by Helen Jukes
‘Shall we walk a bit further?’
‘Okay.’
A narrowboat plugs by, with a man in a tracksuit and a woolly hat standing at the helm. He nods, smiles and raises his mug in our direction. The mug is painted with bright blue flowers.
‘A drone-congregation zone,’ he says, and laughs easily. I’m surprised at my relief. ‘Have you ever seen one?’
I’m back in London. My friends with the kittens are away again, and the psychic has come over for another visit.
‘No,’ I say, remembering how I stood in the garden this week, scanning the sky for one. ‘You’d probably need special equipment. Apparently there’s one over Crystal Palace, but I don’t know. Mostly they’re a mystery.’
‘A mystery?’ he says. ‘Hm. And what about your queen? Has she visited one of these congregation zones?’ I’m not sure if he’s playing with me.
‘Oh yes,’ I say. In fact, my queen is laying furiously. There’s more brood in the hive each week – the workers must be struggling to keep up with her.
‘I’ve brought wine,’ he says, as though he’s just remembered the bag that he brought in with him.
‘Oh—’ I say, ‘I don’t have a corkscrew.’ I notice he’s watching me, carefully. ‘Maybe we can borrow one from the neighbours.’
There’s a block of flats opposite, and I’ve already crossed the road before I remember I am not wearing any socks or shoes. I wince. Turn and look back at the house, where his face disappears from a window.
A man stops in the doorway to the flats and begins searching his pockets for keys. ‘Excuse me,’ I say, and he looks nervously at my feet. ‘I’m sorry,’ I say, holding the wine bottle up, ‘do you have a corkscrew?’ He looks at the bottle, then back at my feet. He is probably not asked for corkscrews very often.
‘Okay,’ he says. And then, hesitatingly, ‘I live on the top floor.’ So I stand on the doormat and wait as he goes up to fetch it. My toe pricks, and I pick a shard of glass from it.
Back in the house I am victorious. ‘I forgot my shoes!’ I say, brandishing the opened bottle.
‘I watched you from the window,’ he says, and it sounds a bit like a confession. ‘When you looked up I stepped back and nearly trod on a kitten.’ There’s a spot of blood on my toe and my feet are still tingling.
There is something about him that is difficult to place. This is what I think to myself as I turn and take two glasses from the shelf. And then I realise: he holds himself still. We cook, and talk, and drift between the sofa and the cooker, and all the time there is something in him that sits. Like this, I notice how much he sees of things; and how constantly I move around.
And, like this, a space opens between us. It’s a live space, alert and curious, like a tension held. He shows me how to cook the rice just right (whatever you do, don’t stir it), and he neither invades nor retreats. We sit on the floor and chat as the kittens scuff the carpet around our knees. (It is not until later, when he’s gone home and I’m falling asleep, that I will realise I might want to touch him.)
I walk him to the Tube. It’s busy outside, full of Saturday night lights, and our strides get bigger and our grins wider because of it. We turn off the main road down a narrow side alley to take the long way round, then suddenly he stops.
‘Look!’
The moon.
It is full, and huge. So low that it might have just now descended and settled itself there at the far end of the street, between a church spire and a chimney pot. It is like some great lamp or orb or an eye beaming. There are other people around us on the pavement. They are also stopping and pointing and looking up.
6
Swarm
June
There’s a cloud of them thronging the entrance. It’s just after midday, and the weather is warm; a kind of traffic jam has formed outside the hive, with dozens of bees hovering and circling. More appear at the hive mouth, readying themselves for flight. There are a lot of them. Probably this is not the best time to make a hive inspection, but anyway that is what I’m doing. I pull on my suit, zip up. There really are a lot of them.
I lift the roof and begin easing the bars out. Guard bees fly up, pronging my chest and head. With each bar that lifts I make a fresh hole in their ceiling and they spill out, crawling up the sides and over the tops of the wooden slats, onto my gloves and wrists. I can’t feel them on me through the suit, but I can feel how the air changes because of them. It thrums and bristles and stiffens and shakes, and all the while I have to keep steady and slow and my movements must be soft – I mustn’t let my attention or hand slip. It seems to work best if I stand close but slightly apart from the hive, trying to keep some sense of the whole as I pause over each part of it.
