by Helen Jukes
And then he whispers, ‘Look!’
He’s pointing to the foot of the hive, to the place where the frame was. One bee and then another is tipping down and hovering there, hesitating almost, before flying away again.
‘They’re coming for the frame,’ he breathes.
And then I see it differently. There is the shape of the frame like a ghost in the grass, the stalks around it bent and flattened. The bees are dipping out from the hive, down to the place where the honey was. To find it isn’t.
‘They must be getting sent out to it,’ he says, building the theory as he goes. ‘What’s it called, a waggle dance?’
I know about the honeybee waggle dance from another book I’ve been reading, The Buzz About Bees, by Jürgen Tautz. The ‘dance’ is used to recruit workers to a particular nesting or foraging site, and is remarkable in that, through a series of precisely choreographed movements, sufficient information is passed between workers to enable them to find their way to a specific location even when they have not visited it previously.
A bee ‘dances’ by anchoring herself to the comb with all six feet and rapidly ‘waggling’ her abdomen, then turning in a full circle and waggling again, before turning in the opposite direction to mark a figure of eight. Other foragers gather around her, following these movements with their antennae. The angle of her body represents the direction of the pollen or nectar source in relation to the sun, and the duration of the dance indicates the distance to travel. She dances more energetically if the pollen or nectar source is particularly sweet; less so if there are obstacles or threats to be negotiated en route. Honeybees don’t learn to waggle dance; the dance is innate. When reared in isolation, they’re able to perform and interpret the movements even after a first foraging flight.
Laurence shifts his weight beside me. Is it a waggle dance at work here? It’s possible, but I don’t think so. Dances become vaguer when objects are near at hand; no longer dealing with objects remote in time or space, the dancer would only be able to communicate that a pollen source is ‘very close!’.
‘Maybe some honey dripped when I picked up the frame,’ I say. ‘Perhaps they’re smelling it in the grass.’
One, two, three more small bodies dip out of the hive, probing the flattened grass before lifting up and back inside. Gradually the numbers nudging the ghost-frame dwindle, and we look up to see that the foragers tipping out of the hive are instead turning up, away, over the beech hedge and into Hannah’s garden.
‘They’re re-orientating,’ Laurence says, and laughs, and I feel a loosening around my shoulders. It might be hopefulness about the hive or it might be something else: relief that a creature – any creature – can change direction, start over, stop feeding at an empty frame. We pull ourselves up and walk back to the house where there are berry stains on the bottoms of pudding bowls, and on mouths and spoons. Dulcie has abandoned her chair and is sitting on the floor with her back pushed up against the radiator. We spread out. Gather cushions. Later we’ll eat again, and then they’ll play music. For now we sit and chat. Our voices are lively and attentive and they soften the room, soften my edges.
A few times that afternoon I hear myself talking about the situation at work. The second time it sounds repetitious and the third time it sounds stuck. I wonder if they’re asking themselves why I’m still there, why I haven’t quit. ‘I’m trying to adapt,’ I explain, to myself or to the room. ‘I’m trying to learn some perseverance.’ It sounds a bit odd when I hear it spoken aloud like that; a bit high-minded and unnecessarily obscure.
‘Some environments are toxic,’ Dulcie says bluntly. ‘They have to be changed.’
Once more in the early evening I glance out at the hive from the window, and then I see journeys lifting like invisible threads from it.
On Sunday there is half an hour just after my friends have gone when the house is empty but still full of them, and the rooms are quiet but still ringing with them. I fill the sink with pots and pans and go into the garden. Sit down on the stump and see that patch of grass at the base of the hive where the ghost-frame was, the stalks straightened now.
I am still learning how to look. And when I think back over the last few weeks, I have a hunch that, so far, I’ve been foisting a lot of my own anxieties onto the bees. Wanting them to stay, to be okay, to show me that a wildness can dwell here. Those don’t sound like great terms for a relationship, or for understanding what’s really happening in the hive.
