Wolves & Honey

by Susan Brind Morrow

  The varroa plague has been compounded by the simultaneous appearance of a tracheal mite. The tracheal mite gets into the lungs of bees, breeds there, and weakens the respiratory systems of bees so that they do not have the strength to fly.

  Both mite populations were first detected in the mid-1980s. The mites came into the United States through Ohio, it seems, on an illegally imported queen. They then spread rapidly across the country with the migrant beekeepers who move from the South to the North every year, from Florida up through the Carolinas, through New York to Maine, with the waves of flower and fruit crops, from lemons and oranges to apples and pears to cranberries and blueberries.

  “Sometimes you open a hive after the winter and the queen is there with ten bees,” Bob said. “Imagine eighty percent of your hives are dead. That’s what happened to everybody except me. You know me. I took it seriously right away.”

  A chemical insecticide called Apistan had been developed to kill the varroa mites, but they were rapidly becoming resistant to it. Researchers at Cornell were hoping to extract an herbal remedy that could be used in a hive. The smell of sage or rosemary or thyme is the opposite of the nectar or perfume of a flower. It is an insect repellent that the plant itself has developed to repel predatory insects, and it has been seen to repel varroa mites.

  For tracheal mites the one effective chemical is menthol. “Menthol is a cool burn,” Bob said, “like a cough drop. You think it’s cooling your throat. But it’s actually burning you. I hate menthol now that I’ve started using it in the hives.”

  A tremendous amount of care and attention has to go into beekeeping now just to get through the year. Many beekeepers have lost all their hives to the mites and have left the business.

  “Now at least people might begin to recognize how important beekeeping is,” Bob said. Beekeeping is the most important and the most silent branch of agriculture. Eighty-five percent of the fruit industry depends upon it completely, as does the nursery business. Bees pollinate alfalfa and clover fields, the food of cows, as well as trees and wild flowers.

  “Beekeeping is a tiny one-hundred-million-dollar industry,” Bob said, “that creates fifteen billion dollars’ worth of food.”

  Pollination by honeybees is so pervasive, and so little acknowledged, that people don’t realize that their gardens are thinning, their crops are failing, because of the sudden absence of bees. Now an orchard may only reliably produce if a beekeeper is hired to put hives in that orchard and monitor them carefully through the year. A farmer cannot rely on the haphazard visits of wild bees or bees from distant hives anymore.

  The problem is essentially the virtue of beekeeping. Beekeeping cannot be industrialized. Bob said, “You own the beehive, but you don’t own the bees.” You cannot force a colony of bees to carry on its complicated work, you can only observe, and help where you can. This involves tremendous patience, the kind of patience that, as a recent article in Bee Culture magazine observed, is “no longer amenable to the modern attention span.”

  …

  One cannot imagine bees and honey going out of the world, for the fascination with bees is as old as humankind. Honey and bees figure in the earliest representations, in remnants of the earliest written language, in the Sumerian “goblets filled with the blood of trees,” the food of the immortals—frankincense, honey, and myrrh.

  Bees dwelt in the tree of life, the sacred grove, the enchanted forest, the timeless realm between the living and the dead. The sweetness of honey had a mystical sense—it was a taste of the sweetness of wisdom, the wisdom of the numinous other world.

  The risen Christ eats of a honeycomb. Apollo was raised in the grove of Parnassus by the Thriae, the Bee Maidens, who taught him to prophesy. The name Deborah in the book of Judges is the Semitic word for bee, meaning prophetess. Aldebaran, the red star that is the eye of Taurus, is “the bee”—red, like Antares in Scorpio, suggesting its quality of pain, its sting. Praesepe, the Beehive, a star cluster in Cancer that seems to vanish and reappear, is a crack through which souls enter and depart the material world. Plato in the Ion describes the sophos as a bee, an instrument of the divine, having prophetic powers.

