by Helen Jukes
When we get back to Polly’s office it is after six o’clock, and the desks are still humming with computers. She finds two microscopes and sets them on a table. Next she brings out a tray of specimens. ‘These are spares,’ she says. ‘Duplicates, or species that aren’t important to research. We keep them for visiting groups.’ She puts her elbows on the desk, pushes the tray towards us. ‘Take your pick.’
Charlotte finds one right away – ‘A jewel wasp!’ – but I’m still picking my way through the spread of inert creatures when hers is already under a microscope.
‘How about this one?’ Polly says, putting on her glasses and picking out a dark and curled-up creature. ‘A honeybee. What you were looking for, right? This one’s a female.’
She (the bee) seems tiny. But perhaps this is because of the huge beetles sitting to either side of her, who have messed around with my sense of scale. Polly switches on my microscope and the bulb beams a bright white. ‘Put your eyes here,’ she says, and I do, but my eyes must be too far apart because they don’t fit the lenses properly. I try pushing the eye-pieces closer together, but then they pinch my nose. The microscope is heavy, and surprisingly bulky; I’m uncomfortable, and I don’t see anything at first.
‘Have a play around,’ Polly says. ‘You’ll get the hang of it.’
Charlotte is well-versed in all this, and chats easily with Polly as she fiddles with the dial on her microscope.
‘Have you travelled much?’
‘I did a research trip to a rainforest in Bolivia,’ Polly says. ‘We were looking for wolf spiders; you see them best at night. Sweep a torch over the path, and you realise there are hundreds of green eyes looking at you.’
I seem to be looking at a shadow. Now and then I catch a rim of light in the lens but then it disappears, and everything feels back to front because I keep catching my own eyelashes in the glass.
‘Scorpions, too,’ Polly’s saying. ‘They glow a bright blue-green under ultraviolet light. With a UV torch you begin spotting them all over the path.’
I begin again, looking with just one eye and then both together. I catch a blur of something, and then it’s gone.
‘Actually, that was a very recent discovery,’ Polly says. ‘Until a few years ago, scientists couldn’t understand why scorpions had evolved to light up under moonlight. I mean – they go hunting at night. And they’re vulnerable to predators, too. Owls, rodents, things like that. So it seemed counterintuitive. Why become more visible, just at the point that you most need to work undercover?’
I seem to be struggling unnecessarily. I should slow down, I think. I try moving the bee, and not the lens, and catch a glimpse of that blur again. Keep my eyes fixed on that position; begin moving the dial very slowly towards me. I am turning it by increments so small that I am not sure I am really turning it at all.
‘Three or four years ago they worked it out,’ Polly’s saying. ‘Scorpions are extremely near-sighted. They struggle to make out anything at a distance. So they’ve learned a kind of trick, I suppose you could say. They use their bodies as light-collectors, taking in the dim light from the moon and stars and converting it into that bright blue-green that they can see. By sensing how brightly their own body is glowing, they can tell how much light there is in the surrounding environment. Like that they can find areas of shelter, even at night. They use their body as a gauge for what’s around them.’
Suddenly the blur springs into focus, and my breath catches as I see her.
For a moment I think there’s been a swap, she is so different close up. The plates on her back are black and tarnished and they glint like a pool of petrol. They’re punctured with tiny holes. Her abdomen is furred, but the fur is matted and mangy-looking, like a dog that’s been out in the rain. I look at her and think of metal and petrol pumps and the weather; not of bodies, or of bees. And then she dips back into dark.
I look up; adjust my seat. There’s a message board on the wall still pinned with photos from the staff Christmas party, and a reminder about how to retrieve articles of lost property. Polly is picking through the tray of duplicates and discarded specimens. ‘Some scientists even think scorpions have clusters of nerves spread throughout their body, which can register UV rays,’ she says. ‘If that’s true, it would mean they’re not just watching themselves glow; the body itself becomes a giant eye – it begins doing the seeing.’
I look down again, and see her.
On top of her head are three raised spots like black and shining stones, the kind you find on the bottom of a riverbed and take home for safekeeping, which dull as they dry out.
