by Helen Jukes
‘Nothing?’ Luke says, when I call him.
‘Nothing.’ I watch the hive with half an eye as a bee lifts up and out of it.
‘Nothing at all?’
‘Nothing at all.’
‘Give it another week,’ Luke says. ‘If they haven’t started building comb by then, you might have to take drastic action.’
I do as he says. It is warm enough in the mornings now to sit on the tree stump before work, and I begin taking a cup of tea out in my pyjamas to watch the first flights tipping and leaving. The day’s journeys begin when the sun reaches the hive mouth, and they end when it lowers behind the fence.
I don’t lift the lid; and I try to leave my disbelief suspended. When the mug is empty or the tea is cold I go back inside, get dressed, get to work, return to my own frames and schedules. I try not to get caught up. I run through to-do lists, answer emails, attend meetings. But I am thinking about them. The thought is like a breath taken in and held somewhere behind and underneath my ribs. My insides are light like the inside of the hive is light; I’m waiting and willing them to stay.
When I get home I go outside again, try to keep sight of one bee long enough to know her. I can’t. If I could, I might ask her why it is that she won’t move off those frames.
Then one day an email arrives from Jack with a picture attachment. I’m sitting at my desk at work, and really this is not the time to open it. There’s a lot to do, and I don’t need any more distractions. Closer than a microscope! is the subject heading.
And it is. Zoomed up, in special, high-definition focus that makes everything appear smooth, I find her face. I glance up, around the room, to see if anyone’s noticed that I have stopped looking at my to-do list, and begun looking instead at her face.
Here are two raised mounds, in the place where our eyes would be. Softly furred, and hard like the welts on the heads of young cattle at the point where their horns will be. In place of cheeks are her compound eyes, round and so huge that her vision extends to almost a complete sphere.
Her compound eye is a convex surface of thousands of individual lenses, each one independent of the next and angled slightly differently to cover a unique part of the visual field. There is no lens at the back, as with a human eye, which works to gather an image from the information coming in and so form our perception of a continuous visual field. What she sees is a patchwork pieced together from those thousands of angled views. Highly pixelated, we’d call it. A low-resolution image. If a bee were to take an eye test, by our standards she’d be classified as almost blind.
I do a search on Google Earth for our postcode, wanting to get a sense of what the bees might be seeing as they fly up from our terraced plot. The web page is slow to load and it’s difficult at first to make out an image on the screen. But this, right now – as the picture is still assembling itself – must be something close to what she sees. Grainy blocks fuzz and form across the screen.
Objects on the ground are visible only if they’re big, or she’s close. Tree, house, chimney pot. The landscape becomes distinguishable, and so also navigable, by a series of features: things that rise up out of the blur and prove large and immovable enough to mark a flight path. Like this, it seems impossible that she can navigate at all – but then she can also see things that we can’t. Like polarised light, which forms a particular patterning across the sky in relation to the sun, such that, by watching for these patterns, she can tell where the sun is even when it’s lost behind clouds. Or like ultraviolet light. I find pictures online of flowers photographed under a UV bulb and see marks on them in places I hadn’t noticed before; colours that contrast where I’d thought them uniform. There are lines like arrows directing bees to their centre.
Later, as I step out of the office onto the street outside, I look up; and for a moment I see patterns forming themselves. Look down; and imagine markers, and signs. The route home takes me down pavements and across roads. There is a road sign every few metres; a traffic light at every turn. It is all a long way from the experience of a honeybee, who adapts to her environment rather than writing over it, and whose systems for navigation are stowed inside her.
The next day I’m outside the Turkish shop on my road when a man with a streak of grey in his hair and a swollen lip reaches across me for a courgette. I’ve been sorting through tomatoes, searching for a bunch with the vine still holding them. I like it when the vine still holds them. Sometimes I bake them in a bunch like this, and then the vine goes dry and crispy like a piece of twisted seaweed. I’m not sure if you’re supposed to eat the twisted seaweed, but anyway I do.