It’s looking good. The comb has formed in perfect parallels, and the bars lift smoothly up, and nothing sticks. It’s all down to that bee space – the exact distance the bees leave open between each comb, to allow air and movement through the colony.
I want to see it. I prise two bars apart, widening the gap enough to peer inside. Between the combs it’s dark and thick and clodded with bees, and their wings rustle as I draw closer. The bee space measures three-eighths of an inch. That’s the length of a fingernail, or half the width of my eye – it is a small space, even for a bee. Just enough for one body to move alongside another. And yet the whole life of the colony passes through it.
‘Okay, are they?’ Becky asks as I arrive at the back door with my suit still on.
‘I think so. The hive’s getting very full.’
‘You’re covered!’ she says, stepping back. She points to my shoulder, my head, both knees. I brush them off, one by one, and step into the kitchen.
I’ve seen the psychic again. Really I should stop calling him the psychic, but I find that I can’t say his name. He’s a musician; he makes music. I’ve heard it, and it’s really good.
We sit on a log in a park in south London eating toasted sandwiches sticky with melted cheese, and talk about being kids and growing up and finding a voice.
‘I think that’s why my music is so quiet,’ he says. ‘My mum didn’t approve, and the walls were thin. There was only a very small gap for it to exist inside.’ I poke my finger into the plasticky grey of my takeaway cup and fish the teabag out. I’m thinking about bee hearing, those fine-tuned channels through which signals run back and forth; and about bottlenecks and one-way valves and things being released and hidden. I flick my hand and a spray of tea lands on my shirt and on his jumper. When I look up I see his face, hill, open sky, and an oak tree far off in the distance.
‘I like your buttons,’ he says, pointing to my jacket. ‘Those are good buttons.’ The buttons are metal and I sewed them on after I’d pulled all the old ones off. They’re so shiny that if you put your nose up close they become like mirrors, and then you can see your face and what’s behind you in them. I don’t tell him this because I’m not sure what it would mean to invite his nose up close.
As I walk away after meeting him each time I have a feeling of being differently weighted. I am quieter as I move around, and lighter, like something emptied. I notice the soles of my feet. The soles of my feet notice the ground under them. Not just firmness or softness but also movement, like the rumble of this lorry passing.
He’s gone back to Forest Hill, and I’ve got as far as the bus stop. My phone rings and I jump, even though the ringing is not so loud and definitely quieter than the traffic on the road beside me. It’s Luke. He’s calling to arrange a visit. We’ve talked a lot since the bees arrived, but he hasn’t been back to see them.
‘How about next week?’ he says. He’s speaking from his flat in Soho, where there’s glitter in the bathroom and painted nudes on the walls, and Walkers crisps and books and pieces of hive stacked up in the kitchen. ‘I could get a train to Oxford one afternoon, and we could open the hive together.’
‘Great!’ I say, relieved at the thought of having him there to act as an interpreter. ‘Come for dinner!’<
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The bus arrives, and I get on it.
‘I got dive-bombed!’ Becky says when I get home that night. ‘I was watering the lettuces, and one dive-bombed me!’
‘You want to be careful,’ I tell her. But this is not helpful, since there is only so far that you can go with being careful when there’s a colony of bees in your back garden.
You can’t stop a colony from growing once it’s started – it will just keep on wanting to expand. And so much goes on in those journeys beyond the garden, it’s not like you can do anything to moderate their intake. The bees will keep going out and bringing back, and as I watch them thickening around the entrance I begin hoping the hive is enough to hold them.
I am itching to see Luke and for him to see the hive. On the day of his visit I rush through work and leave early; he’s already waiting when I get home, standing outside the front door in red trousers and a shirt patterned with tiny sunflowers. ‘Helen!’ he beams as I get off my bike, offering tea or coffee or whatever. ‘Later,’ he says, waving a hand. ‘Let’s see those bees.’
