A Honeybee Heart Has Five Openings

by Helen Jukes

  ‘I think I’m getting a headache,’ Becky says. And I can’t shake a feeling in the room of intensifying light. Perhaps it is the smell. The smell is like sweetness and wax and splintered wood.

  Soon the honey is everywhere. There is no stopping it. I abandon my spoon and begin using my hands. My hands glisten and stick to things, and everything sticks to them.

  Then, quite suddenly, there’s a shift. It is no longer just us in the room; something else, dark and shadow-like, is flitting against the walls and around the edges of our vision. ‘A bee!’ Ellie cries, and I look up. It scrapes the ceiling and dives back down. ‘There’s one here too!’

  We look into the corners, around the walls. They must have come in with the comb, we say to each other. But the one-way valves seemed to work, and anyway the numbers in here seem to be increasing. There’s another on the pan lid; one resting on a sieve.

  ‘We’ve brought brood inside,’ Becky says, and it’s true. In my top bar hive there was no way of separating the queen from the rest of the colony, so the brood was not separate from the honey stores; and the comb we harvested contains eggs and larvae too.

  ‘They’re hatching!’ Right here, in our hands and between our sieves and spoons. I peer down at the sticky, broken mess in my hands. There are bodies in there, scratching at surfaces, pulling up.

  We stop, stand up as if to do something, though none of us knows quite what to do.

  ‘But they can’t be flying,’ says Jack.

  ‘Why can’t they?’

  ‘I don’t think they can, that young. We must have brought them in with us.’ And with a frown he begins inspecting the one-way valves on the box lid. ‘The guy in the shop promised they’d work,’ he says crossly, putting one eye up to a valve and squinting.

  We caught the ones we could, and took them outside. And then we finished straining the honey. We filled one large Kilner jar and six small ones – it took us three hours.

  ‘How did it go?’ Pat said, when I called up to tell him about the harvest.

  I tried to describe what the inside of the hive looked like and how we harvested the comb, what it felt like to carry it away in my hands. Then I told him about the hatching bees – how it happened all of a sudden, there were bodies in there as well as honey, I was holding birth and death and harm and care all at once, all on top of each other, and then there were also the live bees strimming the walls.

  I said it all in a bit of a fluster and the words didn’t come out right, I got muddled or upset and anyway I am never very good at describing things over the phone.

  ‘I want to see you,’ he said.

  ‘I want to see you too.’

  How much of looking, how much of wanting to look, is about its opposite – about wanting to be seen?

  Later that night we wiped everything clean – the floor, our hands, the outsides of the jars – but there must have been a residue because a slight tackiness lay over everything for a while after. I could still feel it this evening, nearly a week on. I stepped on a floorboard, and the floorboard stuck.

  I wrote to Paul to tell him about the live bees that flew up as we strained the comb, and asked where he thought they might have come from. He wrote back with three possible explanations, laid out in a neat, bullet-pointed list.

  They could well have been newly hatched bees; when bees first emerge they do, after all, have wings. Or it’s possible that some bees found their way in from outside; some beekeepers say that if you’re processing honey within proximity of the hive, the bees will always find a way of reaching it. Or, as Jack had thought, perhaps the one-way valve went both ways.

  So it seems that the case of the flying bees in the living room is set to remain a mystery, something we’ll never quite make sense of, and maybe I even like it better that way.

  We kept one jar of honey for our house. The rest I’ll carry out, lids tightly screwed, and give to friends. I took one when I went to London at the weekend, where there was a gathering of all those friends who put money in last Christmas to buy me the colony. No one wanted to open it at first. They passed it around and looked, but it wasn’t until the next morning that Laurence made a pile of toast and then the lid came off and everyone tried it.

  I gave one to Pat, who keeps it on his desk and has a spoonful with each cup of coffee. There is a particular time each day, he tells me, when if the sun is out it will hit the jar and send a pattern of refracted light against the wall – an amber and orblike glow.

