by Helen Jukes
‘I don’t know,’ I say, turning back to the screen. ‘There’s so much choice.’
I don’t get a skep. That afternoon a one-line email arrives from Luke with a web link copied and pasted. This is the one to go for. And in the end I do go for it, a top-bar hive – more like a log on its side or a boat with four feet than anything resembling a house-shape. Top-bar hives were first built in Africa, where hollowed trees were placed lengthways and used to house colonies, but nowadays they’re common all over the world and more often cut and built to shape – raised up on wooden legs to make them handier for beekeepers and less handy for mice and foxes.
Under the roof is a rectangular cavity that tapers towards the bottom, with a series of removable wooden bars rested widthways along the top, from which the bees build their comb freeform. Top-bar hives are completely frameless – the colony is given no further direction than a thin wax strip running lengthwise along each bar. They’re cheaper than conventional hives, and relatively easy to make. The website describes them as offering a more natural approach.
I like the idea of a natural hive, but when I think back over the early hive forms I’m not sure I could say which were the more natural ones, or where the naturalness might be said to have started or finished. That thought of framelessness is intriguing, though. I like the idea of leaving the bees to build from scratch; of letting them follow their own forms. I’ve been so concerned with what I’ll do without Luke around to guide me, I haven’t stopped to consider that I might actually be guided by the bees themselves.
The website shows photos of the top-bar hive from various angles, but the background is white. Whatever landscape there was has been removed, so that the hive is without context, floating like the house in Corinne’s drawing. Because of this I struggle to picture where it’s coming from, or what it might look like once it’s here.
I order from Elvin who lives in Kent and builds hives in his shed. I call him later that week. I’m sitting on a park wall beside Ellie, our legs dangling over a rose bush – we met up after work to get some food.
He’ll courier it over when it’s done, Elvin says. And then I just have to be in to meet it. I have some questions for him, since I’m still trying to filter the various warnings and advice I’ve been given.
‘I’ve heard bees swarm more in top-bar hives,’ I say. ‘Is that true? What do you do to stop them swarming?’ He begins to explain, something about rearranging the bars, leaving space near the entrance to avoid overcrowding inside – but the connection is bad, his words skip, there’s buzzing and then the line goes dead.
‘Everything okay?’ Ellie passes me a plastic takeaway tub and a set of chopsticks wrapped in a paper packet.
‘I think so,’ I say, nearly scalding myself as I lift a corner of the lid and a shoot of hot steam escapes. ‘I couldn’t hear him very clearly.’
‘Hive,’ Ellie says, ‘it’s a lovely verb. A funny mixture of pulls and momentums.’ Ellie works for the Oxford English Dictionary. Her job is to update and revise definitions, one word at a time. Sometimes a word takes weeks.
‘What are you working on at the moment?’
‘Sky,’ she says. ‘I finished Cheese last month. Yeah, Hive is good. It’s got all those associations around gathering and coming together, storing things up. But then there’s also hiving off; breaking away, making separate. Hey, maybe you’ve been doing some hiving away recently. I’ve hardly seen you since Christmas, you’ve been so ensconced in all those bee books.’
‘I guess it’s all about to get a lot more concrete,’ I say. ‘Soon there’ll be a real hive in front of me. Noun form.’
The holiday season is over, and I’m back to work again – determined to do things better this time around. I’ll adapt, I tell myself. I’ll work faster.
But when I arrive there’s a new set of ‘key performance indicators’ on my desk – a New Year’s greeting from Head Office. Thirty fresh targets, divided into six neat categories, which we are now required to report on each quarter. Everyone’s fuming about it, thronging the corridors, pressing noisily into the staff kitchen. I want to throw the performance indicators in the dustbin.
Honeybees were one of our first domestic species, over six thousand years ago – but what is surprising when you stop and think is that they’ve never been fully domesticated. When a swarm of bees leaves a hive today they’re as wild as they ever were – not reliant on the hives we’ve made, and just as capable six thousand years on of following their own instincts about how to live.