‘Bee sting,’ he says, seeing me eyeing the lip.
‘Oh,’ I say, and wince. Swollen lips always feel bigger than they look, and this swollen lip looks big.
‘Do you have a hive?’
‘Five,’ he says, drawing himself up. ‘Out of the city.’
‘You weren’t wearing a suit?’
‘I was wearing a suit. But I wanted a closer look. Held the frame right up to my face, and one got me through the mask.’ I push the skin of a tomato with the tip of one finger and watch tiny wrinkles form over the flesh. I can’t help envying him his frames, all lined up and laid out ready. None of the uncomfortable mismatching happening inside my own hive, or that empty vastness of the waiting cavity.
‘I have a hive too,’ I say, pointing up the road.
‘City’s a good place for them.’ He nods approvingly. ‘Plenty of biodiversity, see. Not like where I live. Oilseed rape – that’s all I get. It comes, and then it goes, and then there’s nothing. Huge fields; no hedgerows. Pffllp.’ His mouth makes a sound like a balloon deflating. ‘I wouldn’t like to be a bee now.’
Underneath the tomatoes are trays of oranges and lemons and one of scotch-bonnet chilli peppers, making bright blocks of colour against the grey of the pavement.
He’s right about the rural landscapes. Over the last century there’s been a massive drive in the UK towards intensive agriculture; farming practices that inadvertently supported pollinating insects – the hedgerows, fallow fields, and even the alfalfa crops which provided fuel for the horses that pulled the ploughs, while also providing forage for bees – have been replaced by systems of large-scale monoculture and agrochemical use that are harmful to them.
‘Habitat fragmentation,’ the lip is saying, picking a cucumber up and waggling it at me. ‘I went to a talk about it. Some guy from the university, don’t remember his name. Pollinator habitats are getting shrunk into pockets. Like islands,’ he says, and puts the cucumber back. ‘And the thing is,’ he adds, looking down at the tray of them, ‘the thing is, the islands don’t join up; the bees can’t move between them.’
‘Hey man, are you gonna buy those vegetables or just stand around playing with them?’ The shop assistant leans over the counter, then baulks at the sight of the lip. ‘Oooh.’ He winces, and makes a face. ‘Naaasty.’
As we pick up our baskets and take them over to the till I see this place from above, again. Roofs and roads. Those fenced rectangular gardens with the different-coloured flowers inside them, and the pockets of wild space between: a corner at the top of the recreation ground near our house that’s begun filling with wildflowers, and the crack between two walls where last week I spotted a sprig of buddleia. A patch of land beside the golf course where Becky found wild raspberries growing, and a verge spilling weeds beside the train tracks. I see all this, the shoots of weed and wildflower mixed in among neatly laid areas of cultivation, and then I see the flight paths looping and linking them.
‘You okay?’ asks the lip, seeing me wobble slightly.
‘Yeah.’ I blink and shake my head. ‘Bit dizzy.’
The shop assistant is half-hidden behind packets of chewing gum and KitKats. He’s weighing out vegetables, and in no kind of hurry about it. The woman in front is buying yams. Her kid hides and holds between the folds of her skirt, watching.
‘So you’re pretty new to beekeeping, are you?’
says the lip. ‘How’s it going so far?’
‘I – they’re still adjusting, I think.’
‘Mm.’ The lip stretches – I think this means he’s smiling. ‘I imagine you’re still adjusting, too. Takes a bit of getting used to, walking out your back door and finding a bloody beehive sitting there.’
I grin. ‘Yeah, maybe.’ Perhaps keeping a wildness close doesn’t always come very naturally at first.
The inside of the hive smells tart and tough like a hamster’s cage, and there’s another scent too, underneath the first, something sweet and soft and seething.
Saturday has come around again, and I’m making my second inspection. This time as I lift the bars up one by one something sticks.