  I offered Ellie and Jack a jar each as they were leaving after the harvest, but Jack shook his head.

  ‘Not for me,’ he said.

  ‘You don’t like honey?’

  ‘I do like honey,’ he said, ‘but I was wondering. Could I take the wax?’

  He wanted to make mead with it. I popped over this week, and he’d boiled the wax down and taken the last of the honey off. There’s just enough for one batch, he said. In his bedroom was a row of demijohns filled with fermenting liquids. Beech-leaf wine, beer, blackberry wine, mead. The mead was a dull-dark brownish colour, like dirty pond water. The jars were lined up under his window and along the radiator. When the heating came on there was a soft popping of bubbles as the carbon dioxide escaped from them.

  October

  Sometimes, often, I find it easier to make sense of a problem when I can step away from it slightly, view it sideways or through other things. I must be trying to make sense of something now because here I am with the dictionary in my hands again, still trying to tease out the relationship between beekeeper and bee, human and wild creature. Man and his own crazed, tortured desire to keep.

  This time I try making it concrete; I look up the noun form.

  A keep is a bar of soft iron placed across the two opposing poles of a magnet to prevent loss of power. A keep is a ring worn to hold another on the finger. A keep is a piece of wood or plastic inserted through the earlobe to keep a piercing open. A keep is the innermost tower inside a castle.

  These fortified towers were built deep within the castle walls, and first appeared in Europe during the tenth and eleventh centuries. They served a dual purpose, housing the lord’s private residence and also providing a place of retreat should the rest of the castle fall to invaders. Early keeps were made from timber and hung with animal skins to delay or dampen fires; later they were built from stone.

  I’m sitting on my bedroom floor, books and laptop strewn pell-mell across the carpet. I’d planned to spend this afternoon clearing out cupboards, sorting through piles of books – but here I am getting into them again.

  I wonder about those keep towers, the safe-holds and look-outs hidden inside castle walls. My own need for such places of sanctuary can make me uneasy; I worry that a tendency towards retreat takes me from the world, that I am too prone to withdrawal, too inclined towards places of safekeeping. But perhaps it is possible to see it differently.

  I do a bit of reading about the etymology of the castle keep, this time steering away from the dictionary and looking to other sources. Keep towers were also referred to as donjons, which was later corrupted to dungeons – a term that originally referred not to a place of imprisonment but of refuge.

  Over this past season, it seems to me that the hive itself – that teeming space by the far fence – became a refuge of sorts, granting me the space and legitimacy to begin testing out some different ways of doing things. Down by the hive, away from the city’s tough exteriors, I found a place where I could take my armour plating off; could become more exposed, more capable of touching and being touched. Perhaps I became better at caring, too.

  I reach up to my bedside shelf and take down the piece of twisted and torn-off comb, which has faded and dried out, the wax melted in places from the sun.

  Huber and Langstroth, those pioneering beekeepers, each grappled in their own ways with that sometimes permeable membrane between inside and outside world. Huber was blind, and Langstroth sometimes became mute. The hive seems to have offered refuge to them both;
to have been a place where sight and voice and sense-making found a lucidity and a clarity they struggled to find elsewhere.

  Last year I was also feeling blocked, caught in a culture and a state of being that seemed to be short on care and to have little patience with sensitivity. The hive, for me, was about escaping that site of difficulty; or the hive was not about escape at all, but about the upwards thrust of my own hard-fought belief that something else was possible – a different kind of perception, of relation – within this less-than-perfect range.

  In theory, honey keeps. Its high osmolarity forces the water out of yeast and bacteria cells, killing them and preserving the honey itself. Our honey, on the other hand, is unlikely to last long. We’ve been heaping spoonfuls of it over porridge in the mornings; fragments of wax that escaped our filtering process float to the top, glistening in the milky sludge.