I can’t help feeling it is some great victory on the part of the bees that they’ve managed to retain their independence despite all those centuries of being kept. But it’s created a tension in human societies, where people want to be able to own things and sort them clearly into category and type. In The Hive by Bee Wilson, I learn how in ancient Rome there were two categories of animal: wild ones, which could be possessed temporarily, and domestic ones, which could be owned. Honeybees, which could be kept but not tamed, didn’t fit into either. In fact, the Roman encyclopaedist Pliny the Elder argued that, not either tame nor wild, they occupied a middle, indeterminate category all of their own.
I’m feeling on-the-fence about domesticity myself, I think, pushing open the front gate at the end of my first week back at work to find a fresh littering of crisp packets and beer cans behind the wall. Hannah and Darren’s drainpipe has sprung a leak, and someone’s dumped a mattress outside the house opposite. This area is increasingly given over to rented accommodation; you can tell by the air of undernourishment about the houses. The residents are temporary, and the landlords live miles away – there isn’t a lot of motivation on anyone’s part towards upkeep. In fact, this street would fit very nicely into Pliny’s ‘not either tame nor wild’ category at the moment.
I unlock the door, step over the junk mail scattered across the mat and plod through into the kitchen. Everything is in place at our house (apart from the blinking heating), but somehow we haven’t yet found a fit. In the evenings Becky and I have both been arriving home tired and drained and a bit senseless; ready to dump and refuel before beginning again. She goes for long walks, or out to meet friends. I take flight into books, as Hannah and Darren’s TV hums through our adjoining wall.
In his studies of comparative religion, the historian Mircea Eliade observed that for traditional societies, the home was the place from which the world made sense. This was possible because it stood at the crossing point between two axes: the vertical, which is connected with the world of the gods and the world of the dead, and the horizontal, along which all journeys are made in this world. I read this in a book I picked up today by the writer Dougald Hine, The Crossing of Two Lines, and it made me think of the hive. Those flights running out and back from the entrance; the comb inside, building down.
In the kitchen I open the fridge and sniff a pot of week-old yoghurt, then put it back again. I’m thinking about the wildness of honeybees, their irrepressible life – that ability to build and make a home sitting right there inside them all the time. My own capacity for building and making feels pretty stunted at the moment, and in fact I wouldn’t mind asking Eliade a thing or two. If home is the place from which the world makes sense, then what do you do when, even standing in your own house, your senses feel lost, or blocked, or broken down?
Eliade’s work has also been cited by John Berger, who in his book And Our Faces, My Heart, Brief as Photos set about locating the origins of ‘home’. It seems inseparable from houses now, and from notions of domesticity and ownership. Yet in its original meaning it referred not to a building or even a geographical location, but a state of being. A place at the heart of the real, according to Eliade. A place from which worlds could be founded; a place where meanings are made.
There are heart-shaped ornaments in Mary’s window; I notice them there as I lock my bike to a street sign.
I’ve decided it’s about time I got to know some other beekeepers in the area; it might be easier to step into
the role of beekeeper, I’ve been telling myself, with a few experts around.
That old piece of folklore about bees that have been freely given or arrived of their own accord being more likely to do well has been playing on my mind. It’s tempting to think that the tradition had a practical function, ensuring the direct passage of skills from one beekeeper to another but also requiring an attentiveness, on the part of the receiver, to what makes a hive inhabitable. You can’t receive a colony unless you’re willing to become a part of a network; you won’t catch the attention of a passing swarm without some understanding of what it is the bees might need.
I came across a website for the Oxfordshire Natural Beekeeping Group. Natural Beekeeping – that’s a phrase that keeps popping up recently, and it marks a shift away from some of the techniques developed by modern beekeeping towards an approach that is less focused on the honey, and more on the bees. Less intervention, the message seems to be. It sounds good to me. But it feels like swinging from one extreme to the other to join the ONBG in the same week that I’ve been reading about factory-produced foundation sheets, and I wonder if they’ll smell an intruder. Anyway, they’re meeting tonight, and I’ve been sent directions to Mary’s house.
