A Honeybee Heart Has Five Openings

by Helen Jukes

  Later that evening, when Ellie has gone home, I’m in the front room and clambering over the furniture.

  ‘Helen,’ Becky says, arriving back from work, and ready for food and bed. ‘There are no clean pans left. Are you going to finish that washing up?’

  ‘Yes,’ I say, but I don’t make any moves towards the kitchen. I’m balancing with my toes on the edge of an armchair as I reach up for a bookshelf. ‘Have you seen my bee books?’

  I tried to get a good look at the bees in Luke’s hives, but a bee is not an easy thing to observe. The thing is that they are so strange. In just the same way that you can think of light as either a wave or a particle, a honeybee can be thought of as either an individual or as a single cell within the larger superorganism of the colony. That disrupts our notion of the world as a place of fixed forms, where every creature has a name and a set of identifiable parts. You might look at a dog or a cat – the arrangement of eyes, nose, mouth and ears – and you’d be able to recognise and relate to a face. But with a bee you’d need a microscope, and even then the body is so strange that you might have to reach for diagrams to make sense of her. And what about a colony? A colony is nebulous and shifting; when it takes flight as a swarm it can seem to belong more to the air than anything in the physical world. You can’t draw a ring around it; can’t make a body out of it. So how to get a look? How to go about understanding it?

  With so many tight deadlines and tick-boxes at work, perhaps I’ve become a bit black-and-white recently, needing to define things as either one or the other, never both or between. But maybe with the bees you have to adjust your senses – to slip between habitual understandings of eyes and nose, mouth and ears; of face and body, form and formlessness – to be able to see them.

  The books are up on the highest shelf, and I have to stretch to bring them down. One of the things that happened when I was beekeeping before was that I began reading about bees, and now I feel it coming back like a thirst. That feeling of wanting to know the hive – to ask questions and find out and understand. I lay the handful of books out like stepping-stones across the floor. They reach as far as the doorway, and Becky’s feet. I look up and remember the pans waiting.

  A few days later I’m out in the garden with an old ice-cream tub full of orange rind for the compost. If you dump kitchen scraps over an open heap like this in summer then a cloud of flies lifts up, but in the winter nothing moves. I empty the tub and the rind tumbles out. The heap has an orange-crested top.

  ‘Psst. Hello!’ There’s a sound of dry twigs cracking, and I jump because I’d thought I was alone out here. I turn round to find my neighbour crouching down on her side of the hedge. The hedge is high, and we’re not normally overlooked – but now the leaves have fallen and the whole thing is bare enough to see through.

  Her name is Hannah. She’s young – in her early twenties – with extraordinarily straight brown hair that never seems to get longer or shorter. She cycles to work with her fiancé every weekday morning at 7.55 a.m. and they arrive back at 5.35 p.m. They have mountain bikes, and matching cycle suits.

  ‘All right?’ she says. And then, ‘Darren told me about the bees.’ Darren is her fiancé. Apparently Becky has already mentioned to him that we’re thinking of getting a hive, and Darren has already approved. ‘Where will they go?’ she asks, her voice bright and light, and I point to the fence, that space by the holly, obscured by a lumbering bramble bush. ‘And when will you get them?’

  I begin willing the hedge to cloak itself with leaves again, give me back my rim of cover. The hive is supposed to bring a bit of respite; I’m not ready for questioning yet.

  ‘I don’t know,’ I say. ‘Spring, maybe.’

  And then she shuffles closer so that the beech twigs must be prodding her cheeks. ‘They’re in trouble, aren’t they? The bees. I was reading an article the other day about declining honeybee populations. No single cause, the article said. A mixture of in-ter-rel-at-ed factors.’

  She says interrelated carefully, sounding out one syllable at a time, as if she is still fitting the word together inside her head. And it’s true. Pesticides outside the hive, parasites in; shifting patterns of land-use, changing climates and the weather – the list of factors affecting the hive over the last fifty or so years goes on and on.

  ‘Gave me the shivers,’ Hannah says. ‘What do you think?’