  The jar is already less than half-full and I’ve been half-wishing I’d kept more back, but so much of what I learned as a beekeeper this year came through other people that it seems right to pass the product on. I’ve saved a jar for Charlotte who took me to the natural history museum, and I took one into work. When people are handed a jar, I’ve noticed that they often hold it up to the light. It seems almost automatic, and not dependent on source – I gave one to Hannah and she held it up to an electric light bulb.

  Two hundred and fifty grams went into a honey cake. I’m going to Wales with Pat at the weekend, the first journey we’ll make together, a change from shuttling back and forth between my house and his. I thought a cake might be a good thing to take. A friend of his bought a derelict Victorian schoolhouse a few years ago, and has restored and reopened it as a painting school. He’s putting a gig on to celebrate, and has asked friends who are musicians to come and play.

  I left the cake in the oven too long and the crust came out as black as coal dust, but the inside is soft and sweet and so dense with honey that perhaps it is all the better for a little bitterness on the outside. Becky and I tried some just to check it was edible, and then Ellie came over and tried some too. It is a big cake, so there is still a lot left. I just hope that no one in Wales minds that it is less than whole, or that there are burnt bits on the crust.

  I mentioned to Ellie where we were going, and she told me about an old abbey nearby that we should go and visit. I looked it up and was redirected to a website for the organisation that looks after Welsh Heritage sites. Its name is Cadw – the Welsh word for keep.

  I won’t open the hive again now until the spring. You have to leave it closed through winter so as to help the colony preserve its heat; even the most interventionist beekeepers know this. So this week I packed my beekeeping equipment away for the final time this year, and as the temperature outside continues to cool I’ve noticed we are also going out to the garden less.

  It’s Saturday morning and the back door is open; I’m balanced on the doorsill. I tip forward, and my toes tap the brickwork paving outside. Tip back, and my heels hit the stone tiles of the kitchen. We leave for Wales in twenty minutes and Pat’s upstairs deciding whether to take soft shoes or walking boots, and which is the best music for the car. I’m wearing wellies, the boot sawn off at the ankle to make them lighter and easier for clambering. My bag is packed and waiting by the door, the honey cake wrapped in foil and balanced a little precariously on top. We ate a piece each when he arrived last night, just to check it was still fresh. (It was.)

  I look over at the hive and spot a bee lifting from the entrance. It’s been raining for days, and this is the first one I’ve seen all week. I step out of the doorway, walk down to the far fence. With wintry weather forecast, this might be my last glimpse of them for a while.

  At the base of the hive a small heap of shrivelled-up bodies lie scattered across the concrete block. These are male drones, expelled from the hive and left to die of starvation rather than consume any more precious resources. The colony is ridding itself of surplus, reducing down to a core body of workers and the queen until spring arrives, when she will begin laying and the colony expanding again.

  The ONBG has reduced down for winter, too. I went along to a meeting earlier this week, and we were only a slim handful. But Paul says that as a group, we’re thriving. He has a long list of people ready to join next spring, and is even planning a programme of trips in the summer. He’s met a lady who runs a plant nursery specialising in bee-friendly flowers – she grows them herself, from seed and without pesticides; she’s going to show the group her test plots, and how to monitor which plants are most popular with the bees. There are already twenty-six people signed up to go.

  I knew better than to give honey to Luke – he’s swimming in it by this time of year; but I did go and see him when I was in London last. ‘So you’re a real beekeeper now,’ he said. ‘You’ve made it through a whole season with a hive.’ He’s busy at the moment, working on a project aiming to create ‘pollinator corridors’ in areas suffering the effects of fragmentation. Using existing railway lines, he’ll be working with station staff and community groups to build a network of flowering habitats across London and beyond, doing the job of reconnection in places where pollinators are struggling. He’s just bought a retro caravan, too. A friend of his is going to convert it into a bee-mobile, a sensory-education centre for kids. There’s work coming in already and they need more hands. He asked if I’d like to get involved, and I said that I would.

