Wolves & Honey

by Susan Brind Morrow

  The landscape was an illustration of the mixing of Asian and Caucasian blood that has gone on in the steppes since prehistory. We were looking for rock drawings in the red sandstone mountains and had come down into the Ili Valley in China where the script was Arabic, the language Turkic, and the architecture Russian. In Urumchi there were tall fair Scythian mummies with blue tattooed cheeks.

  Beken was looking for Scythian burial mounds, and lived out of a converted Soviet Army bus. It was the summer of 1991. We did not know that the Soviet Union was about to fall apart. Nothing had happened, yet there was an odd mood of laxness, almost of gaiety, in the air. When the bus was stopped at a military checkpoint and the soldiers demanded, “What have you got in there?” the men said, “American women from New York,” and the soldiers winked and waved us on.

  Flocks of sheep spilled over the steep green sides of the mountains. There were no roads. Occasionally we would see a lone black bull (“Buik lubit krasnia,” Beken would say, laughing at my old red hooded sweatshirt. “Bulls love red.”) In the evening Beken fished for tiny pink-flecked trout in the mountain streams, which looked as if they were made of beaten gold.

  We sat in the dark after the supper fire was gone, naming the stars as each of us knew them, for we had no common language. Beken, an old Asian with a white beard, looked to me for all the world like an Eskimo. He remembered the names in Kazakh, the Turkic of his nomadic childhood. Stalin starved the Kazakh nomads and forced those who remained into the urban life of the capital, Alma Ata (which in Kazakh means Father of the Apple), where they were forced to speak Russian, the language of the state. Beken became an archaeologist in order to take occasional refuge in the hills.

  “Eto archaeologie!” he would say. “Now this is archaeology!”

  6

  Bees

  THERE IS A KIND OF REST that is not sleep exactly. It covers the mind like the film that covers the eye of an animal at night—the translucent second lid. Light penetrates, thoughts float freely through levels of the mind, but the body is at rest. After nights of lying outside in this condition, one’s eyes, opening fitfully, begin to fix steadily on the changing patterns of stars. To someone who lives outside, these patterns are not mere talismans of lost belief. They are a map defining the horizon, as it slips with each day and with one’s progress.

  The concepts of time and the sky have only diverged as the brightness of each settled place blots out and separates it from whatever worlds there are beyond, both earthly and celestial. Our very word for hour, the root for time and season, was originally used to represent the precincts of the sky. When Sappho, watching the moon and Pleiades set, writes, mesai de nuktes, para d’erket’ ora “It is the middle of the night, the hours go by,” she does not refer to time abstractly passing, but to the constellations that pass overhead as she watches. Expressing the same simple visual truth, Herodotus says of traveling east or west, “on towards evening, on towards morning,” picked up by Barrie for the flights of Peter Pan.

  Of all the different hours of day I have loved most the last hour before dawn, the last frieze of stars when the horn of the sun meets the horizon on the celestial equator and stops the zodiac like a dial.

  That the zodiac were signs in the pictorial-alphabetic sense was a revelation to me. The first time I looked up and recognized Aquarius—not with a chart, but by the silver wavelets, the drops that fell around it (and seemed to float, and perfectly to represent the universal ancient sign for water, a single wave, which ultimately works its way into our alphabet as the letter m)—and Scorpio by its bright red heart, they became my toys from childhood, present everywhere without having to be brought, and I could feel through their grip on my imagination how pervasive their influence had been.

  …

  In the mid-1980s I took a tiny ground-floor back apartment on Claremont Avenue, off Riverside Drive, in New York. It was quiet and dark, and I felt like a ghost in the old familiar neighborhood. I went sometimes for long stretches without talking to anyone at all. The hours were marked by bells from Riverside Church, which rose up bone white and sharp against the blue winter sky outside.

