by Helen Jukes
‘Well I wouldn’t bother about that,’ he laughs, and I hear the sound of a car horn in the background. ‘What’s the point of finding something out if you already know what it is? Maybe there are some questions you’re trying to ask yourself,’ he adds. ‘You just haven’t found the right words yet.’
There are no questions I’m trying to ask myself, I nearly say; I am just interested in the hive. But that wouldn’t be quite true.
‘I’m worried I won’t know what to do,’ I hear myself telling him. ‘How to look after a colony, I mean. We’ve been building hives for thousands of years, but I’m not sure we’ve ever really learned how to keep.’ In fact, all our self-assuredness about being able to secure and manage our environments is looking decidedly strained, I want to add – but I can’t get the words out. ‘I thought if I could get a handle on the hive itself, how it’s changed over time, I might get a better sense of how to keep it.’ And I tell him about the Enlightenment scientists, all excited and caught up in their own powers of observation.
‘Hm,’ Luke says, and I wonder if he’s followed me or if I lost him somewhere around the ‘thousands of years’ bit. ‘Well, if you really want to get into it, François Huber would be a good lead to follow,’ he says, and I remember the Swiss natural historian and his claims about being acquainted with the whole of his colony. ‘He represents a bit of a turning point, when science began to intersect with everyday beekeeping. He tried to apply science, make it useful to beekeepers in a practical way.’ He pauses as a siren passes. ‘Anyway,’ he says. ‘What about your hive? The real one, I mean.’
‘It’s nearly ready. Should be here in a couple of weeks.’
‘Good. Won’t be long now. Soon the bees will be there too, and then you won’t have time for all this reading.’ Which panics me slightly. There is still a lot more to know.
Luke is good at making you believe you can do something even if there are a lot of voices in your head arguing to the contrary. He doesn’t try to understand everything; he says he’s still learning all the time, and in fact the learning is all part of it. Sometimes the novice beekeepers are even the better ones, he told me once – they have less of a picture of how the hive should be, so they pay more attention to what’s actually happening when they look.
In 1792 Huber laid out a record of his investigations into honeybees in a series of letters to the acclaimed naturalist, his hero Charles Bonnet. And now – over weekends, between work and life and seeing people – I begin making trips to London, slipping into the British Library to read them.
By the time of Huber’s writing, scientists had come to understand the true materials from which honey and wax are made, and some of the processes involved in their production. The colony is ruled by a queen and the celibate workers are female. There are also male drones, larger than the workers and darker in colour, with bigger eyes that almost meet in the middle, so that there is no room left for a forehead. The new knowledge had transformed scientific understanding but bore little relation to the practical stuff of beekeeping itself, and it was to this that Huber now turned his attention. He wrote to Bonnet of his concerns over traditional practices. It didn’t make sense to him that beekeepers should destroy a whole colony at harvest. Thousands of years had passed since people began keeping bees, but in all that time the hive had remained much the same. Most beekeepers still used skeps, and employed practices that had been in place for centuries – but these were beginning to look nonsensical. The landscape and agriculture had changed. There was less forest and fewer wild colonies around; the bees were not so easy to replace, yet still the beekeepers killed them.
I can think of a few parallels between Huber’s world and my own. That feeling of the world as a place of uncertain resources; of living-practices being out of kilter with them. Huber didn’t think much of the observation hive. Bees weren’t made to live on a single comb; they are taught by nature to build parallel combs . . . a law from which they never derogate [unless] constrained. Along with the letters, he sent Bonnet a collection of diagrams and instructions for the ‘leaf hive’, his own design. Twelve identical wooden frames, each one hinged to the next and all tied together with string. It looked like a box, at first, and then like a book, the frames like pages as they opened out. I imagine the combs like crusted pages, crammed to their edges with bees. The frames must have stuck, a bit, with propolis, which would have made a cracking sound. And then the bees, shifting, hiding, shuffling themselves.
With Huber’s design the beekeeper could observe the wooden frames one by one, thereby gaining a sense of the hive as a whole. There is capacity, he asserted, to make small adjustments to promote the healthy functioning of the colony. The keeper could separate the frames. Remove pieces of honeycomb and close the hive back up, leaving the bees to reconstruct the missing parts. He was making a case for a new and more efficient hive design, but he was seeking to reset the terms of a relationship too. There is room for manoeuvre, he seems to have been saying. It is possible to make alterations to the hive itself, but beekeepers need to change their own practices too.
When we have all the combs before us . . . we see how abundant the provisions are and what share of them we may take away. Huber wanted beekeepers to see into the hive, but was wary of intervening too heavily. He urged moderation in the harvesting of honey and wax, and argued that to compensate for this moderation every means must be employed to promote the multiplication of bees. We should take a little; and do everything we can outside the hive to help them thrive.
I’m surprised to find that his letters – while scientific and rigorous and occasionally pedantic – are alive to touch and sensory detail. The hive opened and the comb sat exposed. With regular inspections the bees became tractable (easier to work with), Huber noted, careful not to suggest that he had tamed them. He wrote also of changes in the light: the shock of sunlight when the hive was opened seemed to excite their fear; the bees shrank into the comb, concealed themselves. They were less tractable in the night or after sunset. Sitting in the library, the wintry sun peeling in through the skylights as I feel my shoulders loosening and a knot unfurling, I begin warming to him.