Inside, he drops his bag and we pull on our suits, but I want to stand back and watch today so when we go out to the garden it is he who opens the hive, not me.
‘Look at that,’ he says, lifting a bar out. ‘Now that’s a good start.’
The comb attached to it is thick and full; at least as long as my forearm. The walls of a single hexagonal cell are only eight-hundredths of a millimetre thick. Honeycomb is rigid, and feather light when empty, but a piece like this from a top-bar hive will weigh as much as three kilos when full.
It is easier to look when someone else is doing the lifting. So with Luke holding the comb I peer in, trying to make out individual cells under those thousands of crowding feet. Each cell is built with a slight upwards tilt so as to keep whatever is inside from falling out. Inside we spot eggs and larvae, soft and mucuslike, surrounded by pollen and nectar and a soft rim of honey stores. But we have to be careful. If Luke wasn’t holding it just right from the bar at the top the whole thing might rip and tear under its own weight.
A comb-building bee must form a cocoon of warmth around herself as she works, to keep the wax soft and malleable. She secretes wax from glands in her abdomen. It comes out in flakes and she moulds it with her mandibles, which are like two shovels on either side of her mouth. Mandibles are for cutting (she can slice the leg or tear the wing from an opponent), as well as for chewing and manipulating. She uses them for filling holes with propolis, and for shaping the wax cells.
A bee lands on my hand, and I lift her up to see the mandibles. Everything about her is somewhere between reaching and receiving; she probes the world, tastes and touches it, as she bites and chews it.
Luke is unhurried by all their fuss and teeming. He replaces the first bar and levers another out – this one is just as full. To hold comb like this you have to heave, and it takes effort to keep it lifted. You feel the muscles in your shoulders tug, and there is always a pull in them for a while after.
‘Well,’ he says, when we’re nearly through, ‘there must be nearly a hundred thousand bees in here. It’s the biggest colony I’ve seen all year.’
It’s big. I repeat this to myself. The colony is strong; and the hive is nearing capacity. There are only three or four empty bars left at the far end of the hive. If they expand much more, it will be full.
‘It’s unlikely,’ Luke says, when we’re back in the kitchen and pulling our suits off, ‘but you might find they swarm before the season’s out.’
When a hive is full, the colony will split in two. The queen’s pheromone that usually gets passed around the hive no longer spreads far enough; there are too many bodies, and the bees are building too far from her. Without her smell around to act as a suppressor, the workers will begin raising a new queen. Once she’s hatched, half the colony will leave with the old queen in tow to found a new hive elsewhere.
I imagine a swarm leaving – only half of them left, the hive emptied and thinned. With that open doorway at the hive entrance you might be doing everything right and still there’s no guarantee the bees will stay. Then why put all this effort into keeping them here, making them strong, if they’ll only end up leaving?
Luke has folded his suit and is placing it in his bag; he turns and takes it out into the hall.
‘But,’ I say, wanting to stop him, backtrack. ‘But what can I do?’
‘Do?’ he says, half-listening over one shoulder as he hangs the bag from a coat hook.
‘How can I stop them swarming?’
‘Stop them?’ he says, hands still raised with the bag in them.
I stare at him, incredulous. Yes, stop them.
With the colony diminished the hive would be more vulnerable to attack, and the remaining bees would make less honey too; but the feeling in me is simpler than that. I want to keep them here, inside my hive. I’ve grown used to that curious hiving activity tucked away by the far fence – attached to it, even. I don’t want to see the colony depleted and I don’t want any of them leaving.
Luke ducks his head through the doorway as he comes back into the kitchen. ‘Swarming is a colony’s reproductive function,’ he says, ‘it’s a natural process. It’s how they make more of themselves.’
‘Of course, you might want to contain them,’ he adds, filling the kettle now, searching the cupboards for mugs. ‘You don’t want a load of bees flying loose around the city.’
