A Honeybee Heart Has Five Openings

by Helen Jukes

  As we drive back to Oxford with a box of bees in the boot I try to find words for the feeling. ‘It was like – a warmth. Like there was a warmth coming from them. Have you ever felt that before?’ I ask, and I keep twisting around in my seat to check the back window because I’m half-expecting to see a colony of bees flying out.

  Luke isn’t into mysticism but he gives room to experience, and he likes to wonder about things. ‘Well, it would’ve been warm in the hive – the bees have to keep it at around thirty-five degrees for the brood to develop, and it’s cool today; you might have felt heat escaping?’ Which makes sense, but doesn’t fit with the feeling. It wasn’t coming from the hive itself, it was coming from the space around me. Perhaps warmth isn’t right; I can’t match my words to it.

  When we stop at a service station I open the boot and put my nose up to the metal grille where upside-down-bee feet are clicking and tapping. They’re beautiful, I want to say. I am amazed by them. I say it to Luke when we’re driving again, but my eyes are too wide, it sounds overblown and silly. That multitude of tiny legs, each one no more than a hair’s breadth. I can’t wait to get them home.

  Back in Oxford we put on our beekeeping suits, then take the box out and open it, and the bees lift up as we slip the wooden frames out and place them inside the waiting hive. The opened cavity seems impossibly vast after the tight-packed box, and the frames don’t fit; they’re too square and wide to hang widthways down the tapered sides, so instead we rest them like fallen dominoes along the base. I catch sight of the queen, then, before replacing the lid.

  That week it is suddenly cold again. So cold that people stop in corridors and on buses to mention it. ‘So strange,’ they say. ‘What’s happened to the spring?’

  I walk around the office with a lightness in my stomach, pausing at windows to peer out at the roiling clouds, and then it rains, a lot, and I worry the bees won’t get out to gather food – and what about that steady inside temperature they have to keep?

  I begin checking online weather reports every few hours, and they warn of freezing temperatures. So there I am, running out at night under a bitten moon, heaving blankets and string from inside the house and wrapping them around the barrel of the hive. I don’t open it up to look inside because I don’t want to take any more heat from them.

  Like this the hive is just as before, except now with those blankets around it, and the frames inside like an organ grafted. I watch it for a week. Not believing the bees will make it through, not knowing how they could – wondering at the shock and the cold and the violent displacement of arriving here, coming to this place.

  4

  Orientation

  April

  After those first few days of rain and cold the clouds begin to thin and then the sun bleeds through, and a flight path opens in the garden. Through the windows we catch glimpses of bees hovering around the hive; shuttling over the fence. Not many. But a few.

  Now they’ve arrived in the garden I wonder how on earth to begin keeping them here. There’s a terrible kind of fluidity about them with that open doorway and those passages back and forth. I realise I’m spending every second moment worrying they’ve died in there; every third worrying they’ll fly away. Enough, I tell myself. Go out and look.

  There’s a tree stump a few metres from the hive entrance and this is where I sit as the air gathers a warmth to it, waiting for a sign or some indication that they might have accepted this tin-topped, too-bright thing. And they do get busier. I watch the way they sweep down and pause, holding themselves over the threshold before disappearing inside. Later I move closer and glimpse pollen like globs of earwax clodding their thighs. The pollen is bright yellow or sometimes orange, and they’ll be collecting it to feed the young larvae hatching inside the frames. They might be drawing nectar, too, for making honey; but that’s a thing that you can’t see being carried, no matter how close you get.

  If there’s pollen going in, there must be something happening inside, I tell myself, but Luke said to leave them for a week so for the moment I’m only guessing. If all goes to plan they should start moving off Viktor’s nuc frames to find the bars at the top with the neat wax strips, and building their own comb freeform. Once laid, eggs take three weeks to develop into female workers (a little more for drones). Workers live for as little as six weeks in summer and are crucial to the functioning of the hive; the colony will become weak and will ultimately die off unless the supply is constantly replenished. So I should wait a while before removing the frames, Luke said, his thinking being that by the time the eggs in them have hatched there should be enough new brood in the fresh comb for the colony to sustain itself.

