by Helen Jukes
They are stones in their feet, Virgil said. Weighting their legs like a plumb line, and offering stability in flight. Honey comes from heaven, according to Aristotle. It is the saliva of stars, said Pliny – or else the perspiration of the sky or some kind of moisture produced by the air purging itself. Either way, so he thought, honey falls to earth from a great height – which accounts for its varying colours and consistencies across different sites and seasons; it picks up a great deal of dirt on the way down, sliding over foliage and becoming tainted by the juice of flowers, stained with vapour of the earth and later soaked in the corruptions of the belly as the bees ingest and carry it back to the hive.
This reads at first as a kind of fantasy – the curiosities of the great classical thinkers given free rein to wander. The ‘stones’ in bees’ feet were in fact pollen inside pollen baskets – the small hairlike grooves on the insides of their knees, where that yellow and sifting dust from the inside of flowers is brushed and licked into a wad firm enough to carry. When a creature is as strange as a honeybee, you have to stretch a long way in your mind to reach it. I think of Pliny’s imagination doing a loop-the-loop when he describes honey as star saliva.
But what is noticeable about these ancient sense-makings is how – just occasionally – they seem to possess a kind of insight. Bees are deaf, wrote Aristotle. And so it was found, under a microscope many centuries later, that they lack an auditory system. In Bee, Claire Preston describes a common belief that bees were terrified of thunder and lightning, noting that it’s true they can sense when a storm is coming – although whether they are afraid is anyone’s guess. Perhaps they are excited.
It’s still winter, and that space by the far fence is as bare as it was the day that Jack and I took to it with pruning shears. Maybe there are a few more dead leaves blown up against its sides. Spring feels a long way off, and despite the hive tool and the bee brush having arrived through the letterbox, I am feeling no better equipped to welcome a whole great massing colony of bees into the garden, or into my care.
There’s a robin in the garden, poking about in the soil. I hover on the threshold, hoping he won’t notice me or that if he does I won’t disturb him. Suddenly Hannah’s cat emerges from under the hedge, and there’s a flash of wing and feather as it makes a dive for the robin and the robin scarpers.
Cracks of time open at either end of my day. When I wake and before Becky gets up I pull out books, turn pages. At the library I make reservations, add my name to waiting lists. I find I want to trace the development of the modern hive; if I can map out the journey that led to the birth of modern beekeeping, perhaps I’ll have a clearer sense of how to keep the bees from here on.
By now four books in particular have become mainstays: Claire Preston’s Bee, Bee Wilson’s The Hive, Hattie Ellis’s Sweetness & Light and Eva Crane’s The World History of Beekeeping and Honey Hunting. They sit stacked up beside my bed, a flotilla of females – writers who voyaged deep into all those centuries of beekeeping history, much of it male, and navigated a course through. I underline passages, flit between chapters. The Hive is soon marked with a coffee stain.
Tentatively, I begin navigating my own course through. I find I’m tracing the development of the modern beekeeper, as well as the modern hive. I want to know where our involvement in the hive’s inner processes began; where a curiosity about the bees became an impetus to see and begin controlling what happens inside.
‘You’re a beekeeper?’ asks the librarian, eyeing my oversized pannier bag as I heap in a fresh stock of books.
‘I was,’ I say. ‘I mean – I will be.’
One evening, in Eva Crane’s book, I read a curious story about Aristotle and his bees. Apparently he built a window, not for looking out but for seeing into his beehive. Thick walls, a thin crack down one side and a transparency inserted. The window didn’t work. According to the story, the bees obscured the glass with clay. It would have been propolis, not clay, but still. I read it as a call from the ancient past urging caution: don’t let intervention run unchecked. To look inside was to disturb the proper functioning of the colony – a disturbance that could be remedied from inside, by the bees, who appear capable of accepting or rejecting an intrusion at will.
I’m intrigued. I begin looking out for more of these openings; cracks made in the hive walls. I learn that Pliny described hives made from transparent mirror-stone. It was probably the mineral mica, and is unlikely to have made a whole hive, but – fingernail-sized, ear-shaped, eyeball-like – it seems that windows did appear throughout the history of beekeeping, and there were people who caught brief glimpses of the hive’s insides, before the bees covered them over.
I’ve reached as far as the seventeenth century, and it’s getting late. I have work in the morning, and really I should be getting to bed – reserving my hours of wakefulness for the present day, not journeying down through the past. But I’ve got to the point where the age of scientific discovery begins, and a fresh focus develops in relation to honeybees. Distinct from the practical concerns of common beekeepers, the bees themselves have become an object of study.
Through the Middle Ages, beekeeping had been the work of the lower classes, and hives were kept solely for the harvesting of honey. But with the growth of the natural sciences it drew the attention once again of learned scholars, and a new generation of apiarists rose up, many of them clergymen – educated men with time on their hands and a keen interest in the wonders of the natural world. These early scientists of the Enlightenment era began to observe honeybees meticulously, methodically; and before long they began to question, then to disprove, many of the accepted ways of thinking about the hive.
