by Helen Jukes
I’m halfway through the article about the flow hive when the web page freezes. I can’t click onto the screen or out of it. I press refresh, try reopening the page. A message pops up to say there’s a server error; the internet connection is down. I phone down to reception, and they call up the IT guys – but the IT guys are off at the weekend.
I’m forced out. I cycle home slowly. The roads are quiet, and the pavements are full of people. The sun is out and it’s making the car wing-mirrors wink. And now I notice buds have appeared on the trees; they’re hard and shiny and too well-sealed to give much of themselves away just yet, but still: they’re a sure sign that spring is on its way.
In the garden the space by the fence is in full sunlight. The ground has hardened since we cleared it, but there are spikes in the earth where grass shoots are beginning to show through. I poke the tip of my toe in, work a pebble free.
I know that I’ve begun drawing connections between the bees’ world and my own. I’ve caught myself thinking we might be facing some of the same struggles; that perhaps we’re under similar strains. It is probably not very sensible to think about them in this way. It makes everything a bit blurry, and just at the moment I want to be able to see clearly. Still, the parallels are difficult to miss, and it is not often I find shapes that fit with each other.
Back in the house there’s a text message from Elvin to say the hive is ready; he’s booked a courier to deliver it.
When the hive finally arrives it is in pieces. They’re packed inside a cardboard box, and it rattles when it tips. The box is delivered by a man with a van who picked it up from Elvin’s shed in Kent and drove it all the way here.
The first I see of it is the red FRAGILE sticker pasted to the front as the whole thing crashes from the van. Now it’s standing upside down on the pavement.
‘It’s heavy,’ the man shouts, and heaves it through the gate. I can only see his feet. As though he has a box for a body, or as though the box has feet. Now it crashes into a plant pot, and the plant pot rocks.
‘Careful,’ I say, then I pick the pot up and move it.
He sets the box in front of me. Looks it up and down. It is level with his shoulder and almost fills the doorway. It is not really a box. It’s a taped-together patchwork of used boxes – printer cartridges, storage shelves, a kettle – all opened out and wrapped around each other to make one parcel big enough to hold a beehive. Underneath the FRAGILE stickers there are more messages scribbled in black felt-tip. Don’t drop me! with a squiggle, and then HANDS. Two arrows looping and pointing.
‘There’s hand-holds,’ he says, and shows me two hand-sized holes, one on either side. He spreads his fingers wide and bunches them, slides them in and grips. Lifts the box, then sets it down. He lifts and sets it down again.
As the van drives away I slip my own hands in and feel wooden struts inside. I don’t know where to put it, the box, so I put it by the sofa. Fetch a pair of scissors, find a seam and slice it. There’s a smell like the underside of parcel tape and paper fibres mixing and then suddenly the whole thing falls apart, tape ripping, the put-together structure peeling outwards as its insides tumble across the floor.
I sit down and begin picking the pieces up one by one. Here are the top bars. I run my fingers down them, feeling for the tips where I’ll lay wax strips lengthwise along each one. A marker for the bees, encouraging them to build along each one separately rather than across or between, so that comb and bar can be moved and removed in one piece. It’s a first bid for correspondence between beekeeper and bee, and compared with the solid wooden frames and foundation comb of a conventional hive the gesture seems hopelessly tentative; it’ll be some great stroke of luck, I think, if our orientations happen to coincide.
With the hive pieces piled up beside the sofa I return to the books and websites, and to the beekeepers I know. Once you’ve built your hive, I’m told, you should treat it on the inside and out. The outside should be painted to protect it from the rain and damp. Use a mixture of beeswax and linseed oil; or buy a can of Cuprinol. Rub the insides with beeswax, make it feel like home. Harden its outsides, soften its insides; give it a ready smell.
On Sunday, Jack arrives to help. Elvin did not send instructions, so we lay the hive pieces out across the floor and begin guessing which bits are for what thing and where. We turn things upside down and right them again. We don’t talk much, and when we do, the talking is easy. Why is that hole there, look at these wine corks, the way they’re whittled at one end. See here, this edge, and then a flat.
