by Helen Jukes
The next weekend I am visited by my friend from Leeds. His name is Dan and there are blue wisps in his dark-brown hair from when he dyed it for a party last month. He stands by the shed watching as I open the hive, arms folded nervously across his chest. ‘You just carry on and do your thing, love,’ he said as I put on the suit, stepping back. He shrieked when I put the gauze mask down, but he is quiet as I lift the lid.
Inside they’re growing. It’s not the bees themselves that are growing but the colony itself, and the comb which is lengthening from the top bars towards the base. At first the new comb was so pale it seemed almost translucent and I worried there were no eggs inside it; when brood has been capped with wax it’s supposed to be the colour of digestive biscuits, but this was more like shortbread. It was all so new – there were no layers, and nothing soiling them. A couple of weeks on, the comb is thicker. It’s toughened into yellow, and almost brown in places. I look back at Dan standing by the shed. He’s craning his neck without moving a step closer. I can see his socks. They’re bright blue, like his hair wisps. How is it that he is always so perfectly matched?
In the middle, near the centre of the comb, I find the queen. Her head and upper body are the same size as a worker’s, but her abdomen is huge; round and shining like the smooth outside of a chestnut bud. She rotates slightly, her backside nudging as though it were the one doing the directing, and not her head. I hold the comb higher, squinting, and her attendant workers gather in a clutch – mounting her, hiding her, wary of my gaze and the glare of the sunlight.
The hive has often been touted as a symbol for the virtues of a monarchical society, but that’s misleading. In fact it is the workers, not the queen, who hold much of the decision-making power; and in the absence of a ruling authority it is communication, not control, that maintains the stability of the hive. Which rings true with the sense I have, standing here, leaning over them like this, of something alert and meshlike at work.
‘That was wild!’ Dan says, when the lid is closed and the suit is off and I’m standing by the shed with him. But I’m not sure wild is how it felt. My eyes are wide and my heart is beating faster, but I also feel calmed and – well – sort of contained, I suppose. There is something quietening about looking in on the bees. I have to steady my legs; concentrate on what I’m holding and not on their seething; find a way of picking out what’s happening beneath all that heat and constant motion. It makes me feel a bit forceful myself.
‘How are they doing?’ Dan asks, tweaking my elbow, nudging me back down to earth.
‘They’re getting bigger – I saw the queen.’ I pull him closer to the entrance until he sees their differently dressed-up legs. There are pollen buds the colour of traffic cones and dumper trucks, and some are even an odd grey-green.
‘Looks like mould,’ he says, eyeing it suspiciously. ‘Where does it come from?’
‘Not sure. All over, I guess. Allotments. Parks. There’s a meadow just beyond the playing fields, so maybe there.’ Three more come down, carrying that odd grey-green. He’s right; it does look like mould.
Next he wants to know about the queen. ‘There were so many of them,’ he says. ‘How does it – who do they – how do they know where to find her?’
I search around in my head, trying to find an answer for him. ‘Well,’ I begin, ‘they can’t see her. It’s crowded, and pitch black in there. So she sends out a pheromone – a particular smell, like a signal to let them know she’s in attendance. It gets licked off by the workers around her, and they pass it on to the workers around them, and so on. They spread it body to body through the whole colony.’
Workers also use smell to communicate. After a rainstorm last week I saw three of them standing over the entrance, waving their backsides at the freshly watered air. They were releasing a different pheromone to guide home any foragers who had become lost. And they use scent to recruit foragers out of the hive, too – sharing samples of nectar during a waggle dance. In fact, if you think of smell as a form of communication, then even the dead speak: the last odour to be emitted by a bee is oleic acid, the smell of decay. On smelling this an undertaker bee will seek out the corpse and begin dragging it towards the entrance. After some distance she will drop the load and move on, and another undertaker will arrive and drag it further, and then another, until the entrance is reached and the dead bee ejected from the hive. I saw this too last week. I was sitting watching the entrance when suddenly something dropped. I thought at first it was a stone falling, but then half of it moved. It was two bees wrapped around each other, and one of them was alive. The live one began tugging. The dead one was so tightly curled I couldn’t see its legs. It got tugged almost to the edge of the concrete slab before the alive one left it.
We head back up the garden, sit down on the doorstep with two chipped coffee mugs and the bottle of wine Dan brought. We’re still within sight of the hive, and looking over I wonder what’s now being said, what messages are being passed inside it. I like the thought of a stability that comes from fine-tuned communication, and not the say-so of a single ruler. It must be a restless kind of stability, I think. The messages come constantly and from all around, and catching them is more about receptivity than reach.
‘So I’ve been meaning to ask you,’ Dan says, leaning back against the doorframe, settling himself in, ‘are beekeepers celibate?’
‘Oh,’ I say. Crossing my legs, recrossing them. ‘I don’t know. Why?’
‘Well, I was chatting to this guy online,’ he says, and his eyes shine as I raise my eyebrows at him. ‘He’s a farmer. And he was telling me he’s been dating this fifty-nine-year-old beekeeper.’ He sips his wine and pauses. I see that he’s enjoying this. ‘But the thing was, the beekeeper couldn’t have sex. The guy was celibate. Something to do with the bees, the farmer said.’