I peer inside. Here is a lip of fresh comb running down from the top, but it’s odd and misshapen – it twists awkwardly in the middle and then fuses to a nuc frame at the base. My breath catches and my chest chills; I’ve never seen anything like it. I close the hive up quickly, come away again.
‘Take them out,’ Luke says decisively when I phone him.
‘The nuc frames? All of them?’
‘All of them. You’re going to have to leave the bees to go it alone. Either they’ll take to the hive or they won’t, but you’re going to end up in a mess if you carry on like this.’
A colony of bees will always seek to build along a single orientation. Since the top bars are rested widthways across my hive, when the bees began building they met with confusion halfway down as they reached the frames sitting lengthwise along the base. A mess indeed.
‘Just make sure you get the queen in. If she’s there, the rest will follow.’
I pull my suit back on, zip up. And as I lift the lid this time my knees are light with a feeling like thieving. I prise the frames apart and there’s buzzing as I lift one, take a breath and shake it like I saw Viktor do in one clean movement, except that my movement is not clean and the bees don’t pour like a liquid, they just buzz and fly up and some of them fall back into the hive, but I don’t know if the queen is among them. This is more like ripping than keeping, I think, as I pull the next frame out and shake it. Everywhere I look now, I am looking through a fuzz of them. I don’t care, I think. Let them leave; I don’t want any more of this. I dump the last frame by the foot of the hive and am about to close it up, get away from here, when I remember one last thing Luke said to do. I take a kitchen knife from my pocket, find the bar with the freshly built comb and slice it at the point where the twist begins; pull the warped part free.
‘It’s done.’ I’m breathless and shaky when I phone him again, and my voice has a faraway sound to it.
‘Good. And the queen’s in?’
‘I – think so.’ There are still clouds of bees fretting the entrance.
‘Good. Okay. And now you wait.’
Later and without gloves on I take the piece of torn-off comb and hold it in my palm. It is so light that I can’t feel the weight of it. If I pinched one cell between two fingers I could crush it. I don’t, but it unnerves me. I put it on the shelf in my bedroom beside the bottle of hornet whisky and there it stays as I move around, distracting me with its thinness and unfilledness and with the suddenness of its form.
That week I avoid the hive. I am busy. Out a lot, and when I’m not I steer clear of the windows. If I do catch a glimpse of the hive sometimes I see bees circling the entrance, but not many. Not enough.
Still, I can’t avoid thinking about it. That big boat-like space with all the frames removed – will there be a reorientation happening inside? Will the bees move up, around, begin building again from the top? Or will they give up, go off, search out somewhere else?
We’re hanging washing on the line one afternoon when I can’t help but notice the lack of them. The sun is shining, and they should be out – but I see no sign of them.
‘Have you seen the bees today?’
‘No,’ Becky’s voice comes through a bedsheet. ‘Not at all. Do you think something’s happened?’
Well, I think. They’ve left. That’s what’s happened.
But a little while later we see a few.
‘Funny, isn’t it?’ Becky says, standing outside the back door as I cook dinner in the kitchen. ‘You think they’ve disappeared, and then there they are again.’
But I’ll wait out the week before opening the hive up, since at least not doing anything is a thing that I can do.
I am getting way too caught up. This much worry is out of proportion with a colony of bees that has just arrived in the garden; I need to get a grip. I retreat inside, defer to the dictionary. At least the dictionary is around to help make sense of things.
In the online Oxford English Dictionary the entry for the verb keep is long, and its etymology is curious. While over time keep came to imply (with increasing intensity) an effort to retain, its earliest meaning is likely to have been something closer to lay hold, with the hands, and hence with attention; to keep an eye on, to watch.
I shift my laptop over to the opposite knee; read through a second time. And then I take a breath. To think that keeping may originally have been associated not with locking down but with taking care, and that care was about eyes and hands and the very particular kind of attention that flowed from them. Well, that shifts my focus.