  ‘About the decline? I think it’s complicated. Imagine all those stressors building up inside your house; something’s bound to snap after a while.’

  She’s still crouching down so I crouch too, and then our eyes are level with each other among the beech twigs.

  ‘Maybe they’re like canaries,’ she says, twisting a twig until it snaps. ‘You know, the ones that used to get taken down the mines. Their lungs are so small they’d drop down dead if there were poisonous fumes around, and then the miners would know to get out quick. Perhaps the bees are trying to tell us something.’

  ‘Yeah,’ I say, remembering how I’d read that in myths and folktales from cultures across the world there are stories of bees as messengers, able to pass between realms. In ancient Greece the sound of bees buzzing through the cracks of rocks was said to be souls emerging from the underworld; the Mayans believed that bees were imbued with mystical power; and in British folklore they’re known as small messengers of God. I think of the miners in the deep dark tunnels who turned round to find their bright yellow birds had snuffed it. ‘Perhaps,’ I add. ‘Except that we can’t go up for air.’

  ‘No,’ Hannah says. ‘Right.’

  She straightens up and dusts herself down. ‘I’d better go. Good luck with it.’ I think she’s about to leave, but then she pauses a moment. ‘Oh, and watch out for the citrus.’

  ‘Sorry?’

  ‘The citrus.’ She nods at the ice-cream tub which I am still holding in my hands. ‘Too acidic. It’s not good for compost.’ I turn and stare at the heap, which looks like it hasn’t done any decomposing for months. ‘You need a lid,’ she says. ‘Something to keep in the heat.’ And I hear a soft tutting as she walks back up to her house.

  Next week the weather gets even colder. The city canal freezes and part of the river does too, and in the mornings I walk to work under a sky flushing the same cold pink as my skin. Front gates, car wing-mirrors, the spindly spine of a rose bush – everything is sharp and hoar-spiked.

  It doesn’t stay that way for long. Soon the clouds roll over and the temperature rises, and we get a lot of rain. Spots of mould appear on my bedroom walls and books. Furred, and forming in perfect circles. I trace their perimeters with the tip of a finger, rub them off with an old tea towel. The mould disintegrates. It is like dust. It leaves a blue-grey smudge on the fabric.

  I’ve heard that if there are mould spores in your house they start growing inside you too. So, lying in bed at night, I begin imagining the organs and routeways in me growing furred. Lung, trachea, larynx, throat. Lungs are interesting. With that passage of air moving in and out they’re our only internal organs to be in constant contact with the outside world.

  And, lying in bed at night, I also get to wondering whether I’m up to this business of getting a hive. What if they die or swarm away, or what if I want to get away from them? What if they keep me here, stuck in a place where I feel so unsettled? What if I can’t keep them?

  I stopped beekeeping before because I was set to move again, and out of London this time. ‘But you were just getting the hang of it!’ Luke said, which surprised me because I hadn’t thought I was getting the hang of it at all. I still hadn’t understood the bees, and if there was an internal logic of the hive I hadn’t learned it. That winter we’d lost the colony at Coram’s Fields, and I was still reeling from the sight of those greyed and lifeless bodies all huddled together on the comb. I obviously hadn’t done anything to help the bees, and all this time spent beekeeping was becoming difficult to explain to other people. London is so full of drive and push and moving up-up-up that you can feel lik
e you’re impeding the current if you’re not trying to get anywhere in particular.

  Outside, in Oxford, it keeps raining. I have a big report to write and for a couple of days I work from home, so I’m in the house during daylight hours more than usual. Whenever I look out of the back window it is that space by the far fence that I see first. There’s something waiting, or watching, about it. It makes me itchy. I look away, back into the room where my laptop is sitting, seventy-two work emails waiting. Seventy-three.

  A muscle at the back of my neck twinges. Some hard and determined knot has wedged itself deep into the base of my neck, and now it’s getting aggravated. A shoot of pain runs from my head down into my wrists, humming there a moment, and then it’s gone.