  There’s a rustle behind me, and Hannah’s face appears on the other side of the hedge. It’s in leaf now, but still sparse enough to see through if you push.

  ‘They’re in?’ she says. ‘Wow.’ She pulls at a branch so as to see better. ‘How many are there?’

  ‘I don’t know. A few thousand?’ I hope, eyeing the hive.

  ‘How are they doing?’

  ‘I’m not sure. We’re waiting to see if they’ll take to the hive – start treating it as home.’

  I look around at the garden, which seems itself to be toying with the idea of domesticity. Becky’s cleared the container beds and laid them with old patches of carpet to stop the weeds; she’s mowed the lawn, too, with a rickety old lawnmower she found in the shed. The grass is roughly shorn and patchy – it looks as though it’s had a rather difficult encounter with a hairdresser.

  Three more bees lift up from the hive and disappear over the shed roof.

  ‘Where d’you think they’re going?’ Hannah asks.

  ‘They’re probably scouting the area – looking for what’s in bloom. They fly up to three miles when they’re out foraging.’

  ‘I wonder what they’ll find.’

  I try imagining the hive from above. With that tin roof the sunlight bounces so that it could be water or a window facing up. It is one rectangle sitting within the larger rectangle of our garden, which itself appears as one in a long line of other rectangles following the terraced houses on our road, and other lines of other rectangles, spreading out from the city centre and into each other in a great web of neatly lined and edged and compartmentalised space.

  ‘Exciting,’ Hannah says.

  ‘Yeah.’ Except for that pool of nervous anticipation collecting in the bottom of my stomach, and the buzzing it is making in my head. I am longing to lift that lid.

  ‘A suspension of disbelief,’ Ellie says on the phone that night, when I call up in a bother to tell her I’m convinced they’ll either leave or die. ‘You have to stop stamping it down so as to make some space for it to happen.’

  My feelings are flying about all over the place. What’s got me in a tizz is not the fear of failure or even added responsibility, but the sudden rush of care. I’ve put a lot of thought into how this will work, what makes a good beekeeper – I hadn’t expected to want the bees; I hadn’t expected to feel so implicated.

  ‘Try not to get so caught up in things,’ Ellie tells me gently, after we’ve said goodbye and before she puts the phone down. I’m not getting caught up in things, I want to say. Or I wouldn’t be if they decided to stay. With the phone still crooked between neck and ear I open the curtains, peer out at the moonlit garden. A peculiar quality of moonlight: it stills things. It suspends them.

  All the movement and change of the last few years – the string of houses and jobs, the roving friendships – has put me in the habit of expecting things to disappear quickly once found, and in that state of almost permanent temporariness I’ve caught myself wondering a few times if it’s very reasonable to hope to keep anything at all. No wonder the arrival of a colony of bees is triggering my anxieties. Here I am pondering impermanence, having just tasked myself with the responsibility of keeping something – with sustaining it. A colony is not a book or an archivable object and you can’t hold it in a glass cabinet or o
n a shelf. It is live and shifting and if this one doesn’t take to our little rectangular space it’ll be out of here faster than you can say swarm.

  That glimpse of the bee under the museum microscope has been playing on my mind like an image caught and flickering. I’m falling asleep at night and suddenly there she is, springing into focus. Or there she isn’t. I want to find her again.

  A worker bee spends most of her life in the dark inside the hive, where there is little need for sight. She has five eyes. There are two compound eyes like giant cheeks on either side of her face, and three ocelli – light sensors – on top of her head (these are the spots like shining stones that I saw through the museum microscope).