So how to care, without caring too much? I don’t want to detach completely, but I do want to recognise the bees for the separately alive creatures that they are. I recall again that letter of William Mewe’s about the bees being changed by his looking. I’m not sure about the bees, but my friends do change me and what I’m capable of noticing. My own eyes are not always the most reliable ones and sometimes I need other people around to help me see, or to see differently.
I pull my suit on, zip up. Stand at the hive and grip, lift, listen for that hummed disturbance coming from inside. Slowly, I begin lifting the bars up. I’m still half-thinking about the music last night, and the lunch we ate today, and the washing-up soaking in the sink; so when the comb appears it is suddenly, weightlessly. A single piece attached to one bar near the middle of the hive, where it hadn’t been before. Fresh, almost white. Almost translucent, when I hold it to the light. No twist.
5
Losing Sight
May
The weather is getting warmer. Spring has been busy unfastening itself, and the meadows around Oxford’s city centre are filling with weeds and wildflowers.
In the garden, the hive is thickening. I sit on the stump most days, and like this I have learned some things. The bees are busiest just after noon. You don’t disturb them if you’re sitting quietly, but sometimes they come in for a closer look. They are more interested in faces than feet. It’s possible to tell the difference between a worker and a drone bee from a distance of two metres – you just have to look out for the size of their abdomen and for their eyes, which are differently spaced.
At the hive they are bodies; at the fence they are black and determined specks marking flight paths in the air. The workers are out searching for pollen and nectar, but the drones aren’t. By this time of year they have another reason to leave the hive, and it has nothing to do with foraging or with swarming away.
Reopening Bee Wilson’s The Hive, I learn that the question of honeybee reproduction was a source of debate and contention for centuries. In ancient Greece, some thinkers proposed that bees don’t reproduce at all but instead find their young nestled inside plants and flower heads. Aristotle wasn’t convinced, but he did consider that sexual intercourse must be out of the question for honeybees, since he’d been unable to identify the male and female sexes within the hive. Workers couldn’t be female, he reasoned, since they have stings and nature does not assign defensive weapons to any female. But – busy as they were with housekeeping and raising young larvae in the hive – nor could they be male, since no male creatures make a habit of taking trouble over their young. The bees were slipping between categories again, and – unable to fit them neatly – Aristotle concluded that the workers were neither one sex nor the other but a mixture of the two.
I’m beginning to enjoy this slipperiness of honeybees, their tendency to evade categories, which had even Aristotle confused. The mystery surrounding their reproduction persisted until the time of François Huber, that blind natural historian of the eighteenth century. And now in the evenings I find myself returning to his letters, following his investigations into the impregnation of the queen. The bees in my garden seem tentatively to have established themselves in the hive, but I’ve been wondering about this question of honeybee reproduction. Since beekeeping is about keeping something alive, not just fixing it in place, I want to find out how a colony regenerates itself – where does its new life come from?
There are plenty of references to Huber on the internet but only three portraits
of him that I’ve found. The first shows a young boy with fat cheeks and heavy curls and an inquisitive expression on his face. He’s looking up, as though to an adult, or anyway someone wiser. It reminds me of old-fashioned Christmas cards and cherubim children and I find it a bit twee.
The second portrait is of Huber as a grown man. His hair is unruly and the top button of his waistcoat is undone despite the formal sitting pose. He looks active and robust but his eyebrows are big and his eyes are oversized, as though the artist has fallen prey to that habit we have when we’re trying to ignore something, of instead focusing in, of being unable to look away.
In the third portrait, Huber is old and gaunt, and this time the artist has painted his blindness for all to see. His mouth is not quite closed, his eyes are sitting slightly askew. He appears troubled. He gazes wildly into the middle distance with the air of someone unaccustomed to holding a focus. I don’t like this one very much; it makes Huber look deranged. It doesn’t fit with the picture that’s formed in my own head from reading the letters he wrote.