  I put up a hand and rub the tops of my shoulders, trying to find and loosen the knot, but I can’t – it’s driven too far in. As I am rubbing, the rain is tapping like fingers, or tiny, toughened bodies, at the glass.

  And then the rain stops and my friend Jack arrives, with pruning shears. Jack lives down the road. He’s over six feet tall and looks a bit like an enormous seal, with great dark eyelashes and a body made to be in water. A section of the Thames runs through the city half a mile from his house, and he swims there every unfrozen day of the year, in his pants. Wherever he goes, he always takes a towel. If he comes across water but has forgotten his towel, he swims anyway.

  ‘Pruning shears?’ I say, bewildered.

  ‘Thought you could do with a bit of help clearing the garden,’ he says, shifting his weight from one foot to the other. ‘Get it ready for the bees.’ Jack is another person I’ve told about getting a hive, and Jack doesn’t wait around. I stare at him a moment, unsure whether I want to clear the fence or just leave it as it is, inhospitable to human or hive and tangled up with weeds.

  ‘But everything’s still wet from the rain,’ I say, eyeing the shears.

  ‘They’re rusty already,’ he shrugs, pulling them open and closing them. They make a harsh grating sound with each movement out and in, as if to demonstrate their unsuitability for the task.

  I reach for my boots. I find us some gloves, too.

  ‘What a mess,’ he says when we’re down by the fence. And then he begins cutting the brambles and trimming the holly. The shears are very blunt. It is more like hacking than trimming, but it works, and the clearing by the fence expands, and after a while I even begin enjoying myself, hauling armfuls of dead twigs back and forming a small mound of them on the grass.

  Two round sweat marks appear on either side of Jack’s shirt. ‘There’s a Lithuanian word for friend,’ he’s saying over his shoulder. ‘Biciulis. It comes from the Lithuanian word bite, the word for bee. Literally, it means a person with whom one shares the keeping of the bees.’ Jack has an enormous capacity for random facts. Sometimes he has trouble getting to sleep at night, and he uses these periods of extended wakefulness to teach himself new things. Last month it was home brewing. Now it seems to be Lithuanian.

  ‘Huh,’ I say, tearing a band of rotten ivy from the fence and wondering how to let him know that this idea of getting a hive isn’t really about friendship; it is just about me and the bees, and I’m not sure I’ll want anyone around to watch.

  ‘Yeah,’ he’s saying. ‘In ancient Lithuania bees weren’t bought and sold, so relationships between beekeepers were based on giving and borrowing. They linked people across whole districts. I guess beekeepers must have been thought of as honest, trustworthy people. Dear friends.’

  I’ve heard of those relationships based around giving and borrowing. All across northern Europe there were traditions linking the buying and selling of bees with bad luck, whereas swarms that had been freely given or arrived of their own accord were believed more likely to do well.

  Jack turns round. He looks at me and frowns. ‘What are you doing?’

  I’m standing by the fence, pretending I’m a hive, or a bee, testing this place for suitability. The brambles must have been growing here for years. The fence is scratched and softer and differently coloured in the spots we’ve cleared, and the earth is bare – just a few yellowed stems poking through, suddenly exposed to the wintry light and air. It’s sludgy and uneven, too. A beehive should be placed on level ground, and this ground isn’t.

  When a colony of bees enters a cavity in the wild they move up, around the edges, searching for the ceiling, a secure surface to build downwards from. Attaching themselves one to the next with tiny hooks on their legs, a group of workers will then form a loop, like a living chain. Inside this chain, more workers will gather and begin building wax comb vertically, along gravity’s pull – a two-sided grid, with each hexagonal cell sharing its six sides with six adjacent cells. If the cavity or hive is crooked the comb will form at odd angles to it, and end up colliding with the walls.

  From the garden we can hear the traffic rumbling along the road outside, splashing in the places where the storm drains have flooded and the rainwater has collected in great pools over the tarmac. A man shouts. A kid bawls. We stare down at the soil.