Jack asks what I’ve been up to recently, and I tell him about going on the trail of the beekeeping greats.
‘There’s something I noticed the other day. Both Langstroth and Huber had a sense missing; Huber was blind, and Langstroth sometimes became mute. Makes me wonder what that does to your experience of the world. I’ve heard when you lose a sense you can become especially sensitive to the others – like you pay a different kind of attention to things.’
‘Yeah, except that voice isn’t a sense.’
‘Oh – of course,’ I say, wondering how I could have got the two conflated.
‘Sight, sound, taste, smell, touch,’ he counts them on his fingers. ‘Not voice. Voice is how you speak; it goes out. It’s not about how you perceive.’
We roll the rug up, lay plastic bin bags and Sunday supplements out across the floor. I fetch brushes, and we start painting the exterior.
This month Jack’s been spending his nocturnal hours on the Anglo-Saxons, and he tells me about the metrical charms they used to fix a difficult situation or a disease: ‘The charms were written on objects or spoken out loud or sometimes it was about a particular action that had to be performed.’
I pick up one of the sellotaped packets, and read the hastily scribbled label. Corks, it says. And here’s another, Mouse guard.
‘There were spells to find lost cattle or to hurry a birth, and there was one that kept bees from swarming and leaving the hive.’
‘I like the sound of that.’
‘I wonder if they worked.’
We start a second coat, our hands sticky with the gummy wood preserver, which is sticking to the paint brushes too. We’ve been trying to fix the hive base to the frame with metal clasps, but now the base swings open. We pick it up, begin again, our heads sitting level with the lid as we feel underneath us for the click. The sun goes down outside and we are still in the room, the sofa disappeared under cartons of wood glue and drill bits. There are scraps of scribbled paper at our feet.
3
Bee
March
After all of our waiting and careful preparation the hive sits outside with a what now? feeling about it, an unnaturally bright near-tangerine beside all of the stripped-down greys and hard-fought greens that have made it through the winter.
In fact, winter seems to have stuck fast. That early glimpse of spring has disappeared. The winds are up, and we’re still hurrying around in hats and coats. When the weather warms we can fetch the bees, but you can’t go moving a colony around in the cold, so for now we rattle around the house, and we’re still lighting the fire even though forgoodnesssake it’s March already.
It is around this time that I end up back at Oxford’s natural history museum courtesy of Charlotte, an anthropologist-turned-zoologist whom I met a few weeks ago through a friend.
What are you doing this afternoon? She sends me the text message at 6 a.m. Can you leave work a bit early? Meet me at the natural history museum? I’ve got us a backstage pass!
Charlotte has red cheeks and velvet shoes and the kind of quick, alert intelligence that you can never quite keep up with – it is always spilling over into new things. When we met she’d just got back from Japan, where she’d been researching edible insects, and especially wasps and hornets. I invited her over to see the hive and she arrived on my doorstep a few days later with a bottle half-full of darkish liquid, one whole and huge dead hornet swilling around at the bottom of
it.
‘Hornet whisky!’ she announced. ‘I made it myself.’
Apparently what you do is buy a bottle of whisky, then catch a live hornet and put it inside. As the hornet drowns it releases its venom into the liquid. ‘It’s supposed to have loads of healing properties,’ she told me. I unscrewed the cap and sniffed it.
We went out into the garden, walked up to the far fence.
‘Are you ready for them?’ she asked when we’d reached the hive, taking a peek under the tin-topped roof.
‘Yes!’ I said, infected for a moment by her air of keen proficiency. ‘Well – I think so.’
Before beekeepers learned to split and breed colonies artificially, one means of populating a hive was just to leave it out like this, in the hope that a passing swarm might settle inside it. I told Charlotte this, and we stood and looked – but the thought of a swarm of bees turning up in the chilly back garden of an end-terrace seemed pretty far-fetched, to say the least.