The bees’ world was so alien – it followed laws and logic that bore so little relation to Huber’s own – that, aided by his assistant François Burnens, he was obliged to proceed without a map, carrying only his own powers of deduction with him. This led him to some curious conclusions. The air which we exhale appears to anger them, he wrote, and experimented with bellows instead, which scattered them.
Then one day Huber noticed something truly surprising. The combs were forming just the same as they always had, vertically and parallel to one another, but now he found his attention drawn to the spacing between them. He measured it. Checked himself, and measured again. And perhaps the hive reversed itself in his mind, so that he saw its negative space. This leads me to what I believe is a new observation, he later wrote. Throughout the hive the spaces between each comb were uniform, and this, he became convinced, was essential to the health of the whole colony: too far apart, and the bees would be less able to capture and preserve heat; too close, and they would be unable to move around freely.
What I don’t learn until this point in reading the letters is that Huber was almost completely blind.
I sit back.
He’s blind?
This man who claimed to have been particularly acquainted with his bees, and who was so passionately committed to observation? What to make of that, if seeing was the one thing he couldn’t do? All that time I’ve spent on the trail of the old beekeepers as they formed windows, made cracks in the walls of hives; and now here is Huber who got rid of windows altogether – who opened up the hive – but couldn’t see.
I’m curious but also a bit wary of this man François Huber, and unsure that this lead Luke has given me is really heading anywhere useful after all. But anyway I keep on with the history of the hive because I haven’t reached the modern hive yet, and without knowi
ng that part of the story I won’t be able to join the dots – won’t properly understand where we are now, what’s happened to the bees, or what it means to be a beekeeper today.
The next part of the story concerns another man, a pastor named Lorenzo Lorraine Langstroth who lived in the nineteenth century, a long way from Huber, on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean.
Huber had doubted that the Leaf Hive would ever become popular, and ultimately he was right. Although used occasionally for scientific study, it proved impractical for common use. The frames stuck. It was bulky, and difficult to build. But over half a century later his insight regarding the evenly spaced combs resurfaced when a copy of his letters to Bonnet fell into the hands of Lorenzo Langstroth in America; and it was there that the modern hive finally came into being.
As a young man, Langstroth had trained as a Congregational pastor, but this vocation had not been an outright success. He suffered bouts of debilitating depression and anxiety, experiencing a muteness so pronounced that he became unable to give sermons, sometimes for months at a time. Having moved from one failed church posting to another, in 1848 he resigned as a pastor for the final time. Rekindling a childhood fascination with insects, he set up an apiary in the garden. He’d come across copies of Huber’s letters a few years earlier, and now he began studying these. He began to experiment with Huber’s hive design and another hive developed by the apiarist Edward Bevan. I became thoroughly convinced, he later wrote, that no hives were fit to be used, unless they furnished uncommon protection against extremes of heat and more especially of cold. He doubled the layers of the hive’s exterior. Next he started on the hive’s insides, determined to promote a greater and more reliable honey flow.
In the Bevan hive the honeycomb was built on removable bars, but when Langstroth tried these he found the bees soon fused them to the hive walls. He tugged the comb, and the bees flustered around him. The comb was stuck. How to make it movable, he wondered, and found himself turning again to Huber’s gaps.
He took this gap, the distance between combs, and began testing it in other places. Dead air space, he called it: a distance of three-eighths of an inch that the bees would leave open throughout the hive. Any smaller and they plugged it with propolis; any larger and they bridged it with honeycomb. Bee space, it later became called, since in fact it was far from dead. Langstroth diligently entered the measurement into his hive design; a series of frames surrounded on all sides by this space. Tested, it worked. The frames remained movable. He lifted them out, and put them in. Shuffled, expanded and rearranged them, as the bees shuffled and rearranged themselves around him.
Encouraged by friends to publish his findings, Langstroth patented his design and moved away from his family to live with his sister in Greenfield, Massachusetts. There he installed an apiary in her garden, and – moving between bees and words, hive and study – began to write. His handwriting was illegible. The words jumbled and knotted across the pages, unreadable by anyone except his wife. And she was miles away. He began posting her packages – a gift, his scrawl – which she carefully transcribed for the printers. Langstroth on the Hive and the Honeybee: A Beekeeper’s Manual was published in 1853, and the hive was a success, heralding the biggest shift in beekeeping since ancient times.
Langstroth did not become rich. Despite its patent the hive was easily replicated, and anyway it emerged that a beekeeper in Poland, Johann Dzierzon, had also been working with the bee space. The Langstroth hive was reproduced and reinterpreted across continents, spawning the WBC (a hive named after its inventor William Broughton Carr), the National and the Dadant (after its inventor Charles Dadant). In place of roundedness came squares and rectangles, a set of parts that could be easily replicated and assembled. Here is the hive we recognise, the sloping roof and weatherboards and the narrow entrance like a doorway at the base. With the removable lid and frames there is little of the hive’s interior now that remains unknown to us; we can say that we understand it. More than that, we’ve learned to believe we can control – even have mastery over – what happens inside it.