François Huber was born in Geneva in July 1750 to a family of intellectuals. The family was wealthy and there was no expectation that the young Huber should earn a living. Attending college in Geneva, he was nevertheless a high achiever and studied hard, often working and reading late into the night. By the age of fifteen this intense schedule had begun to take its toll. He contracted an illness that left him weak and seemed to be affecting his vision. He was taken to see the physician Théodore Tronchin, who prescribed rural respite without delay. Sent to a village just outside Paris, Huber apparently recovered his strength, but his eyesight continued to deteriorate. His father arranged for him to visit the renowned oculist Baron Michael de Wenzel who, curiously, gave each eye a separate diagnosis. In one eye he found cataracts (untreatable at the time) and in the other gutta serena, a term used to describe blindness where the source of damage was located in the posterior region of the eye. Gutta is a Latin word for drop, and tended to be attributed to diseases of that time which produced a fluid discharge. Serena implied a clear and undisturbed exterior. Where no scar or inflammation was visible, the cause was understood to be behind the eye – on the retina, or in the optic nerve, or the brain. Huber’s blindness was pronounced incurable.
By this time Huber had met and fallen in love with Marie-Aimée Lullin, daughter of one of the syndics of the Swiss Republic, who did not approve of the match. Despite her father’s protestations and Huber’s own fears over the kind of life he could offer her given his failing vision, the two of them were married. As well as his wife she became his reader and also his secretary, often helping him in his work.
Huber said of Marie that as long as she lived I was not sensible of being blind, and in their home he could live as if he wasn’t. All the paths in the grounds around their house were hung with knotted ropes so that he could keep up his walks in the open air unaided. The cord was a thing to hold on to, and the knots were markers to help him orientate himself.
At a time when traditional modes of seeing and knowing were being replaced by a new spirit of scientific empiricism and rational enquiry, the honeybee must have made a compelling subject for study. The true origins of all substances associated with honey-making – brood, wax, pollen, nectar, propolis – were still unknown, and dispute persisted over the act of reproduction itself. Male and female sexes had by now been identified within the hive, and it was understood that the queen, not the workers, laid eggs inside the wax cells; but the means by which those eggs became fertilised had not been established. No one had yet witnessed a mating between queen and drone, and in fact the Dutch biologist Jan Swammerdam argued that, given the proportions of the male and female sexual organs, intercourse was physically impossible. Theory and speculation abounded. Perhaps it is not through intercourse but something else that sperm is passed, posited Swammerdam, noting that drones seemed to emit a strong odour at certain times. Or what if bees are like frogs and fish and fertilisation comes after the eggs are laid, suggested the English naturalist John Debraw. Or, argued Johann Hattorf, who came from a region in Central Europe known as Lusatia, perhaps the queen impregnates herself.
I notice, as I put Huber’s letters down for the weekend, that the house is drying out. Finding myself operating some selectivity over which particular wildnesses I want to live alongside, I’ve scrubbed the mould patches from the walls and they haven’t come back. Yesterday I left the back door open and then the wind swung in, chilling the surfaces, unsettling anything light and not fastened down.
Down at the hive a lot is happening. I only open it up once a week, so I can’t keep tabs on everything, and have instead begun following hunches, looking for clues. Why did they build this way, why not that? Where has brood been laid, how far does the comb reach?
Some weeks when I open the hive the bees fuss around me like a bad temper; others they are quiet and slow and I can move the whole way through the hive, lifting each bar in turn, without eliciting much more than a grumble from them. I can never tell before I lift the lid which way it’s going to go.
There is something about this act of moving through the hive from one end to another as they cluster, rise, foam, that gives me the sensation of working always very close to an edge. I am never more than a finger’s width from a commotion; never more than a moment from outstaying my welcome here. If I flap, they panic. Forget gaining mastery over the colony; the task will be to learn a bit of self-mastery.