  When I arrived the apartment had the fresh chemical smell of new paint. I remember the desolate first night—the snow falling silently, heavily against the blackness of the bare window glass. I brought with me two shopping bags packed with things from my room in Geneva—my grandmother’s silver tea set from Ontario, a small faded Kazakh rug, Bedouin silks, a translucent blue willow Japanese teacup that had belonged to my grandfather in Albany, small white cardboard boxes lined with cotton that contained familiar fossils so handled and known that they were almost toys: a sectioned rugose coral like a tooth or growth of horn, lined evenly within as though with spider webs hardened into stone; a perfectly rounded trilobite punched out of the chipped slate on our shore at Seneca Lake.

  I covered the windowsill with lichen-patched twigs and bracket fungus and a kind of rich green moss from Riverside Park. Every morning I would pour a pitcher of water on the sill. The moss was so thick that the water never fell to the floor.

  I was preoccupied with one question in those days: how to get back to Egypt. But I loved the apartment on Claremont Avenue. It gave me back Riverside Park, where I knew every tree. I watched two European birches die that year at 108th Street, and a big-toothed aspen at 115th. I used to walk under the elms in the early morning and cut fresh branches of flowers and leaves, which I hid in a sack from the street of the canvas makers in Cairo.

  My desk on Claremont Avenue was a black card table in a corner between two windows. I had a folding chair, lent by a friend. My bed was a mattress on the floor. Outside one window was the broad platform of a fire escape beneath a huge old gingko tree, lime green in spring and golden in the fall. In the afternoon I would push back the heavy accordion grate, having unlocked its rusted padlock, and climb out onto the fire escape with the little faded rug, the pillows from my bed, and a tray of tea.

  …

  I sometimes went to see a friend who worked at night at the Columbia telescope on the roof of a nearby building on 120th Street. The telescope was a century old, not much in use, and Joe was there at night as a sort of guard from the astronomy department. He was a skeletal man, long and loopy, like a swamp dweller in a fairy tale. He showed me Halley’s comet that year and Saturn’s rings, set as a circular rainbow, radiant as a jewel, perfectly formed against the black night sky. The old wood floor would turn and creak, the tongue of copper with its lime green film would slide back, as the telescope swung out into the night. I stood on a stool, as Joe showed me how to squint to see out through the immense tubular eye.

  I used to come into New York on the Hudson train from Syracuse and walk across Grand Central Station with two black garbage bags. In one were four or five frozen trout, and in the other, a honeycomb in a drawer-sized wood frame I had taken from the honey house.

  Whenever I went up to the Finger Lakes I would go to the honey house on Kime Road just off the northeast curve of Seneca Lake, where Bob Kime in his rumpled bee suit, flecked with drowsy disoriented bees, would show me his recent take. We could see, even in a single frame, the tremendous variety of flowers from trees and fields the bees had hit over the weeks past. Throughout each sheet of comb the cells were variegated with honeys of different densities in patches of pale gold deepening to amber, for honeybees will work a certain crop of flower until it is gone before moving on to the next.

  Bob and I would dig our fingers into the combs and try to identify the different tastes, and thus the progress of orchards and fields the bees had traveled that month. Bob had worked for years in the lab at the Experiment Station and he knew a great deal about flowers and fruit and their qualities and smells. He was also the son of one of the old farming families on Seneca Lake, and he knew a great deal more than a researcher would about where things were and how they worked. So there we were, tasting right out of the hive the honey that was the essence of the fruit.

  One year we
found raspberry that was crystal in the comb, and once a dense wild plum that was so strong it was almost intoxicating. At first we couldn’t figure out what it was. We would uncap the combs with the hot electric knife, which moved stiffly and was hard to hold. There was the wonderful smell of wax burning as the comb gave, the wax falling away into a tub to drain and be sold separately. Then we would fit the uncapped frames into the extractor and spin those rare flavors together into something more like what one would expect honey to be.

  I liked to have my honey straight out of the comb, and Bob gave me a frame to take back to New York. I boiled up the wax on the gas stove and made the apartment smell like the honey house. I sat on the fire escape under the gingko tree with a plate of Kimey’s honey and ate it with a spoon. I couldn’t keep bees in New York, but I knew every hive of wild bees in Riverside Park. There was a hive high up in a tulip poplar just south of 110th Street, and another near the ground at 121st Street in an old locust where the trunk had been split vertically with an ax.