Since my friend Ellie works at the OED and knows a lot about words and their meanings, I write her an email to check I’ve understood it right, but she replies to say that I should take the definition I’ve read with a heavy pinch of salt. The whole dictionary is in the process of revision and keep hasn’t yet been updated, which means it was last worked on more than a hundred years ago – in 1901, to be precise. So basically the entry you are looking at is a piece of nineteenth-century scholarship which should be treated like anything of that age, she writes. Venerable but fallible! But keep does seem to have a very wide spectrum of meanings, she adds, and goes on to make a list of all the things it makes her think of.
Here are the words on her list: observation, care, nurture, interception, seizure, absorption, maintenance, preservation, retention, detention, restraint.
I wonder what would happen if everyone in the whole world were to make a list like this. Sometimes our lists would overlap but probably there would also be a lot of differences, and each one would tell a story about that person’s own experience of keeping and holding and being held. I write back to Ellie to ask when will keep be updated and she says she doesn’t know, that hasn’t been decided yet.
Perhaps it’s no surprise that I’ve been feeling uncertain about how to keep if even the dictionary isn’t sure of a right meaning for it. But then isn’t our whole mode of keeping – our capacity to keep – undergoing a major crisis of confidence at the moment? Climates are changing; colonies are dying. Our ability to sustain environments of all kinds is being called into question, and we’re having to face our own dependency on those ecosystems we’ve seemed intent on destroying in our bid to control and manage nature.
Quite apart from the dictionary update, taking pause to rethink and revise what we mean by keeping and how we go about it may be badly needed.
I can’t open the hive the following Saturday because a group of friends are visiting. When they arrive they say how are the bees and I say I don’t know, I took everything out from the middle of them, there’s nothing holding them there now.
We pull out the table for lunch in the back room and gather enough chairs to seat everyone. While I’m in the kitchen fetching plates and forks, they pop out to the garden and come back telling me the bees are busy, it’s looking good, there’s definitely something happening.
The table fills with dishes. It is too small to hold everything, and we are too many to fit around it. Our elbows bump, and so do our plates and forks. We speak through mouthfuls, over each other, across the table. It is the kind of bubbly and excited chatter that comes after you’ve gone a while without seeing each other. For the most part I bubble along as much as anyone, but a few times
my attention drifts. I catch myself glancing out at the hive, scanning the air for movement or some sign of life.
‘They’re going to be fine,’ Dulcie says, seeing me looking. She has a dark bowl-cut and pink cheeks and when she feels strongly about something she gets so full of energy and conviction about it that usually, whatever it is, I end up believing her. ‘The best advice I got before Corinne was born was never to rush her,’ she says, bringing her face close and stretching her eyes wide so that I have to stop looking out at the hive, and see her face. ‘Let her settle into the world at her own speed. Relax,’ she tells me. ‘Give them time.’ It is easy to believe what someone is saying when you know that they are able to believe themselves.
Later I go out and see for myself. When you sit right beside the hive the bees sweep close to your cheek, but if you’re quiet you aren’t a bother to them, and this is how Laurence is sitting, with his legs crossed by the concrete slab, while everyone else is inside getting pudding.
‘Is it okay?’ He looks up as I join him. Laurence has blond hair and broad shoulders and he’s sitting right by the entrance in shorts and a T-shirt, as the bees with their stings and shining-pebble eyes fly a few inches from his face.
‘To sit here? Course.’
He has no more understanding of bees than the next person, and he’s never been this close to a hive before, but he doesn’t look the least bit uncomfortable about it.
‘Amazing, aren’t they?’ He nods at the hive.
I follow his eyes for the amazing.
That last nuc frame is still lying where I abandoned it at the foot of the hive, and I notice that it’s been sucked dry of honey. That’s a good sign, that the bees have salvaged what was left and carried it back into the hive. I pick it up and put it away in the shed where the rest of them are stacked, then I come and crouch down beside him. We talk a little, but quietly, not wanting to disturb the bees or distract them.