Mary lives in a semi-detached house just beyond the eastern bypass. I can make it out, just about, in the window-lit dark of after-work January. There’s a bright-yellow lichen on all of the trees along her road, but only where they’re facing the traffic. It glows under the streetlamps like the stain on an X-ray after you’ve swallowed a tracer.
Her wind chimes jangle under the eaves. ‘Come on in!’ she says, taking my coat. Her house has a smell like nutmeg. We arrange ourselves on sofas and stools as she hands around teacups painted with tiny wildflowers. I’m introduced to Paul, who organises the meetings; Helle and her son, whose extended limbs and heavy fringe mark him out as the group’s only adolescent; Jude, who arrives late and spills coffee on the sofa; and Mark, who drove twenty miles to get here. That’s what he says when he arrives. ‘I drove twenty miles to get here.’ His head is closely shaved and he rubs a hand over it each time he speaks.
‘We’re low on numbers in the winter,’ Paul explains, a little apologetically. ‘In the summer we’re a much larger group.’ I look around at the tightly packed room and can’t imagine how they’d fit.
Mary bustles back and forth with tea and coffee and now Paul takes a piece of honeycomb from an old shoebox, which we pass around. It’s old, and dark with the repeated laying and cleaning and the build-up of debris that goes on inside the hive. It still smells of honey, too.
Next we pass round a plate of biscuits. Paul asks if I have a colony of my own, and I say that I’m awaiting delivery of a top-bar hive. ‘You want to hear about Mary’s top-bar!’ he says, and beckons for her to sit down.
Mary retired a few years ago, and built her own hive after her husband gave her a set of power tools for Christmas. She found a video on YouTube with step-by-step instructions. ‘I was in and out between the computer and the garden,’ she grins. ‘I’d watch a bit and pause it, then run out and add a bit more.’
Paul does a quick recap to find out whose colonies swarmed over the summer.
‘I lost count,’ Jude says, reaching for a biscuit. Her neck is lost somewhere underneath rolls of scarf and jumper. ‘Could’ve been three – I saw three. But it could easily have been more.’ Jude hasn’t opened her hive for years. The legs are so rotten, she says, that sooner or later it’s going to collapse completely – and I don’t know if it’s pride or bloody-mindedness in her voice.
I take a bite of biscuit, turn it around in my mouth. I’m not sure about this. Isn’t beekeeping also about upkeep? Taking care of the hive, at least, even if you’re not meddling with the bees? I’m not sure I’m so interested in beekeeping if it isn’t also about opening a hive.
Jude’s approach is clearly extreme even among a group of low-intervention beekeepers, and I see Paul shuffling in his seat. There are important reasons for opening a hive, he carefully reminds us. It allows us to check for disease and make small adjustments to ensure the conditions are right for a colony to grow. Jude folds her arms and humphs. ‘Well no one’s going to open this one,’ she says. ‘The lid is jammed shut.’
That’ll be the propolis, I think to myself, remembering Luke explaining the sticky resin made by bees from buds and sap to fill unwanted gaps inside the hive. It’s like trying to recall a language I began learning once, but never practised. Words I’ve heard before but not for years have begun scudding and slipping about my skull, light and liquid and uncoupled from their meanings. I’m still fitting them together when sentences have already finished, the talk moved on elsewhere.
The room begins humming with conversation; there are always two or three happening at once. Now and then Paul interrupts and gathers us in, before sending us off again on a fresh line of discussion. There are divergences within the group. Not everyone agrees on the right way of keeping bees, and my plan to locate an expert or two who can tell me the right way of doing things seems a little naive now I’m here. They’re talking about bees, but also about chemical pesticides and microscopic parasites and a new legislation that may see inspection programmes rolled out right across the UK.
I sit and listen mostly, and wonder what the old beekeepers talked about if ever they met up in this way. The group here are comparing notes. They’re sifting for clues, looking for patterns, and the patterns aren’t always visible at first glance. Last summer Helle noticed the wings on some of her worker bees were looking frayed. At first she couldn’t work out what it was; assumed it must be something happening to the bees in flight. In fact the cause was inside the hive, a disease known as deformed-wing virus, which affects bees in the larval stage, meaning that they are unable to fly.
