Maybe he’d forgotten about it. Maybe he’d changed his mind.

  He looked at his watch as well.

  Then he took it off. And put it in his pocket.

  “Dad. What was it like, the first time?”

  He looked at me; suddenly that profound gravity of his was back.

  “What do you mean?”

  “The first hive you opened?”

  “What do you think? Completely awful.”

  “But what was different? How is this different?”

  I took a sip of my coffee, and sloshed it around in my mouth, found it difficult to swallow.

  “Oh, I don’t know. They were just gone. Only a handful left at the very bottom. Just the queen and larvae. All alone.”

  I turned away, didn’t want him to see my eyes tearing up. “And it happens so quickly, one day they’re healthy, the next they’re just gone.”

  “Not like winter death,” he said.

  I nodded. “Nothing like it. Winter death is the weather, it’s food shortage, or both.”

  He remained silent, held the cup with both hands, thinking.

  “But you’re going to experience winter death again,” he said finally.

  I nodded. “Of course. There are hard winters from time to time.”

  “And they’ll get even harder,” he continued. “There will be storms, bad weather.”

  I should say something, contribute, but didn’t know what.

  “And summer death,” he continued. “You’ll have more summer death, too. Because the summers are getting more rainy, more unstable.”

  “Sure,” I said. “But we don’t really know.”

  He didn’t look at me, just continued, his voice growing louder. “You’ll have collapse again, too. It’ll happen again.” He was speaking loudly now. “The bees are dying, Dad. We’re the only ones who can do anything about it.”

  I turned to face him. I’d never heard him talk like this before, and tried to smile, but it just turned into a lopsided grimace.

  “We? You and I.”

  He didn’t smile, but didn’t seem angry, either. Just dead serious.

  “Human beings. We have to implement changes. That’s what I was talking about when we were in Maine, right? We mustn’t be part of the system. We have to change operations before it’s too late.”

  I swallowed. Where was this coming from? His enthusiasm? He’d never been like this before. I was suddenly so proud, just had to look at him. But he was suddenly preoccupied with his coffee cup.

  “Want to get back to work?” he asked softly.

  I nodded.

  Evening came. Night fell.

  We sat on the porch, all three of us. The sky was clear.

  “Do you remember the snake?” I asked.

  “And the bees,” Tom said.

  “The snake?” Emma asked.


  Tom and I looked at each other and smiled.

  I slept in the next day. And I woke up with a grin on my face. Ready for new hives. Emma was sitting at the table when I came into the kitchen. She had started reading that thick book.

  There was a single plate in front of her. I looked around.

  “Where is he?”

  She put the book down. Turned down the corners of her mouth in a pout.

  “Oh, George.”

  “Yes?”

  “Tom left early. Before breakfast.”

  “Without saying good-bye?”

  “He didn’t want to wake you, he said.”

  “But I thought . . .”

  “Yes. I know.” She picked up the book again, sort of clung to it, but didn’t say anything more.

  I didn’t have the strength to say anything, either. I had to turn away.

  It felt as if God had been teasing me. Hung a ladder down from the sky and let me climb up to take a peek, let me see angels on candy floss wings before He suddenly pushed me off a cloud and let me fall back to earth. The earth on a rainy day. Gray. Slushy. Horrible.

  Except the sun was shining just as doggedly. Scorching the planet to death.

  I had lost the bees.

  And I’d apparently lost Tom, too. A long time ago. I’d just been too thick in the head to realize it.

  TAO

  Ma’am? We’re closing.”

  The guard stood over me holding a heavy bunch of keys in her hand, which she rattled. “You are welcome to come back tomorrow. Or to borrow something.”

  I stood up. “Thank you.”

  In front of me was a long article about the death of bumblebees. The bumblebees and the wild bees disappeared at the same time as the honeybees, but their death wasn’t as evident or ominous, the species were depleted without anyone actually sounding the alarm. Wild bees were responsible for two-thirds of the pollination in the world. In the US the honeybee did most of the work, but on the other continents wild bee species were the most important. Here, however, the continuous species decline made it more difficult to gauge population numbers. But mites, viruses and unstable weather also affected the wild bees. And pesticides. They were in the soil, enough to poison future generations, both bees and humans.