  Bees were everywhere an essential part of the depiction of wild nature. The priestesses of Artemis, the goddess of the mountains and the forest and the moon, were called Melissonomoi, “beekeepers.” A beautifully mysterious fragment of Alcman describes the creatures of the wilderness:

  The peaks and the valleys of the mountains are asleep

  The headlands and the bays

  The tribes of every creeping thing the black earth feeds

  The mountain-going beasts and race of bees

  The monsters in the depths of the porphyry sea

  And the slender-winged birds are asleep.

  An ancient Egyptian story tells how bees were born from a tear in the eye of the sun, touching upon their goldenness, the sense that honey is gold, materialized sunlight.

  Samson (from shams, the Semitic word for sun) comes upon a lion, a creature of the sun, a creature of gold. He tears the lion apart with his bare hands. Later he finds the lion’s carcass filled with bees. He reaches inside and takes some honey in his hand and eats it. “Out of the eater came what is eaten,” says Samson, “and out of the strong came what is sweet”—the painful rending of strength, the hard, reveals within it what is soft, the sweetness.

  One dimension in the golden quality of bees and honey represents thought itself, the stored thought that is all of human accomplishment.

  The kellos of the honeycomb was the cell of the monk. A Coptic monk in the Egyptian desert once said to me, “You pray and pray until the prayer becomes like honey in your mouth.”

  …

  The last time I saw Bob I was visiting my parents in Geneva and went to track him down. I found him in his lab around midnight. I hadn’t been there in years and felt a chill at the strangeness of the sight, as though I were seeing it again through the eyes of a child. Through the wall of windows thirty feet high, segmented in panes of old glass, the dimly illuminated copper-green equipment of food processing stood poised like giant insects in the dark.

  Inside Bob was working late, as usual, intent and beelike in his industriousness. On that particular night, he was bottling berry wine he had just made to distribute at the New York State Berry Growers Association conference in Syracuse the following morning.

  I followed him as he walked around with a clipboard, holding up to the light small jewel-like bottles of raspberry, strawberry, peach, and plum wine, grading them by their color (raspberry in five varieties or grades, strawberry seven, etc.) and pouring out shot glasses for us to taste as we walked along, Bob in jeans and baseball cap, his hair gray now beneath it, laughing as usual, saying in his dear, familiar reedy voice, “It’s easy. You just take thirty pounds of fruit, fifteen pounds of sugar, two gallons of water, add a little yeast . . .” He handed me a plastic bubbler so I could try it at home.

  “Yeah, it’s easy for him.” His assistant, Tracy, laughed.

  We were getting a little woozy with the wine. It was delicious, like sweet perfectly ripe fruit, without a trace of a foreign or chemical substance.

  “Those poor grape wine snobs,” Bob said, “they don’t know what they’re missing.”

  7

  The Silver Forest

  THE SILVER LIGHT has retreated onto the branch tips, silvering now only the shells of the trees. It is November. The air is cold, and there is still a burning color to things. The red squirrels are whistling in the maples by the road. Last night, as we came in, a barred owl flew raggedly over the hood of the car in the dark, shuddering slightly in flight like a giant moth. We stood beside the house in the starless night. From within the line of tall red pines a hundred yards away we heard a sudden sound—a scream, shrill and prolonged. The pure sound itself made us stiffen with fear, for it was an almost human scream. The night was abruptly still. And then another sound began, in pitch like the first, but rising, winding an
d unwinding into many voices, low and high, that broke at last into sharp short cries.

  Where we live in this upland valley east of the Hudson, the neglect that has crept over much of New York State has turned the curving slanted fields lined with piled stones partly back to forest. We see the land going to seed before our eyes. Young trees root insistently on open ground. This is transition forest coming down from the Adirondacks—a mix of boreal pine and the hardwoods that grow on the lower slopes of mountains. As we walk in the woods we pass through the lemon-green light of second-growth birch and hickory where the forest floor still has the grassy meadowlike quality of the sheep pasture it was a hundred years ago. The ground is strewn with chunks of white quartzite once assembled for walls, now scattered and sided with thick green moss like fur. Around them grows the autumn crop of gem-studded puffballs, the spangled panther, cinnabar chanterelles, pristine destroying angels, and huge russulas with sticky mottled heads. We follow the thin slapping of the falls into the deep cooling blue shade of the hemlocks. The floor here is matted with soft flakes of hemlock needles amid the broken bodies of fallen trees, their moist, splintering, deeply rotted wood stained with saffron streaks of witches’ butter—the rot out of which new hemlocks grow.