  Bob suggested I take a job teaching beekeeping in Darfur for the Ford Foundation. He heard they were looking for someone, and he knew I was looking for a way to go back to Egypt and Sudan. I thought of Riverside Drive as the wood between the worlds that summer, the safe neutral forest where one is lulled to sleep beneath the trees.

  I would get up in the morning and walk over to Morningside Heights to watch the sun rise. Then I would walk down through Riverside Park to see what was out. Sometimes I saw remarkable things: a question-mark butterfly on an ailanthus leaf in a thunderstorm, its ragged wings dusted over with the purple of the sky; a brilliant orange mass of jack-o’-lantern toadstools that came up all at once after rain; a shelf of pure white angel wing that filled the soft trunk of a dying elm.

  I remember the successive waves of flowers—the corridor of basswood down the hill south of 103rd, the wild roses up near Riverside Church, the old honey locusts ringed with thorns at 96th, their waves of heady smells dividing the weeks of June, each crop of flowers rapidly filling with bees.

  My old friend Dick Miller would come through New York on his way to and from North Yemen. He would take me down to Rockefeller Center and show me the letters etched in gold about citizenship and sociability, the joys of city life. He would fix me in his cornflower blue eyes—the pupil of one eye ripped at the base, bleeding in a jagged black streak through the pale bluish rim of the iris—a prismatic eye, I thought—and wave his arm toward the crowds, the lighted buildings, and say, “Well, you won’t see anything like this in Darfur.”

  In the end I did not go to Darfur to teach beekeeping for the Ford Foundation. Though one day on an oasis in the Libyan desert I heard what I thought was the sound of rain and found myself standing in a bee yard.

  …

  In 1910 an ophthalmologist named C. von Hess asserted that fish and all invertebrates were colorblind.

  “But I could not believe it,” wrote the biologist Karl von Frisch. “It was easier to believe that a scientist had come to a false conclusion than that nature had made an absurd mistake.”

  In 1910 von Frisch began a series of basic empirical experiments with squares of colored cardboard, sugar water, and sheets of cellophane. Over decades of close observation, he came to understand the primary senses of insects, and ultimately cracked the language of bees. In 1973 von Frisch won the Nobel Prize.

  Von Frisch saw everywhere the organic significance of color, beginning with the color blue, the blueness of the sky. The sky is blue when the light of the sun is scattered and diffused by the high small particles of the atmosphere. In the blue sky the sun’s light vibrates away from the particles of air at a definite angle, like laundry hanging in the wind. The human eye cannot detect this angling of light; it works like a camera, reproducing the image of what is before it in an approximate condensed way, creating an illusion of solidity, of fixity. But a honeybee sees the blue sky as shifting patterns of polarized light. A honeybee can read the position of the sun at any time by seeing a patch of blue sky.

  The eye of the bee is made up of thousands of tiny light receptors, each eight-petaled like a lotus or a rosette, with the light piercing through its center. The perception of light and color differs slightly in each receptor, so that the overall visual effect is multifaceted, fragmented.

  The angled light of the sun to such an eye is a map. The honeybee can reproduce that map by dancing, dancing the angles of light. The dancing is contagious. The bees near her learn the dance, dance with her over the combs, and then can read and follow her path through the sky.

  Bees see in the blue range, the short end of the color spectrum. A bee sees blues a human being cannot see. To a bee, ultraviolet, the ultraviolet rays reflected back from the petals of a flower, is a vivid color, red is black, and green is gray. Hence (von Frisch concludes) there are few scarlet wildflowers in Europe, no cardinal flowers, for in Europe there are no hummingbirds.

  To a bee, a newly opened flower arises from its nest of dull leaves as a vibrant mass of color. The form and fragrance of flowers are not accidental. The yellow streak on the inside of an iris is an arrow, leading the bee in to the hidden pool of nectar at its base.

  The iris supplies the nectar for the bee. Nek tar, “that which overcomes death.” As the bee plunges down to the nectar, unfurling her long, red, strawlike tongue, her fur is dusted over with pollen, the protein-rich male seed of the flower. As the bee moves on she inevitably carries the pollen to the female parts of a neighboring flower of the same species, and so enables the fruit to form, the seed to grow, the flower or tree to continue.