  Charged with almost total responsibility for maintaining the healthy functioning of the colony, her life passes through a series of stages, and in each she has a specific role to perform within the hive. She is first a cleaner and then a nurse bee, raising young larvae inside the comb (a single larva will be checked by nurse bees over a thousand times a day). Later she becomes one of the queen’s attendants, and also takes a turn in keeping the hive at a steady temperature, fanning her wings to keep it cool and ventilated. The stages are pre-programmed to the extent that her bodily capacities change as she matures: at seven days her glands begin secreting wax and she becomes a comb-builder (or she becomes a comb-builder and she finds the wax secreting). New capacities emerge, forcing her on, out. She leaves the hive, first as a guard bee and then as a forager, only towards the end of her life.

  So when I sit out by the hive, these are grown bees I’m seeing, already familiar with the internal rhythms of the colony. I’m just back from work, and slowly coming to – my eyes still strained by screen-glare. A bee turns and lands on a dandelion beside my right toe; I bend down for a closer look.

  I can see her compound eyes but I can’t see her light sensors, which are lost in a fuzz of hair over her face. The fuzz of hair is how she senses which direction the wind is blowing, and her own flight speed. Ocelli don’t register images, only changes in light intensity, and thus where the sun is in the sky. Knowing the sun’s position tells her which way ‘up’ is, which brings stability in flight, and helps her to orient herself.

  She thrums her wings, and the dandelion bobs a little as she lifts. I twist, fidget, scratch my head. I wish I were able to learn ‘up’ and a bit of steadiness just by looking at what’s around me.

  I peer at the hive entrance and think of Aristotle and the other classical greats; all the things they guessed and gleaned about the life of the hive in the absence of windows or lids. I’ve been sitting and listening and waiting and watching, but don’t seem to have gleaned anything so far.

  She might have those sensors like an inbuilt compass directing her to use the light as a point for anchoring, but a honeybee’s relation to the sun itself is active and learned. In their book The Honey Bee, James and Carol Gould describe an experiment by the scientist Martin Lindauer, who raised a colony inside a closed room and then transferred the hive outside. The bees quickly became lost. A fixed light bulb proved an inadequate substitute for the sun, which moves – and without having learned to orient themselves in relation to a light source that rises in one place, dips in another, and sometimes disappears altogether, they were unable to navigate a landscape or re-find the hive, having departed from it.

  ‘I feel like a doughnut,’ my friend Kath says, mashing a poppadom. It’s Friday night and we’re sitting in the window of a greasy curry house behind the train station. ‘I’m working four jobs and they’re great but sometimes I feel like all I’m doing is moving between them, running round and round, I am so busy, and in the middle is just a hole. That’s when I feel like a doughnut.’

  She sprinkles a plate of curry and rice with the poppadom crumbs and begins mixing them in with her fingers.

  I’m about to say that I don’t know if the doughnut is a cushioning or the stuff of life itself, but then the waitress arrives with a water jug and plastic cups and a cloth that she fusses the table with. She’s wearing a purple baseball cap and a matching polo shirt, and when she grins a gold tooth flashes. She’s come from Poland, she says. She wants to practise her English, but working here she ends up speaking Hindi all the time. She rolls her eyes, flicks the cloth, and disappears back into the kitchen.

  The poppadom crumbs have gone soggy from all the mixing. ‘There’s a lot of loneliness around, I know that much,’ Kath says, forming a small ball of coagulated goo between finger and thumb and popping it in her mouth. ‘A lot of instability. Sometimes I’m not even sure if it’s about trying to get anywhere any more; I’m not sure where I’m coming from. I run around in circles, chase after things. I start thinking I need to socialise more. I socialise more, and it just makes me tired.’ She sighs, and laughs. ‘I need a holiday. I can’t afford a holiday. I fucking want one.’

  There must be other ways of doing things, I think to myself. Some patterns beyond the ones we’re used to seeing. Outside the window a busy junction streams and plugs with the last of the rush-hour traffic. The sun has dipped down behind the office blocks opposite, and the blue is draining from the sky. I’m remembering that original meaning of home as a place of sense-making, of world-building; a place from which journeys are made.

  The waitress reappears at the table next to us, balancing plates from hand to wrist to the inside of her elbow. ‘Hot!’ she says as the plates go down. ‘Hot, hot!’ The plates are steaming.