I am not sure what to say about celibacy and the hive; I’ve never heard of that tradition. The thought makes me uncomfortable, and I’ve been getting comfortable here, and I wish he hadn’t mentioned it, all casual and nonchalant and from the blue like that. So I change the subject; I tell him about Huber’s letters and about the mystery of the impregnated queen. I’m getting ready to begin the story of Huber’s loss of sight and how much he nevertheless understood, when Dan reaches over and ruffles my hair.
‘Been staying in a lot recently, have you?’ he laughs. ‘You’re turning bee-obsessed. Why don’t you give yourself a break? Go away for a weekend, let your hair down. Have some fun, for Christ’s sake! You can’t be a beekeeper all the time.’
I’m caught off guard; I’d expected him to be fascinated by my story of the impregnated queen.
‘Maybe,’ I tell him, thinking probably not. I shouldn’t leave the bees on their own, I think. Not yet. We were just getting used to each other. What if something happens, and they need me here?
I’ve been telling myself that the rather closed routine I’ve slipped into lately is for the bees’ benefit, but in fact I’m getting used to it. It feels important; necessary, even. The hive has become a counterweight to a work environment I’ve been finding stressful. I’ve begun to relax out here; to drop some of the rigid outer casings that were holding me stiffly and rather unhappily in place. The bees are hot and busy inside the hive, and maybe if I can understand them better I might learn something important about how to live.
Thinking this, I feel a flash of kinship with François Huber; his withdrawal to a place where he could reconceptualise the hive, create a world afresh. There’s a loneliness about a situation like that; it makes for a lot of disjunction when the world beyond your fence doesn’t match up with the one you’ve built inside your head. Huber wanted to demystify the colony, and so change beekeeping practices everywhere; I imagine the intense detail in his letters must have been due in part to the criticism he anticipated from among his peers. It’s a difficult kind of longing to carry around, wanting the world to be otherwise – to bend its shape, let something new in, accommodate you; and it can trap j
ust as surely as it can set free.
On Sunday Dan packs his bag, changes his socks, and heads for the train station. I try catching up on chores in the house but that challenge of his to go out, have some fun, has bothered me.
I remember that a friend in Islington wants someone to look after her kittens when she and her partner go away in a few weeks. And then it occurs to me that I could go back to the British Library for more of Huber’s letters. So maybe a trip to London is not such a bad idea after all.
I call Luke and ask what he thinks about the idea. Can I leave the bees alone for a weekend? Would it make me a bad keeper? He laughs and says they’ve done okay without me for millions of years; they’ll be fine for a few days now. Feeling a little foolish, I call my friend with the kittens and ask if she’s still looking for someone to come and stay. She is, so then it’s settled. I book a train ticket. And since my bee books are sitting right there beside me I pick one up and flick through the index, just to see what it has to say about celibacy and the hive.
Worker bees remain celibate throughout their lives. The queen releases a pheromone that suppresses their ovaries, so although they spend a lot of time caring for young brood they don’t actually lay eggs and never become sexually active. In ancient Rome, Virgil invited his readers to marvel at this selfless virginity, but he didn’t suggest they copy it. We’re humans, not bees, and creatures of the flesh; having sex and giving birth are all part of being human.
Reading this, I have the rather childlike sensation of having been found out. I haven’t been paying much attention to human flesh recently; I’ve been busy paying attention to the bees. Perhaps I’ve got caught up again, gone too close – my caretaking has tipped over into identification. I imagine Virgil wouldn’t think much of my impulse to absorb a few life lessons from the hive.
The book I’ve picked up is The Hive by Bee Wilson, and now I skim through the pages, searching for traditions linking the sexual activity of beekeepers with the celibacy of bees. Wondering if there are stories of mimicry, or blending, between keepers and their colonies.
The Greek essayist Plutarch claimed that bees were especially bad-tempered towards men who’d recently had sex, and that they could sense adultery and punished it by stinging. The Roman writer Columella advised beekeepers to abstain from sexual relations the night before opening a hive, and the Italian Renaissance writer Rucellai claimed that bees could identify an unchaste person by the smell of his breath, which repulsed them. In a tradition common across eastern Europe, a girl’s virginity could be tested by having her walk past a beehive: if the bees left her alone, her purity was judged to be intact.
They’re curious tales, not about identification with honeybees so much as compliance with social mores, and more about friction than blending. I’m not keen on the moral undertones but I do enjoy the switching-around of roles between the keeper and the kept. In these stories the bees are the ones doing the seeing, gaining access to our hidden places; the keepers are the ones being seen.
Standing by the hive, in the presence of a colony, it is difficult not to notice that very special receptivity among the bees, and I wonder if it was partly this that led thinkers past to suppose that bees can sense the things we’d prefer to keep hidden. Looking in on a colony is a bit like watching a weathervane trembling and flitting in a wind; you can’t always pinpoint what the bees are reacting to, what messages they’re carrying. It is just like our species to assume that the messages are for us, and concern ourselves.