My mind is spinning out on associations. I try keeping it in, coming back to what I’m really seeing. My mind spins out again.
It’s dark outside by the time we leave, and the moon is almost full. On the cycle home I half-close my eyes until I can’t make out shapes, just the blur of road and buildings and the feeling of air passing. I am trying to sense my own luminescence. It is not really the kind of thing that a rational and dispassionate observer would do, and I nearly crash into a lamppost.
‘Steady on!’ A man on a bike behind me slows as he approaches. ‘You okay?’ I nod and try to look responsible and roadworthy, and he smiles and rides away. There are fluorescent strips around his ankles and on the back of his coat, and they light up each time a car passes.
I cycle the rest of the way slowly and with both eyes open, thinking about the entomology department with the screened-off rooms and about Polly with the ant tattoo and all that knowledge neatly categorised inside her. I went because I wanted to know what it’s like to bring a scientific gaze to a creature as curious as a honeybee, but I’m not sure a purely scientific gaze is what I found. Polly was passionate, and mixed up in her work. She was a scientist and also a mum and a wife, and once she was a child who collected a fish tank full of ants so they’d be right beside her when she woke. I’m becoming less and less convinced that it’s possible to be a purely rational and detached observer of the natural world – or if that’s all we’d want to go on, if it were.
A week later it is still too cold to collect the bees. If a swarm has passed, it hasn’t opted to stop here, and the hive sitting out by the far fence begins to seem to me like a half-finished gesture – a hand opened, unanswered, and left unretracted.
I remember Luke’s approach of letting the weather decide, and try to keep my patience. Still, I can’t help wondering if there’s something more I should be doing to prepare myself; if there aren’t rites of passage to becoming a beekeeper, things that have to happen before a hive – or indeed its keeper – can host a colony of bees.
Rained in, I begin reading about old rituals and traditions employed to attract wild colonies, or at least lend a bit of distraction from the wait. Across the ancient Mediterranean there was widespread belief in the practice of bugonia, the spontaneous generation of a swarm from an ox- or bull-carcass. The Geoponica, a Roman compendium of agricultural lore, lays out detailed instructions for this task:
The beekeeper should find a building ten cubits high and the same in breadth, with equal dimensions on all sides. There should be one doorway and four windows, one in each wall. Next he should drive an ox into it, thirty months old, well-fleshed, rather fat, then call a number of young men and have them beat it with bludgeons until they kill it.
Every aperture of the animal should then be stopped with cloth, including the eyes, before the door and every window of the building are closed and sealed with clay, so that no air or wind or anything else can get in or ventilate it. After three weeks all entrances should be opened, and light allowed to pass through until the room and all substances inside it are sufficiently aerated; then the door and all four windows should be closed and sealed again with clay.
After eleven days the room should be opened up, whereupon it will be full of bees swarming on each other . . . and nothing left of the ox except the horns, the bones and the hair.
I gaze around at my own room, imagi
ning those windows and that door opening, the walls inside all thrust with light; wondering if bees really were found clustering, or if they were just flies feeding on a decaying carcass.
And then what am I looking at? I am looking at a bee.
Alive, and crawling very slowly across the carpet.
If you were to take out a knife and open her body up, you probably wouldn’t recognise very much. A honeybee has an open circulatory system; the blood isn’t confined to arteries and veins but instead fills the body cavity, surrounding her organs in the form of that yellowish liquid you’d see oozing if you poked.
But now look at her heart. A honeybee heart has five openings, each with a one-way valve; not something the bludgeoners or anyone else in ancient Rome could have known, in the absence of microscopes. Yet when I think of it now, when I picture a bee with her body opened, that account of the room with the four windows and door appears suddenly as an image of her heart. As though the room were embodying the bee, even bodying her forth; as though the wild, amorphous mass of a colony might be summoned when called by the bee’s very physical form.
The real bee is still journeying her way across the carpet. I shepherd her onto a piece of paper, open the window and nudge her out. She dives, recovers herself, and disappears in the direction of the traffic.