  “Consider in their entirety,” von Frisch wrote in 1971, “the accomplishments of these small insects, the bees. The more deeply one probes here the greater his sense of wonder, and this may perhaps restore to some that reverence for the creative forces of nature which has unfortunately been lost.”

  Honeybees and flowering plants depend on each other and evolved simultaneously, suddenly, sixty million years ago at the end of the Cretaceous, the age of dinosaurs. Beekeeping is sometimes called the earliest form of agriculture. A rock drawing from the Mesolithic in a rock shelter in Spain shows a person reaching into a tree for the honey inside, surrounded by thick black bees. In the other hand the person holds a small vessel, a honey jar.

  One can only imagine the impact of sweetness in the millennia before the refinement of cane sugar: sweetness as something strange, an intoxicant. Hence one can imagine the value of honey: a treasure taken at some cost of pain.

  Then there is the insistent symmetry, the fragile, insistent symmetry of the honeycomb, and of the lives of the bees themselves.

  …

  The native crops and flowering trees of the Finger Lakes, like Crataegus, the hawthorn, and Pyrus coronaria, the native apple or flowering crab, were pollinated by a vast range of pollen bees native to the American continent, like the orchard bee and the bumblebee. These are not hive bees and do not produce any quantity of honey; the Iroquois sweetener before the introduction of the honeybee was maple sap. The populations of native bees have dwindled dramatically because of habitat destruction and the use of pesticides. Reliable crop pollination can now be accomplished only by carefully monitored hives of honeybees. This kind of controlled pollination has been around for a long time. In pharaonic Egypt beekeepers moved hives seasonally up the Nile on rafts to pollinate the fields and make honey—a double boon. But now it is critical.

  …

  Bob had an interest in honey that was as thorough as his interest in anything he took up. One day he stirred a teaspoon of honey into his tea. He saw the sediment drift to the bottom of the cup and realized that honey worked as a clarifying agent and could be used as a preservative. He patented the use of honey as a preservative in fruit juice and wine, eliminating the need for artificial chemical agents. (His method is used around the world now and has been cited as a classic example of empirical science.) Not willing to waste anything, he used the beeswax left over from his hives aft
er the fall honey harvest to make a skin cream by melting the wax with glycerine on his kitchen stove. The cream was used by the workers at a nearby cement factory to heal sores on their skin. Bob got into beekeeping because the Station needed a beekeeper to assure the pollination of its orchards; the former beekeeper had left after being stung forty times in a single day.

  By 1981 Bob had almost two hundred hives in bee yards around the Finger Lakes, and many farmers depended on him for the pollination of their orchards.

  …

  Beekeeping is seasonal work. The bulk of it takes place in the fall: the honey harvest. In my mind the honey harvest is mixed with red leaves and a bite in the air, the last of the asters scraggly and edged with brown.

  Bob and I would head out at seven in the morning in his pickup, eating apples from his mother’s orchard as we drove along, down the sweeping farm roads around the lakes, down roads of matted grass that ran alongside fields, and into brush clearings of sumac and elder where his bee yards were hidden away.

  He kept us going through the long days by telling hunting stories in his clear reedy voice, his steadying voice:

  “A male turkey will never go to a female turkey, see. And every male turkey has a harem of four or five hens. So to get a male turkey you have to make him think that there’s a female out there somewhere, and that it’s worth his while to go to her. So you have to be downhill . . . ’cause he’ll only go downhill, it’s so little effort . . . in a tree . . . before dawn, when he’s just waking up . . . and then . . . I mean, most people don’t get more than one or two turkeys in a lifetime. It’s that difficult.”

  …

  All the while Bob’s attention is completely on the hives: he moves through each yard in a concentrated, methodical way. We begin by taking the bee suits out of the back of the truck and putting them on over our jeans. The suits are a heavy white cotton, safety-pinned together where they are torn. We stuff the pants legs into our work boots and zip on the hoods that cover our heads but leave a mesh opening for our faces—all only enough to discourage a bee, really. A few usually get in around the wrists and knees. Bob always gets stung a few times.