Helle caught the problem quickly, and the colony recovered. But there is something sinister about not knowing where to look, what to do to make things better, and it occurs to me now, as I listen to the group speak, that the way we talk about bees and how we look at them is changing – is having to change – as we find ourselves in an increasingly uncertain and complex world.
Paul seems often to be bringing in outliers, softening extremes – or else playing devil’s advocate where he sees too much consensus forming in either one direction or another. He’s a member of the British Beekeepers Association, too – a more established and more conventional network of keepers, which has a proper membership and training programme and a shiny website.
‘So he can keep an eye on the enemy!’ says Jude, and laughs.
‘Absolutely not,’ replies Paul, without smiling.
Mark who drove twenty miles to get here has never been a beekeeper. He’s just thinking about it for the first time, and has brought some photos of his garden along with a lot of questions. ‘CCD,’ he says, rubbing his head. ‘What’s CCD?’
The conversation stops, and the group leans in a little to hear Paul’s reply.
I’ve read about colony-collapse disorder in the papers – a phrase used to describe a particular pattern of losses to bee colonies in America, which began around a decade ago. Beekeepers across several states found their colonies failing. Up to 90 per cent over a single summer, in some places.
‘. . . Similar losses have been reported in Europe,’ Paul’s saying, ‘but none have fitted the exact criteria for CCD.’
‘So we’re all right then, eh?!’ Mark grins, and laughs, and looks around. Everyone is busy listening to Paul.
‘There have been losses to bee colonies throughout history,’ Paul goes on, ‘usually associated with viruses affecting bee populations on a large scale. So although it’s alarming, there’s nothing especially unusual about a period of loss per se. Until you look at the symptoms,’ he says, tapping his chin nervously with two forefingers. ‘The symptoms of CCD point to something very different.’ Mark has gone very quiet. ‘Not a disease in the standard sense, since it’s possible that no single cause exists. With CCD, a
hive is literally abandoned by its workers. Beekeepers open their hives to find them emptied of adult bees. There are no dead bees inside or around the entrance, as would normally happen in the case of a parasite or disease.’
‘Creepy,’ says Helle, shivering her shoulders.
‘They leave?’ says Mark.
‘Vamoose,’ says Jude.
As though the hive stops making sense, I think, wondering what happens to make them quit. A build-up of stress or circumstance collects and heaps up inside the hive, until – in a complete reversal of their natural drive to produce food and raise brood, and despite the fact that there are scant habitats available for them to go to – they reach a tipping point. Exercising their only remaining source of agency, the right to leave, the workers desert their colonies, leaving behind the queen and brood who, without care, will die within a few days.
There’s a pause in which Mary gets up to fetch more tea, and Jude reaches for another biscuit. And then Mary arrives back and suggests that Mark shows everyone the pictures of his garden, which he does, after a bit of persuading. And everyone looks and nods and reassures him that yes it is a fine place to house a beehive.
I like the thought of a low-intervention approach to beekeeping, but when I’m in the garden a few days later I realise I’m not sure how far back to step. How much room to give a colony and still learn something about who they are and what their needs and fluctuating rhythms might be? Both seem important. To step back, intervene less; but also to get to know, to rebuild or re-form a relationship with the natural world. I have a sense that I might learn something from this creature that hives and builds and journeys ceaselessly.
With the early hives, intervention wasn’t an option – so I wonder what the old beekeepers gleaned about the life of the colony; how far it’s possible to understand the bees without lifting the lid to look.
There must have been glimpses of the hive’s interior. As they reached in, pulling the comb loose, the beekeepers must have noticed the toughness of it; the way it curved and bloomed. The sameness of the cells, and the way the colours drifted from white to gold to dark brown, like the tide marks on a beach. Since there was honey in some cells, but not all of them, the beekeepers must have wondered what else was in there. And how did it all get made from what went in – those strange yellow orbs that the bees carried, seemingly, with their feet.