The glass in the window is thin and the frame has seen better days; even when it’s closed I can sometimes feel a draught in here. But there must also be a door or a window open elsewhere in the house because here are goose pimples on my arms, the tips of my hairs bristling, my heart quickened and my skin suddenly sensitive to the touch. Bizarre, I think, and open the window again, so as to give it a good slam closed.
And then just like that – before I can think any more about rites of passage or sealed-off rooms or what to do, how to be really ready for the bees – the weather makes a snap decision. Spring arrives, over the course of a weekend.
On a lunch break I find a quiet side street and sit down on a doorstep, fishing in my bag for the crumpled Christmas card with the pencilled honeybee on the front, my friends’ names written on the back. I pull it out and smooth the crumples free. Beside their names is the address of a farm near Banbury, and a number to call come spring.
The gift was Becky and Jack’s idea, and they’d heard about the farm through friends. It’s run by a couple named Lucy and Viktor, who breed honeybees and sell them, and they sell honey too. Over the winter, at Becky’s request, they’ve been keeping a colony aside for me; and when Lucy’s picked up the phone and worked out who I am, she says they normally open for collections on a Saturday but in fact it’s okay to come anytime, as long as this good weather holds.
So I call Luke to tell him, and he says how about this weekend; he can come down from London and we can drive out and collect them together. We make some arrangements, and sign off. Suddenly it is all really about to happen.
On Sunday I meet Luke at the train station and we pick up a rental car.
‘I’ve been dreaming about hornets all week,’ I tell him, fiddling around with the satnav. ‘And bees. I keep dreaming they’re in the house, or in a box, and I’m looking around for my beekeeping suit, but I can never find it.’
Out of the city we pass through villages of neat thatched cottages, their windows squat and low and portioned out into dozens of diamond panes. A 4 × 4 in every driveway, and not a creature in sight.
‘You want settled?’ Luke says, because I’ve just been telling him about my seemingly ill-fated attempt at settling down in Oxford. ‘This is settled.’ He gestures to a hedge that’s been topiaried into a peacock. ‘I think I’d feel trapped.’
Beyond the villages are country lanes surrounded by acres of fields. It’s all going well until the satnav fails, then we’re on our own in an ocean of rolling green. Luke pulls up in a lay-by as I reach into the back for the hand-drawn maps and scribbled instructions we brought with us as backup.
‘We’re supposed to follow the signs,’ I tell him. ‘Lucy said follow the signs.’ We follow the road until we’ve definitely gone too far, and then we follow it back again. Everywhere is a haze of field and sky. At one point we think we see a hive ahead, but it’s only a fencepost.
The honey farm is a small island of concrete and corrugated iron in the undulating green, and we reach it only after Viktor has driven out to come and find us. There’s a deeply grained chestnut tree beside the gate, its tips just beginning to find their leaves, and a row of weather-warped beehives at its base.
‘We didn’t see any signs,’ I say to Viktor as we clamber out of the car. ‘Lucy said follow the signs.’
He shrugs. ‘There are only signs on a Saturday.’
The yard is scattered with pieces of farm equipment in various states of disrepair. There’s a barn and a row of crumbling outbuildings with their windows painted over so that I can’t tell if they’re in use.
‘Where I keep my honey,’ Viktor says, seeing me eyeing a large shipping container. He points to a sturdy padlock on the front: ‘For the thiefs.’ He has a Ukrainian accent so thick that I wonder if he’s putting it on. He’s wearing a full-body beekeeping suit with the gauze hood flipped back over his reddened face, and the front unzipped to the waist. It’s thickly spattered with wax and pollen, which gives the impression of some kind of slaughter having taken place, or of an oversized playsuit. ‘So, who’s the beekeeper?’ he asks, looking us up and down.
I point to Luke, and Luke points to me. ‘She is.’
Viktor turns and disappears into a shed.
‘You want tea?’
The inside of the shed is piled high with pieces of hive, and it stinks of wax and wood. There’s a desk at one end where a man in glasses and a boiler suit raises his hand to us, and a set of shelves with a kettle and a microwave at the other.
‘Honey?’ Viktor pours tea into brown-rimmed mugs and drops a large spoonful in each.