At the base of the hive is a removable tray which sits underneath the wire-mesh floor and collects any detritus slipping through. Once a week I take it out, lay it down on the grass and sift through the wax- and pollen-scrapings and pieces of dismembered wing. I’m looking for varroa – a tiny red parasite that over the last few decades has become common in hives worldwide. A healthy colony of bees will manage the problem for themselves by picking the mites off each other, but it’s a good idea to keep an eye on whether numbers are increasing or decreasing, because it helps gauge the health of the hive as a whole.
This week I count twelve mites – enough to fit on a single fingertip. The bees zip back and forth above my head, in and out of the hive entrance. There’s a brittleness about those armour-plated outsides; something crisp and crackable. I try not to bother them. Sometimes as I replace the roof or the underfloor tray I squish one.
During the week, in the evenings, I return to Huber’s investigations into the impregnation of the queen.
Aided by his assistant François Burnens, who had arrived at the house as a peasant servant, Huber began repeating and adjusting the experiments of his contemporaries, testing their conclusions against his own. Always he seems to opt for the most meticulous, and so the most arduous, approach. In one experiment he had Burnens catch, hold and carefully examine every single bee in two separate colonies; it took a total of eleven days. Often they hit dead ends or apparent contradictions and found themselves confused, and none of this is omitted from the letters. I have no regret, he wrote. By going over the same observations several times, I am much more certain of having avoided error. We are unable, of course, to ask Burnens if he had any regrets.
I’m fascinated by this perpetual struggle for knowledge; the lengths Huber, and so also Burnens, went to in a bid to solve the mysteries of the hive. It is an investigation into honeybees but it is also an experiment in wanting; in willing a breakthrough.
Swammerdam had proposed that the queen was impregnated by way of an odour secreted by drones, and Huber tested this by confining all of the drones in a hive inside a tin box pierced with holes, separating them from the queen while allowing scent to permeate. Like this she remained sterile; she could not be impregnated by smell alone.
The French scientist René de Réamur had also been studying the queen. Wanting to catch a glimpse of the act of copulation among honeybees, he’d tried putting a virgin queen and a number of drones inside a glass jar and waiting. Huber and Burnens tried this too, experimenting with drones at diffe
rent ages over different seasons, but – like Réamur – they saw no act of copulation take place. We detected between them a sort of union, but so short and imperfect that it was not likely that it had operated fecundation.
On discovering a whitish fluid at the base of the wax cells, Debraw had become convinced that eggs were fertilised in the same way as frogs and fishes, by the male injecting a seminal fluid after they were hatched. Huber and Burnens also observed this whiteness at the cell base, but found it to be an illusion caused by the reflection of . . . light, where fragments of cocoons, successively hatched, accumulate.
By this time Huber was almost completely blind. All observations came to him through Burnens, and the vivid descriptions in his letters must have resulted from a combination of Burnens’s ability to watch and vocalise, and Huber’s own propensity for questioning and crosschecking. He must have been listening very carefully, too. From the collected impressions and remarks of a sighted observer a picture was forming in his mind of the hive’s interior. The picture would prove a more coherent and more accurate conception of the bees’ world than had ever before been described.
Huber had worked his way through each of the existing theories of impregnation, but none of them seemed to lead anywhere. Then one day he and Burnens tried a different tack. They stepped back, this time pushing all hypothesis and supposition aside and instead returning to what facts were available to them. What were the core conditions necessary for impregnation?
They removed all the drones from a colony and narrowed the hive entrance to prevent the queen from leaving, or any more drones from entering. Like this, she continued to lay eggs that hatched successfully. Now a new thought occurred to Huber. In this and previous experiments, researchers had used queens whose prior history could not be ascertained. Was it possible that mating had happened prior to her confinement in the hive? They repeated the experiment, this time with a queen that had been isolated since birth, and found that she remained sterile. No eggs were laid. But here they hit upon a surprising finding. As a control measure they’d confined another virgin queen inside a hive with drones present, and here the same result occurred. It appeared that a virgin queen remained sterile when confined, whether or not there were drones present. Perhaps the answer to the question of impregnation lay outside the hive.