  Three more bees emerge from the entrance, pace the landing board and fly out. That too-bright tangerine colour has softened over summer, faded and streaked by sun and rain, and it doesn’t look so out of place in the garden now. Sometimes when I’ve opened it up I’ve found spiders nesting in the lid.

  ‘Are you ready?’ Pat calls, and I look back to where his head has just appeared from the doorway. ‘I’m ready,’ he says, ‘whenever you are.’ He disappears back inside. I notice he’s wearing soft shoes; and he’s taking walking boots inside a bag.

  How to shake the feeling I have when I look at him sometimes that he is not separate from the hive? That through this experience of beekeeping, of learning about and listening to the colony, I might have called something up – might have begun to articulate and name a capacity I was missing, a connection I needed? A particular kind of sensitivity, a quality of attention which is so thick in him it is almost like a substance itself, and which he encourages and bolsters in me. What to do with a feeling like that – which is not rational, and doesn’t fit with the usual categories – except to notice it silently and with a sideways grin as it becomes part of my day-to-day?

  It’s time to go. I make a movement towards leaving and then pause a moment and look up. I’m still trying to guess where the bees’ flight paths lead to, or even which direction they’re headed. And of course I can’t. I lose sight of each one somewhere near the fence; they’re too small for my human eyes, or my eyes are too far from them. But still, here they are, arriving back. Legs thickened with pollen, bellies tightened. I watch another worker leave. From hive to tree to garden fence, beyond. I turn, hearing the car engine start on the street outside, and walk back to the house.

  Acknowledgements

  This book is born of the many encounters, conversations and exchanges that took place over the course of that year of beekeeping, and I’m grateful to all those people who appear on these pages and to the many others who have flitted about the edges of them. Thanks especially to Luke Dixon, and to Becky Ayre, who lived this story at close quarters, and coped brilliantly.

  I am indebted to Paul Honigmann of the ONBG and Oxfordshire Beekeepers Association, and to Jack Pritchard, each of whom tirelessly answered my queries, untangled my confusions and scrutinised this manuscript for accuracy. Such patience and generosity of spirit is something truly special; and they never once (to my knowledge) laughed at my silly questions. Any inaccuracies that remain are my own.

  Thanks to the editors at the Junket who published an excerpt of this book at an early stage, and to Skaftfell C
entre for Visual Art in Iceland and the Alde Valley Spring Festival in Suffolk, England, who awarded residencies to support the project even when I was still struggling to define what it was. Luckily, there were people around who kept me finding out, and I’m deeply grateful in this respect to Rob Macfarlane for steering me back to the place where it was pulsing; and to Ellie Stedall, Naomi Booth, Dulcie, Laura Joyce, Tom Houlton, Tom Bunstead, Kieran Devaney, Camilla Bostock and Katrina Zaat for helping me to stay with it. Heartfelt thanks also to my agent Jessica Woollard at David Higham Associates for picking it up and carrying it into the world with such care and subtlety of insight, so much vitality.

  A full-bodied salute to Rowan Cope at Scribner for her steady and sensitive eye, her call for clarity over evasion. Thanks also to the rest of the teams at Scribner and David Higham for taking this on, having fun and running with it.

  For offers of room and shelter during the writing, thanks to Julia Blackburn, Tim and Kate Ottevanger, Michael and Marcia Blakenham, Tom Merilion and Ashley Mellet.

  And, finally and above all, thanks to my mum and dad, and to Pat, who opened the windows and brought in the light.

  Bibliography

  My learning about bees and beekeeping came from a variety of sources, and a special debt is owed to the following authors and books:

  Crane, E., The World History of Beekeeping and Honey Hunting (New York, NY: Routledge, 1999).

  Ellis, H., Sweetness & Light: The Mysterious History of the Honeybee (London: Sceptre, 2004).

  Gould, J. L. and Gould, C. G., The Honey Bee (New York, NY: Scientific American Library, 1988).

  Preston, C., Bee (London: Reaktion, 2006).

  Wilson, B., The Hive: The Story of the Honeybee and Us (London: John Murray, 2004).