Hattie Ellis describes how The Reverend Charles Butler, great-great-grandfather of the English naturalist Gilbert White, was among the first to challenge the received wisdom of classical authors. He came to believe that drones were a part of the reproductive function of the colony, although he couldn’t say how. He noted also a peculiar activity among bees returning to the hive. They displayed a soft shivering, he wrote, as they waggled at him.
I stand up and stretch. Ball my fists, rub my neck, remember the pile of paperwork I will have to return to in the morning.
Moving over to the window I touch the curtain to make a gap for seeing. Outside it’s dark apart from the light of the street lamps, and of TV screens flickering in some windows. A double-decker passes and the floor trembles a bit. The bus is empty except for the driver, its insides brightly lit. They’re tinted a whitish blue.
I think about those early scientists working amid all that excitement and change. There must have been a parallel search happening alongside their explicit investigations. They needed a new language to accompany this fresh approach to seeing and thinking about the world. How to describe something impassively, straightforwardly, without recourse to accepted theory? How to balance a sense of wonder about the natural world with the need for rational objectivity? How to find words for what you see, and – more than that – to deduce meaning from it; to explain it?
As I climb into bed my phone beeps – a message from Elvin, who seems to do most of his hive-building at night. Should be ready in a few weeks, it says. Do you want the roof tin-plated?
Yes please, I reply. It is good to be watertight.
That night I dream I’m standing inside a closed room. The wallpaper is the same kind I had in my bedroom as a child, with woodchips sealed in between the paper layers so that the whole wall bumps and mottles like there might be a thousand insect bodies trapped inside.
I am holding a cardboard box. Inside the box is a colony of bees; I can feel them moving around inside. I want to open a window; the window is locked. A hole opens in the base as they begin chewing the cardboard sides. They’re huge. They have teeth.
The following day I shoot out of work on my lunch break, hot from the pent-up atmosphere inside and desperate for an escape route. It’s been tense all morning. Everyone chasing after deadlines, sticky wit
h each other and full of angst. Me too. I feel like an out-of-place and poorly tessellated shape, full of gaps and overlaps and awhirr with unwanted frictions.
I begin stamping out the frictions as I walk, as though there might be answers inside the pavement. All those targets, that push for productivity, the paperwork and increasingly standardised procedures; they might be pulling us into line, but they don’t feel very – I round a corner, search for the word – human, to me. They don’t cultivate trust, or care, and they aren’t where ideas are made. Those individual desk cells leave us isolated – and not in a way that leads to any kind of self-realisation, either.
There are no answers in the pavement; there is just more resistance and silence.
As I reach the high street I’m unsure which way to go; how to break free of this stuck-inside feeling. Then I remember the observation hive. Paul mentioned it at the ONBG meeting. It’s installed at the natural history museum not far from here, and I think I can make it there and back on a lunch break. I check my watch; I’ll have to be quick. I am already half-running down the street.
The sun is out and the wind is sharp. I hurry across wide-open squares and take shortcuts down narrow side-alleys, squinting up at the great grand buildings and stepping through wall, roof and chimney-top shapes as the sun makes shadows of it all. The sun is achingly bright. I zip one way and then the other, losing a sense of which side the sun will come from next, and sometimes anyway it comes reflected: around a corner between two crumbling walls it leaps off a basement window. My hair whips, I gasp great gulps of air. Everything is fresh and tossed around.
Inside the museum entrance is a vast stone atrium. A gargoyle-encrusted ceiling soars high above my head. The whole place echoes with the voices of a busy school party, and with their feet on the flagstones. There’s a shop, selling museum-logo-embossed pencil sharpeners and plastic animals, on one side, and an unmanned information point on the other. A sign in front of me points visitors Left, Right, Up. Toilets, Cafe, Beehive.
I go right, and up. Climb a stone staircase with high windows separated into a hundred panes. You can’t see anything but light through them, and the light floods the stone steps. My footsteps echo like the school children’s voices, but now the school children are behind me. Like comb, I think, looking at the panes. The staircase touches the window, and then it curves.
At the top is a room with dark-green carpet and glass cabinets lining the walls, and away from the stone and the busyness downstairs there is a sudden hush. I’m the only person up here; the observation hive is obviously not drawing a lot of attention at this time of year. Inside the cabinets, plastic plants and taxidermied animals are arranged in woodland and desert scenes – they’re all looking a little tight for space. I peer closer at a wild boar but can’t decide if he’s yawning or baring his teeth through the glass. The fur on his shoulders has a greenish tint; there must be a filter fitted over the light bulb. I turn round and spot the observation hive standing over by the window.
The Age of Scientific Discovery brought with it a fresh impetus to gain access to the interior life of the colony. In 1649, The Reverend William Mewe, inspired by Pliny’s transparent hives, constructed an octagonal hive with multiple tiers, each one fitted with a small window sealed by a hinged shutter. I can take a strict account of their work, wrote Mewe, and thereby guesse how the rest prosper. With developments in manufacturing it became possible to produce glass in sizeable sheets, and what we now call the ‘observation hive’ arrived – a single piece of comb sandwiched between two panes, with a whole colony on display. Not a single bee could escape my notice, wrote another scientist-cleric, The Reverend William Dunbar, in 1820.