  ‘It’s not level,’ I say to Jack.

  ‘We can make it level,’ he says.

  ‘How can we?’

  ‘I’m not sure. I need to think about it.’

  We stand and look. The mud is seeping through a hole in my boot, dampening my feet. I try to imagine the inside of the hive, those first moments when the bees are in and searching around for a secure ceiling. What it would feel like if ‘up’ was where you fixed your feet, and depth what you built into.

  I tell Jack about the honeycomb and the living plumb line and he nods and smiles as though a hunch of his has been confirmed. ‘Friendship,’ he says, as though that settles it. ‘They link up. They have to. It’s the only way to get things done.’

  December

  The first week of December, and any self-respecting bee must have retreated far inside her hive by now. Honeybees form a tight cluster in the cold just the same way that penguins do, circulating heat throughout the colony by keeping a steady flow of movement going, pushing those at the centre out and pulling outliers in.

  The thermostat at work must be stuck on high, because everyone’s walking around in T-shirts. With all the windows closed to keep out the cold the place is stuffy, and stuck at a drab mono-temperature. People keep getting sick. Yesterday someone blamed the closed atmosphere inside the office. ‘It’s a breeding ground for germs,’ they said, and I thought at least there’s something that’s able to thrive in here. It can feel strangely airless – sometimes I get short of breath. I have to remind myself that the air is not missing; it just isn’t moving very much.

  At home we have the opposite problem. The central heating is on the blink, and a lot of heat has been escaping through the bare floorboards and the draughty windows and doors. We’ve been keeping the fire going most evenings, and actually I think I prefer it. With the embers and flames glowing the source is easier to locate, and the warmth always seems warmer that way.

  Sprawled out in front of the hearth, I’ve been getting into my bee books. Tonight I’m reading up on what makes a good place to put a beehive. There’s a tray beside me with a tub of gently melting butter and a half-empty honey jar. The tray is scattered with crumbs, my books and laptop too.

  The Roman poet Virgil wrote about bees in his poem the Georgics. On the correct placement of a hive, he wrote: First seek a settled home for your bees, whither the winds may find no access . . . nor straying heifer brush off the dew from the mead and bruise the springing blade. So our little garden with a few frogs and birds and plenty of wind-shelter from the trees is doing okay so far. But let clear springs be near, and moss-green pools, and a tiny brook stealing through the grass . . . In the midst of the water, whether it stand idle or flow onward, cast willows athwart and huge stones, that they may have many bridges whereon to halt and spread their wings to the summer sun.

  I like the idea of filling the garden with tiny bee bridges, and make a mental note to float some s
ticks in our pond come spring. But Virgil doesn’t have much to say about terraced houses and rush-hour traffic so I put him down for now, and see what the government have to say.

  The DEFRA website states that hives should be sited so that only the beekeeper is ever likely to be stung. Which seems a tricky thing to factor for in a city, and anyway I’m as keen to avoid stings as the next person. Yet hives are increasingly common in cities. Urban beekeeping is a big thing now – part of a resurgence over the last decade in beekeeping as a hobby. People with no previous experience have been starting one hive, maybe two, and taking a little honey each year.

  The trend must be due in part to a growing unease provoked by the news of declining honeybee populations across the globe. Writer and academic Rebecca Giggs notes that one possible psychological response to the apprehension of a threat is to begin producing idealised versions of the thing we perceive as being at risk. Unable or unwilling to process the loss, we increase the intensity, brighten the colours, formulate for ourselves an ideal experience of the thing we believe might be slipping away. It’s easier to ward off an anxiety over declining bee populations, or changing climates, if there are bees buzzing around. ‘Look!’ we can say. ‘They’re right here – everything’s fine!’

  But getting a hive won’t save the bees, who don’t and never have needed our keeping. If we want to do something to help them we’d do better to turn our attention to flowering habitats beyond the hive, on which they do depend. Wetland, woodland, wildflower pasture – all have been diminished over the last century in a hot wave of intensive agriculture and urban sprawl.