In June 1788 Huber and Burnens, still deep into their investigations of the impregnation of the queen, made a breakthrough. Knowing that drones tend to leave the hive at the warmest part of the day, just before noon they seated themselves in front of a hive in which a queen had been confined since birth. The sun had been shining from its rising, the air was very warm; the drones began to fly from several hives. Enlarging the hive entrance, Huber and Burnens paid close attention to the departing bees. Sure enough, the males soon appeared and took flight. Not long after this the young queen emerged. She paced back and forth across the entrance, lifted her hind legs to her belly, and pressed. Stood and faced the wind. Suddenly she took off, rising twelve or fifteen feet in a series of concentric circles. Huber and Burnens sat below and looked up, but soon she was out of sight.
After only seven minutes she was back again. This had been her first experience of flight, and outwardly she appeared unchanged. But fifteen minutes later she re-emerged from the hive, tracing the concentric circles higher and faster so that they soon lost sight of her. Almost half an hour passed before she returned, this time very different from before. Her sexual organs were filled with the same substance [which] very much resembled the liquid contained in the [sexual organs] of the males. As she disappeared inside the hive this time Huber and Burnens confined her, and after two days found her belly swollen and a hundred eggs laid inside the comb.
The evidence appeared unequivocal: queens mate with drones outside the hive. Huber was now able to account for the high prevalence of drone bees in a colony: since the queen is compelled to fly in the expanse of the air to find a male, [it is] requisite that these males be in sufficient number for the queen to have the chance of meeting one.
Huber was right to conclude that queens mate with drones. We know now that on sunny afternoons all the drones in an area will leave their hives and gather in the air at a specific location known as a drone-congregation zone, where all the virgin queens in the vicinity will follow. Reaching this crowd of flying males, a queen will secrete the pheromone decanoic acid, which attracts drones by signalling to them her sexual readiness. High in the air she mates again and again, up to twenty times in a single afternoon, often returning to the same place over several days. Afterwards she’ll remain fertile for the rest of her life, laying up to two thousand eggs a day in summer – more than her own body weight. Unless the colony swarms, she won’t leave the hive again. This will have been her sole experience of flight. Each time she mates with a drone, the drone dies because his penis and abdomen get ripped out.
It’s true that I’ve been hiving away, ensconced in the letters of an eighteenth-century natural historian or else tucked down by the far fence; but I’m also beginning to feel like I’m getting somewhere.
I’d noticed a curious tic in Huber’s letters – a gap or a slip in language that I kept getting stuck on. When in 1792 he published the collected letters, it was with the title New Observations on the Natural History of Bees – but why that word ‘observations’ if, in truth, he couldn’t see?
It wasn’t a one-off; rereading his letters, I realised that they also contain frequent references to vision. We did not believe our eyes, he wrote. I saw . . . I observed . . . Before our eyes . . . Under our eyes . . . I have often seen. I assumed at first it must be down to faulty translation, but when I checked the original version in French I found the same: Huber consistently referred to seeing when describing his experiments with honeybees.
The published volume begins with a preface acknowledging his blindness and the debt he owed to Burnens – [I can] see well when seeing through his eyes – so he wasn’t seeking to conceal it. Far from clumsiness or faulty translation, those slips signify something important. Through that process of intense learning and investigation, perhaps observation came to represent something else to Huber, other than vision: a capacity born out of relationship, built on trust and the slow, careful extraction of detail from the contents of experience. Like this, observation could encompass smell or touch, close listening, an unfaltering attention; and it might proceed through a spirit of constant questioning, imaginative leaps and patience.
The next time I open the hive, it buzzes at me. The sound is like a friction, and I realise that I’ve been marked as an intruder. Soft bodies harden and throw themselves at my chest. These are guard bees, warning me away. Perhaps they want to shake me up a bit, stop me getting too comfortable here. They’re asserting their separateness; stating their right to this plac
e. I find that I’m glad of it. That the bees are defensive must mean there’s something in there worth defending, and as I lift the first bar I feel a new weight to it. The colony has grown again. The comb is stronger-looking, and deeper than before. I turn it one way and then the other, knotting my elbows so as to keep it straight and level with my face. It’s clustered with bees. I can hardly see the comb, there are so many of them. I go through the bars one by one, noting in my head where there is fresh brood, pollen stores, first signs of honey-making. And all the time there is this soft low buzzing that thickens as I lift the bars and settles as I replace them.
I don’t see the queen this time. They’re getting too crowded; it is difficult to tell head from abdomen.
The doorbell doesn’t work, and the door rattles when Dulcie knocks on it. She’s come from London, my friend with the pudding-bowl hair and the clothes like a dressing-up box; she’s staying here a night while she attends a study course just down the road.
It’s dark when she arrives but she wants to see the hive so we go out. Without suits we crouch down and press our ears against its sides, straining through the traffic and the Friday-night street noise. We can’t hear buzzing, but Dulcie thinks she hears a growling coming from inside. I imagine a murmur. Tens of thousands of attentions pricked at our footsteps and brushing cheeks, as if listening could make its own kind of sound.