As the scientist-beekeepers exercised their eyes and rational-thinking minds, fresh discoveries came quickly. But there was something else, too. Through the glass, something more subtle and less observable was happening between human and honeybee.
Reading their accounts, I’ve been struck by the attitude among these early scientists of increasing scrutiny and surveillance. As though, along with new capacities for seeing and knowing, came intimations of control. There was not a cell . . . in which we could not examine what took place at any moment, wrote the Swiss natural historian François Huber in the 1790s. I might almost say that there was not a single bee with which we did not get personally acquainted.
I scoffed at that word, acquainted. Some chance, I thought, thinking back to Luke’s hives and remembering the difficulty of picking out individuals from that mass of a seething colony.
The museum’s observation hive is raised up on a wooden platform. There’s a lever to pull, and the whole thing rotates for you. A piece of plastic tubing runs from the base of the hive to a hole in the wall and outside, but it’s empty today; too cold for flying. I clamber up and put my face to the window. The comb inside is clustered with bees, which are also clustering at the glass. Close up, I can see marks like backbones on the undersides of their bellies, except that honeybees don’t have bones. They have exoskeletons, like armour plating; their insides are soft and lack any internal hard structure.
Gathered together like this their wings could be cobwebs, if you weren’t focusing properly. Chitin, it’s called. The same stuff their exoskeletons are made of, a substance a bit like our fingernails. The exoskeletons are rigid and watertight. When I learned this, I assumed it was to stop the rain getting in. In fact it’s about retaining body moisture; it stops them drying out.
I move closer until my nose is nearly touching the glass, and the bees bristle and stir inside. A CCTV camera turns its head in the corner, and a red light winks at me.
In the writings of those beekeeper-scientists, I think I’ve happened upon a tipping point in the history of the hive. Here was one instance where the motivation to learn – to follow a curiosity, and find out, and understand – overlapped with that other, unshakable desire to get involved. To approach and intervene, even to gain control. What happened next would be the direct result of that overlap and those feelings of possibility.
It is also an instance of how the relationship between beekeeper and bee can become a little tangled. In one letter, William Mewe wrote to fellow beekeeper Samuel Hartlib of a curious effect he’d encountered among his bees. They were, he claimed, changed by his looking. Since he began regular observations of his colony, honey production had doubled. Something was happening, he believed, between beekeeper and bee. The whole colony was modifying itself under, and in response to, his gaze. At no point in his letter does Mewe mention whether the effect ran both ways, so that he was also changed.
I’m wondering how this colony of museum bees might have modified itself under and in response to the gaze of the taxidermied woodland and desert species, when there’s a shout behind me and a kid runs into the room with a blue plastic sword. He makes a warrior pose at the wild boar and I giggle and he jumps, then turns and does a warrior pose at me. I grab my neck with both hands and make a noise like a death rattle, and his eyes light up like he can’t believe his luck.
‘Mikey?’ We hear his mum coming up the stairs. ‘Mikey!’ He pauses for a moment like he’s unsure whose world I belong to, the grown-ups’ or his own. And then he’s gone.
I step down from the platform, head spinning, remembering lunch. Nothing about this hive feels familiar, I realise. Seeing the colony on display like this feels very remote from opening the hives with Luke and, despite the proximity, I feel strangely numb. Everything is visible, and readied for inspection; all other senses are turned to mute. I can’t smell, hear, touch anything from behind an observation pane; and the bees can’t smell, touch, or hear me. Like this the colony seems oddly stilled, more museum specimen than living thing. And I want to get away.
February
It is all very well to go delving into the past, but if it’s all you’re doing, it can begin to look like an avoidance of what’s actually happening right now. One thing happening right now is that on a farm near Banbury a colony of bees is clusterin
g, waiting for the spring. Another thing is that somewhere in Essex a cedar plank is being sliced and planed and drilled and sanded to make the sides and base of a top-bar hive.
If I’m honest, I’ve been trying not to think about it. Just at the moment the thought of a real colony arriving is like too much added load. I’ve been keeping it together at work, keeping myself in place, but I feel brittle and stretched and it is taking all of my energy just to stick to type. The last thing I need is another difficult-to-define creature on my hands; another responsibility.
It would be much simpler to stick to reading about bees in books, where the words don’t move around like real bees do and everything has been laid out neatly in order. Becky suggested yesterday that I should do a bit of reading on how to keep bees, present tense, since the bees are actually coming. Probably she is right. But I’m not ready yet. Avoidance tactic it may be, but for now I am following the history.
I’m clearing out cupboards in the kitchen one afternoon when I get a call from Luke. He’s in Soho, and about to check on a hive – I picture the beekeeping suit and the box of frames he’ll have strapped to the back of his moped.
‘How are you doing?’ he says.
‘Good!’ I tell him about all the books I’ve been reading. ‘I’m really getting into it,’ I say, throwing the names of a few centuries-old beekeepers at him, just to see if he knows any, and in fact he knows all of them. ‘But – I’m not really sure what I’m doing. I mean – why read about the history of the hive at all? I’m not sure what it is I’m trying to find out.’