I tried a drop of the hornet whisky while Charlotte told me about visiting black-soldier-fly farms in America. ‘It could be the solution!’ she said, and I coughed as the whisky hit my throat. ‘Black soldier flies are rich in protein, and they feed off waste; they’re what we’ll be eating after everything else is gone.’
I told her about my trip to the museum’s observation hive. ‘The thing is,’ I said, ‘I really want to see a bee close up. A real one, I mean. Have you ever looked at one under a microscope?’
‘Of course!’ she said. ‘Maybe I can arrange it for you – let me see what I can do.’
I’d like to know what those Enlightenment scientists saw when they leaned into the hive with that freshly rational and dispassionate gaze; the will to sort – to identify category and type. I want to lean in too. The hive has arrived, and soon the bees will be here as well – so how to approach, and begin relating to them? All together in the hive they can seem quite full of chaos, the very opposite of reason, and without Luke around I will have to learn to make sense of them on my own. So what kind of looking – what kind of scrutiny, what quality of attention – should I be aiming for? What kind of gaze is good?
I’d scoffed at François Huber’s claim to have become personally acquainted with his bees, but I’ve been wondering all the same if it might be possible to identify individuals; to learn something about the colony as a whole by separating it out, piece by piece. A hive is not a factory and a bee is not a machine-part, and if I am to become a beekeeper proper I want to understand, as far as I can, her bodily experience – how it feels to be a bee going about in the world, with hooked knees and curling tongue, eyes and sting and armour plating.
After Charlotte left I screwed the cap back on the bottle of whisky and took it upstairs. Now it’s sitting on my bedside shelf, where I can keep an eye on that huge hornet drifting around at the bottom of it.
Finally, I do manage to leave work early that afternoon and I hurry over to meet Charlotte at the museum entrance, where we wait for Polly, the museum entomologist who’s agreed to show us around.
‘Hi,’ Polly grins, arriving in a fluster. ‘Sorry to keep you waiting.’ She’s wearing a white lab coat over a blouse and jeans, and the kind of shoes that are made for being practical. Black, laced, rubber-soled. She looks a little out of place beside the museum shop with its bright plastic toys and visitors’ maps and all the kids running around everywhere, and she quickly ushers us towards the stairs.
We turn away from the room with the observation hive this time, and enter a door marked Private. Here is an office corridor. The rooms are separated by partition walls; everything is a laminate beige, and there’s a lot of stuff around. Scientific apparatus and papers are piled on every surface. Insect specimens lose their colour under UV light, so all the windows have been screened with blinds – more beige – to help preserve them. It all adds to the sense of placelessness about the place; as though the researchers’ wing was installed some time ago with the thought of being temporary, but then stayed.
Polly’s office reeks of mothballs. Really reeks.
‘Excuse the stink,’ she says as we walk in, explaining that in decades past another means of preserving specimens was to use mothballs – and many of the display cases here are still full of them. She levers open a lid and runs a finger along the inside edge where a small slit has been cut and stuffed with tight white beads. ‘The smell gets into my hair and clothes,’ she says. ‘I get funny looks on the bus sometimes.’
She heaves a pile of paperwork from an office chair and gestures for us to dump our bags. ‘Ready? Let’s start with the archives.’
At the other end of the corridor a small door leads through to a museum antechamber. It must be at least three storeys tall, a small square room with a winding staircase and bookshelves reaching almost to the ceiling. As we climb, the books are fewer, the shelves lined instead with old or misplaced equipment. There are test tubes, an old measuring cylinder, a desk lamp with the plug missing. And a thick layer of dust over everything. At the top is a small trapdoor; we clamber into the attic.
The attic is vast. It shines with deep mahogany. Great rafters lift upwards at the ceiling, and the low sun comes almost horizontally through the skylights. Rows of wooden cabinets run the length of the space, each one locked and labelled. ‘Go ahead,’ Polly says, handing us a key each. ‘Take your time.’