  Above the falls is what my great-aunt would once reverently have called the “drowned land,” where the spills of an abandoned beaver colony unevenly divide a succession of small marshy lakes, lined with stumps gnawed into pencil points. The ghosts of trees stand knee-deep in the sludge of tussock grass and reeds—paper birch and sugar maple, carved by birds and the wind into the astonishingly beautiful shapes of ancient things. High hollowed outcroppings of limestone stand between the woods and water and we bring our picnics here sometimes, even in the snow. A broken landscape, the perfect territory for the animal we heard last night.

  The eastern coyote is one of the mysteries of natural history at the turn of the twenty-first century, a time of massive die-off, of the rapid extinction of one species after another. This new animal has thrived in what might otherwise be called the destruction of habitat: the cutting back of old-growth forests; the creation of tarmac roads that run amid a patchwork of urban sprawl, strips of thinned woodland, field lots, and scrub. The animal is so discreet it fades away into brush and trees so that people are hardly aware of its presence. Its given name is part of its disguise—for everyone knows that a coyote is a harmless little animal that rarely exceeds thirty pounds, an animal of the desert and the grass plains, feeding on berries and lizards and carrion.

  The eastern coyote hunts in packs, following herds of ungulates, as wolves, in their great variety, have always done. The wolf is a creature of the Ice Age. It came into being in the Pleistocene, when massive sheets of ice slid like razors around the world, cutting down the trees. The receding ice scraped and cleared the ground, creating tundralike expanses that became rich pastureland for great herds of roaming animals and the species that developed to feed on them: wolves and early man.

  One might say that we are in a new ice age, the ice now concrete, metal, and asphalt—lifeless things, pushing the forest back, leaving only edges of insubstantial new growth; and that wolves, hunted almost to extinction a hundred years ago, have come back among us in this new form. A reemergence suggesting the spiral of insistent growth—destruction and decay followed by the blossoming of forms—that brings to mind the origin of animal in anemos, the Greek word for wind.

  …

  I used to think about a place of silver light like the negative of a photograph: Avalon, apple grove, the rotating island visible only to the dying; or the forest of precious stones that was the home of Tara, star, the wish-fulfilling wheel; or the island of Circe, circle, the white sea hawk with its circling flight. The silver forest was a realm of ghosts, a mirror world—like language, the great mirror that contains the reflections of everything that ever lived.

  Language mirrors the fluidity of life itself. In its essence it is like molecular variation. There are patterns and root elements, and any hardened meaning is a kind of crusting over formed by use. Form is the Latin word for beauty, forma. The mind craves meaning as the eye craves beauty. They are essentially different levels of sense perception of the same thing, like variations on a chord of music. What the mind and the eye crave is form, spun out on a hidden underlying pattern, as the apple and the wolf in their succeeding forms are spun out on a patterned genetic underlay. One often finds both the visual beauty and the deeper meaning worked together in a single word. A vivid metaphorical conflation will often contain astute observations of natural history.

  For years I have carried in my mind a fragment that is said to be the last thing that Catullus wrote. When I was young I was charmed by the intricacy of this small and perfect image formed of words—as though Catullus managed to capture a beautiful little animal on the page. His death is a mystery and people sometimes look to the fragment for clues. He had recently been devastated by the loss of his brother. Was his own death a suicide? The fragment suggests that he suffered some critical betrayal:

  Num te leaena montibus Libystinis

  Aut Scylla latrans infima inguinum parte

  Tam dura mente procreavit ac taetra

  In novissimo casu contemptam haberas

  O nimis fero corde

  A lioness in the Libyan mountains

  Or barking Scylla must have given birth to you

  With a mind so tainted and unmoved

  That you would have contempt for me

  In the ultimate crisis of my life

  Oh you with an iron heart

  The lioness in the Libyan mountains is easy to track. This is a conventional insult. Among the desert people of the Mediterranean world, to whom the lion was once a reality, ibn labwa, son of a lioness, is far worse than “son of a bitch,” for a lioness is a promiscuous animal—that lowest of all possible creatures, a female after sex. Scylla, on the other hand, opens a window through which one has a glimpse of something remarkable. Scylla was the sea monster that Circe warns Odysseus he will meet. But for Catullus, who used words with the skill of a jewelmaker, shading their colloquial, mythic, and historical sense together at once, there would be some hidden atmosphere or meaning. Scylla is often depicted as a woman who is “dogs from the waist down.” This is actually just a linguistic pun on skulax, the Greek word for puppy. The Latin translation of skulax is—Catullus. Hence one might ask: is this some kind of joke? Is Catullus the one whose mother is a sea monster? But far more interesting is the epithet latrans, barking, for now we are on the solid ground of natural history. We are talking about something real.

  Circe’s story of a monster with many arms pulling sailors off the decks of ships and feeding them into a hidden mouth, bite by bite, is an accurate description of architeuthis, the giant squid. The Danish naturalist Steenstrup in 1857 wrote of “a fact not generally recorded in scientific literature, namely the wailing cries which [the squid] uttered . . . such sounds being likened to grunts, wails, moans, squeaks, miserable cries or yelps” heard over the ocean from miles away. Could this be the origin of the mermaid?

  What I noticed about the giant squid in the American Museum of Natural History when I last saw it was that its sharp, birdlike beak was embedded in a hidden mouth the shape of a perfect octagon, textured like the seedbed of a lotus. The animal was red, faintly speckled over with pink polka dots, but I have read that waves of color pass like electrical currents over its skin. It has the largest living eye.

  …

  We used to follow the route of an old Indian footpath that ran directly from our house on Seneca Lake across the state through the Mohawk Valley to my grandparents’ house in Albany, where a huge old gingko tree stood in the back beyond a fishpond. We drove in the winter months through heavy snows to get there, through the black slate road cuttings of Utica when they glistened with ice, and Albany, the white city, rose before us in the distance above the white, frozen river.

  My grandfather was a heavy man, as such men use
d to be, with iron gray hair parted neatly in the middle in the old-fashioned way above his broad strong face. For forty years he was chief counsel and deputy commissioner of education for New York State. During my childhood he argued the landmark cases for censorship and for school prayer before the United States Supreme Court, and lost.

  In my grandfather’s office in the old state education department were books bound in dark green cloth that seemed to shine as though highly polished, the titles pressed into the spine of each volume in gold. These were the monographs on the natural history of the state that the department had commissioned for over a century.

  What is New York State? Each of the green volumes gave detailed answers: a landscape created by water, the flood plain of the Great Lakes, the drainage patterns of great rivers, the migration routes—plant, bird, animal, and human—that belong to them.

  The books presented New York State as a coherent entity, an aesthetic that has stayed with me all my life.

  A bird illustrator at the state museum painted a picture for my grandfather in the 1940s that hung in our attic for years: a watercolor of the flowering branch of an apple tree. Among the blossoms was a bird of the richest purest blue.

  One summer my husband and I drove east across America. Every night lightning shimmered through the dark and fell to the ground, starting brush fires in the dry grass all across Oregon, Washington, Idaho, Montana. When we stopped we found the diners and motels filled with yellow-suited firefighters streaked with black ash.

  One night we slept on the Yellowstone River, at the base of hills covered with scorched, still-standing pines. In the morning we got up and drove for eighteen hours. Halfway across North Dakota in the dark we crossed a line. We could feel a dampness in the air—the smell of damp ground and high grass wet with dew and cornfields. In the dark I felt the great relief of the familiar presence of water. This was home, a territory within the far reach of the Great Lakes. In the morning we saw the low gray sky.