‘How long have you been keeping bees?’ I ask, looking up at a poster of a shiny motorbike leaping over a mountain ridge, and wondering where Lucy is.
‘Since I was birthed.’
‘His parents were bees, weren’t they, Viktor?’ shouts the guy in the corner.
‘Shh,’ Viktor says, and smiles to himself. ‘Don’t tell my secrets.’ And then he gestures to me.
‘Come – we get your bees.’
Behind the shipping container the ground is rough and bare and there’s something in the air that catches in my throat. Perhaps it’s pollen drifting over from the fields.
There’s a wooden box between us, closed. We’re both cocooned in suits now, with the hoods up and the gauze masks down so that I can’t see Viktor’s face any more. All around us more boxes are arranged in neat rows, stained rough reds and greens and looking a bit like improvised towers in a miniature and makeshift city. These are nucs. A nucleus is a small colony created from a larger one, containing a queen and a body of workers along with a series of wooden frames filled with eggs and larvae and honey stores. Before I take this one away with me, Viktor first wants to open it up to show that it’s healthy inside.
‘You’re not wearing gloves. Won’t you get stung?’ His hands are red and swollen like his face was when I could see it.
‘Me and bees; we same blood.’
As he takes a hive tool from his pocket and prises the lid open there’s a sound like a thousand nerves tightening and stirring. He moves fast, without stopping. Takes a few frames out and empties them by jerking, so that the bees change from clinging solid to thick dark liquid pouring back down into the hive.
‘Queen.’ He points. ‘See?’ I spot her through the throng, bigger than the others, and shrinking against the comb. The comb is stuffed with unhatched eggs and I see pollen too. My bees, I tell myself, testing how it sounds. This is the colony I’ll keep, I try. The one I’ll get to know.
But we’re disturbing them. Dark points of agitation fly up, away from the hive or straight for us, and my gauze mask thuds as one hits and ho
lds, buzzing. I can’t see them separately any more; can only feel the size of the disturbance spreading, a hot low pulsing that swells until it surrounds us, and then we are inside it, and the air is alive with them. I’d forgotten this. Had forgotten the foreignness, the formlessness, the furious buzzing that comes sometimes as you lift the lid, and their rising that is more like heat or sound than movement.
Viktor’s finished; he replaces the lid and shuts the entrance closed. Except for a slim metal ventilation grille at the top, the box is sealed. The hum quietens, cools, stills. There is a lot of light around and something is ringing, like when you’ve gone underwater and come back up and everything seems louder than before.
‘Here,’ Viktor says, lifting the box and gesturing me closer, ‘take it.’
Two crows heave from a tree and a scatter of deadwood falls. Somewhere a generator whirrs. A gate swings open on crusted hinges and clangs, repeatedly, against a metal fence post.
The box is heavy. Heavier than I thought. My arms prickle at the thought of all those bodies freshly upturned and moving around inside. Checking themselves, checking each other, sensing walls. I feel a bit light-headed. I turn, blinking, to see Luke waiting by the car with the boot open. He’s hopping lightly from one foot to the other, impatient now to go.
We put the box in and pad it with coats to keep it from bumping around, and we get in the front. ‘Good,’ says Viktor, nodding, and gives a wave as we inch down the rutted track. Then he turns and disappears back into his shed.
A few weeks later Lucy calls to ask how the bees are, and we end up chatting about the farm and about how Viktor came to be a beekeeper in the first place. No one in her family kept bees, she tells me, but his whole family were beekeepers; he grew up in the Ukraine during Soviet times, when you were supposed to have just one hive per household, but Viktor’s dad had over twenty hidden in a nearby forest. Because of this the family were quite well off, and Viktor was able to go away to university in Kiev, living high up in a block of flats, which was okay at first, but after a while he got homesick and he missed the bees, so he bought a hive of his own and kept it on his apartment balcony. This helped a bit but not enough, and eventually he gave up his studies and went back to the family home. He’s been a beekeeper ever since. When winter comes each year he is glad to have a rest, but by January and February he gets sad and listless and struggles to put his mind to anything, until the spring comes when he can be out with the bees again.