Charlotte’s off. She has a list of wasp and hornet species she’s been trying to track down, and this is her chance. I move more slowly, and since I don’t know any of the Latin names I begin opening doors at random.
Inside each cabinet are a dozen glass-topped drawers. I pull them out and find butterflies, beetles, ants – each one held in place by a pin pushed through the abdomen. They’re arranged in rows, the pins an equal distance apart, with neatly handwritten labels underneath giving names and dates.
There must be thousands of insects up here; whole centuries of collecting and safekeeping. I imagine the team of researchers downstairs and all that work of classification happening. But – I realise – when I look at these specimens in their glass-topped cases I don’t think of order; and despite the archive’s promise of preservation, they don’t seem entirely fixed. There’s something less than precise about them; something more than category and type. They’re different sizes and shapes. Some have lost wings or feet. There are bodies curled in on themselves; others that are stretched out almost flat. Each one seems a little skew-whiff. They’re individuals, as well as species – and more fragile than I’d thought.
‘Sometimes these pins are all we have to go on,’ Polly says, peering over my shoulder as I pull open a tray of hawk moths. ‘When we’re dating a specimen, I mean. Handmade, and it’s likely to be pre-1800. Copper, and it’s an early machine-made pin. There aren’t many of those left. Copper reacts with fats inside the insect, and the bodies tend to explode in time.’
Here is a name I recognise. Apis mellifera, the western honeybee. I pull open the drawer and crouch down until my eyes are level with the glass top. Each one has been pushed halfway up the pin-shaft – from this angle they could be hovering in mid-air.
It’s strange to think that in a few weeks it’ll be a live colony I’ll be looking in on, crawling over each other and hatching or dying by the second. These creatures and those seem an impossible distance apart.
Glancing down the row of wooden cabinets, I wonder where boredom factors for the people who work here. Doesn’t all that business of naming things and putting them into boxes get a bit tedious after a while? Doesn’t she ever feel – trapped?
‘It must take ages,’ I say.
‘Yeah – bloody painstaking sometimes.’
I ask how long she’s been working here, and she closes her eyes a moment.
‘Since I left university,’ she says. ‘God, nearly twenty years. Time flies, doesn’t it? Blink, and suddenly there you are with a husband and a bloody mortgage and a kid all ready to start school.’
‘But you enjoy it? T
he work, I mean?’
‘Of course!’ And, as if to prove it, she lifts a corner of her blouse an inch; lowers the buckle of her jeans. ‘Shh,’ she grins, glancing over her shoulder as though there might be a museum guard about to appear and glare disapprovingly at us.
It’s a tattoo. Just below and to one side of her belly button. An ant. The outline blueing now, the edges softening into the skin as they do after a while or after a belly has stretched and then contracted again.
‘My first love,’ she grins. ‘Sad, isn’t it? Sixteen years old and I was crazy about ants.’
She tucks her blouse back in and tells me how she used to track bugs and beetles through the garden as a child, mapping out their nests. Once she even bought an old fish tank in a charity shop and filled it up with soil, thinking she could create a whole ecosystem – an insect kingdom – and keep it in her bedroom.
‘I spent days collecting bugs and beetles to put inside it. Ants too, of course. You should’ve seen the bites up my arms.’
‘And did it work?’
‘What do you think?! I fed them on kitchen scraps. It wasn’t good. The scraps went mouldy, the lid didn’t fit properly and most of them escaped. I didn’t really know what I was doing.’
I used to go hunting for insects too. I had a jam jar with breathing holes punctured in the lid. I found a caterpillar once that made a chrysalis and turned into a butterfly, but it didn’t do very well as a butterfly. Its wings were shrivelled up like crepe paper, and though I tipped it out onto the garden lawn it couldn’t actually fly anywhere at all. It crept over the grass, its antennae crooked, too sensitive and too flimsy for the world. I couldn’t decide which was worse; to return it to the jar or leave it where it was, in the hope its wings might unfurl a bit. Then the wind picked up, and the butterfly went with it.