Back at home in Oxford I’ve been out in the garden, pacing the distance between the back door and the fence. Becky asks, will the bees come into the house, and I say I don’t know, I think that they might. If we leave the windows and doors open then they might, maybe.
Indoors I spread out on the sofa with half a dozen books and my laptop in front of me, a muddle of text and pictures.
The modern hive had allowed beekeepers to manage disease, even to work with the colony – making small adjustments, as Huber had predicted, to ensure the conditions were right for it to thrive. Commercial beekeeping was possible for the first time, and with the rise of commercial practices, the focus among beekeepers shifted again to the process of honey-making that goes on inside the hive.
Honey doesn’t come from heaven as Aristotle suggested but from nectar, which is contained within the glands of plants – a thin and easily spoiled liquid that is converted by the worker bees into a stable, highly concentrated and high-energy food source. A bee extracts nectar from a flower by poking and sucking with the tip of her proboscis. A proboscis is a bit like a curling tongue, I learn, and the nectar is taken inside her honey sac, which is like a temporary stomach. Here it mixes with enzymes as she moves around until, on her return to the hive, a worker ‘begs’ the nectar by drumming on her antennae. This prompts her to regurgitate it, passing it to the worker, who presses it into the underside of her own proboscis, drawing some of the moisture off before passing it on. Like this the nectar is passed around the hive from one bee to the next in a process of communal digestion known as trophallaxis. With each transfer, a little more moisture is extracted, and the humidity inside the hive increases – the workers have to fan their wings to keep it ventilated. When the nectar has been converted into a supersaturated solution it is ready to be stored inside the comb cells and sealed with a thin layer of wax, until such time as it is needed. At this point it becomes recognisable to us and also harvestable as honeycomb.
It’s a complex process, carefully regulated by the colony and highly sensitive to outside changes – an especially cold spring or a drop in forageable flowers can drastically alter the quantity of honey produced from one year to the next. Yet over the last century, the pressure on commercial beekeepers – as on the owners of the factories and farms that have also undergone a rapid process of intensification – has been to drive up efficiency and increase levels of production. The biggest bee farms are now thousands of hives strong, and operate on an industrial scale.
The hive has changed shape again, but this time the change is a perceptual one. Where we see honey not as an active substance and part of a living system but an isolated product like a car or a cake or a cooking pot, the hive comes to resemble a factory; and that delicate and contingent process of making honey is reduced to just another point on a production line that begins in the fields and ends on the supermarket shelf. This changes what happens as we encounter the hive; it alters what we do. The job of the beekeeper-overseer under these circumstances is to iron out the creases, fill in the gaps. Remove any processes superfluous to the real work of making honey.
Common practices now employed by large-scale commercial beekeepers include artificial feeding and insemination, the use of antibiotics, the transportation of live bees across vast distances, and – in a chilling recurrence of one of the earliest and most harmful beekeeping practices – the culling of hives in winter. Not, this time, because no other option is available; but because it can be cheaper to kill a colony after harvest and buy fresh stock in the spring than to feed it through the cold season.
UK supermarkets are among those organisations that have led enthusiastic campaigns aimed at raising awareness about struggling honeybee populations and the importance of expanding pollinator-friendly habitats; but none have addressed the issue of beekeeping husbandry, nor the part the honey industry may have played in the population declines. In fact, honeyb
ees are notably absent from their published policies on animal welfare.
I sit back. I’m nearing the end of this journey into the history of the hive, and as I pull myself back to the present day it strikes me that it is the bees who are the ones intruding here and not the other way around. Present by their absence, inching in like an open question to the places where they’ve been omitted, they’ve been circling the margins as I’ve been reading, nudging my attention back towards them.
It is probably just as well, since February is almost at a close, and it won’t be long now before the real bees are arriving here. Soon there will be no avoiding them.
Even away from the books, I find parts of the hive’s history recurring in my mind, like when a tender spot on your skin prickles and keeps prickling even after the touch has finished. I think of that claim of William Mewe’s that the bees were changed by his looking. I’m not sure I believe that a colony of bees could truly modify its behaviour just by dint of an attentive gaze. But I do know that how we view the world has consequences, and that just by changing a filter or focusing differently we can create blind spots or open new windows, even without noticing as we do.
It’s Saturday and I’m in the office, the week’s work having spilled over into the weekend. I’m searching through folders for a misplaced risk assessment when a friend sends me a link to an article about a new invention, the flow hive. It removes the need for comb-building by supplying ready-made plastic cells, laid out with perfect uniformity. So all you need to do is put the bees in, and then the bees make honey. There’s a tap to turn, and the honey pours out when you need it.
And just like that, we stop looking. Caught as we are in our own containers – our work schedules and production targets and all the other apparatus of our own making – the particular rhythms and processes of the colony become peripheral; secondary, at best. Except, of course, that not everything turns out as we might expect. Sometimes the things we thought were masterable turn out to have a will and a life of their own.