Thoughts are rearranging themselves, positions are shifting in my head. I am trying to keep up. So you can think about the reproduction of the bees themselves, or you can think about the colony as a whole – with needs and drives and an impulse to procreate, to venture out into new areas and outposts. It comes back to that in-betweenness of honeybees, their wild uncontainability. That the colony has a reproductive impulse seems obvious now I know about it; but somehow I hadn’t figured it until now.
I open the fridge and pull out a bag of carrots, trying to suppress my own impulse to go outside right now and clamp the hive closed, stop them moving around for just one bloody moment so I can sit and get the measure of this.
‘Tea?’ Luke says, passing me a mug. I take it despondently and begin making soup, as Luke explains about swarms. How you might stop one, if you wanted to. Or contain it.
It’s possible to watch a colony for signs that swarming is imminent, he tells me. You might notice queen cups among the brood – protruding, globular cells that look like they’ve distended and drooped – a sure sign that the workers are preparing to raise a queen. You might also notice the workers behaving differently. They’ll be resting more, and foraging less. They might be eating honey rather than making it, and raising less brood than usual.
‘You can try stopping them at that point,’ he says, ‘by making more space inside the hive, or by looking out for the queen cups and destroying them before they hatch.’
‘And does it work?’
‘Well, temporarily. If you can keep them contained until the flowering season’s finished, when the colony will reduce naturally again. Or you can create an artificial swarm. Beekeepers who don’t want to lose their bees often split the colony themselves, taking the queen out and putting her into a new hive along with half the colony. That way they end up with two colonies instead of one.’
We eat sitting at the table, with bread and cheese and the tail end of a bottle of wine. There are grains in the bread that catch in my teeth. Chunks of half-submerged carrot parsnip potato float like islands in our bowls, and we fish them with our soup spoons.
‘You know,’ Luke says, leaning back in his chair, ‘next time you’re out there, you should widen that entrance. You won’t stop them swarming by keeping it tight like that. You’ll just piss them off. Try opening it up a bit – just keep an eye out for wasps raiding.’
Luke is good at letting things be as they are. He told me about wax moths once. They can destroy a whole hive in one go, eating through the comb until there is nothing left. �
�What a disaster,’ I said. But he said that even wax moths have their place, if you think about the hive itself as a kind of ecosystem. In the wild they move into abandoned hive sites and clear them out, removing old and dirty wax and reopening cavities ready for new settlers to move in. ‘Like a decongestant,’ I said, imagining a forest full of bunged-up trees. And he said, ‘Yes, I suppose so.’
When the soup is finished Luke gathers his things and heads back to the train station. It’s still light outside when he’s gone. I open the door to the garden, go back out to the hive.
Over by the fence I flop down on the tree stump, wipe a fleck of soup from my sleeve. And wonder about the seeming futility of a role that tasks one with keeping a creature in a place without holding it down. It’s like a hopeless riddle. In fact if the hive is confirming anything it’s that things move and change no matter what you do, so maybe this whole exercise in beekeeping is really a kind of farce and I should just give it up right now and save myself some hassle.
I hunch forward and huff, elbows on knees, chin in hand-heels, my back to the house. I am unsettled like the bees get when you start lifting the bars and rearranging the hive – they’re already trying to resettle themselves, to regain control, before the rearranging has even finished.
If I’m honest, giving up wouldn’t feel quite right. Not really. The bees might not need me but I want them here, and want to be able to care for things without fearing they’ll lift away. So how to care in an open-handed way – with the hands, and hence with attention, as the dictionary once suggested?
The grass around the stump is wet and long and when I tug it comes up in a big clod, roots and dirt and all. In the soil a worm appears, sun-starved and shining, and begins working his way back down.
I think of Luke coming all this way just for a hive-inspection; how well he looks after his friends, no matter the distance. Perhaps it’s what makes him a good beekeeper, too. He treats bees as he treats people, as wild, alive and curious things that move and grow and fly and change as the seasons change around them. I don’t always find that easy; but if the choice is between detachment and the more unpredictable, knotty business of attachment – which lays us open to pain and loss and faulty translation, but also to joy and journeying and fresh meetings? Well, then I know which I choose.