  ‘Anyway,’ Kath’s saying. ‘How are you?’ And by way of a reply I do a bit of complaining too, about work and stress and feeling pushed. ‘You’re too sensitive,’ she says, and wipes her nose, ‘that’s your trouble.’ Which doesn’t help because I’ve been trying to adjust by toughening up; but perhaps I am not as self-sealed as I’d thought.

  Kath reaches for the water jug. ‘Anyway,’ she says. ‘How are the bees? They’ve arrived?’

  ‘Yeah, they’re okay. I think. I mean – I haven’t opened the hive yet.’

  ‘Funny, me going on about being so busy,’ she says. ‘What about the bees? Now there’s an example of a tough work ethic.’

  I drain the water from my plastic cup and sit up in my chair. Now here is a thing I can speak about. ‘Well,’ I say, ‘you’d think. But actually bees spend about eight hours a day being pretty aimless. Just wandering around in the hive, not doing anything very much.’

  ‘Ha! And I had them down as a model of productivity.’

  ‘Well, they’re that too. But the wandering around is all part of it. They know to preserve energy for when they need it.’

  Behind her head, beyond the window, the car headlights blink. On this side of the road there’s a row of shops, and you can watch how the light in people’s faces changes as they walk. A harsh white outside the brightly lit kebab shop next door, then a soft orange glow at the bar a few doors down, and a flickering green or pink and blue outside the newsagents on the corner where Lottery and Phone top-up signs flash through the glass.

  ‘So, when will you do it?’

  ‘Do what?’

  ‘Open the hive.’

  ‘Oh – at the weekend. Tomorrow. If the weather holds.’

  The next day is Saturday and the weather does hold. It is one week since the bees arrived, and time to make the first hive inspection. Most beekeepers will inspect their hives once a week in summer. You lift the lid and take the bars out one by one, keeping an eye out for signs of disease, checking for brood and pollen stores, and that the queen is alive and well. This first inspection of my hive is a bit simpler than all that: I just want to check that the bees have moved off Viktor’s nuc frames and begun building their own comb from the top bars.

  I pull on my suit. Big boots, thick gloves, a gauze mask pulled down over my face. There’s a hive tool in my pocket like a miniature crowbar painted yellow, ready to split things apart. I hear birds and the traffic, a guy spitting and shouting in the street, the sound of my own head brushing the inside of my hood. No sudden movem
ents, I know that – but it’s not easy to walk inside this suit. I shuffle closer, not up to the entrance this time but at the side, in the middle, where I stand with both hands on the roof.

  ‘I’m going to lift the lid,’ I tell them. I say it quietly, so as not to surprise them. ‘I hope you’ll stay,’ whispering this, so that even if there were someone listening through the hedge or over the fence they wouldn’t hear me.

  I squat a bit, to get some leverage. Those mismatched nuc frames are in the middle, at the base, about level with my navel. I am standing with my arms outstretched; I clench my hands and lift.

  No sound. Here is the row of top bars, in the place where the roof was. I adjust the gauze, away from my face. Begin at one end, teasing a bar up, out, feeling for a weight, something stuck or building underneath. It’s empty. Clean as it was when it first arrived here, except for the neat wax strip that I melted on. Next one: nothing. I move through the bars, one by one, lifting, tensing for the feeling of something added. I reach the other end of the hive; the bars haven’t been touched.

  Where are they?

  Step back.

  I check the entrance; see a few bees drifting and passing. Bolder now, with worry, I remove four bars at once, making a hole big enough to peer inside. And then I see them. Crammed into the nuc frames like a tight and concentrated knot sitting fixedly at the bottom. Except for a few foragers shuttling back and forth from the entrance there is no sign of any movement out; nothing to suggest they’ve begun exploring the waiting cavity, let alone accepted it as a home. In fact, as I take the hive tool and run it along the walls, I find propolis gumming the nuc frames; the bees have welded them further in. I close the gap, replace the roof. Retreat to my own doorway.