Oil and Honey

by Bill McKibben

  “When I saw the state of the honey crop, I almost pulled the plug on doing the house the same year,” he said. “I theoretically still had enough money in the bank, but I’m very cautious. I didn’t want to risk using up my whole balance.” (Needless to say, he was not borrowing to build.) “But I still had half my crop in storage from the year before”—stacks of fifty-gallon drums of honey—“and the people who had been buying my honey and reselling it in Massachusetts were doing so well that they wanted to buy the rest, and at a good price. All in all I had about $70,000 more than I thought I was going to. And that was enough.” The crew, by this time more seasoned, picked up their hammers and returned to work to build the house. He had sketched out the plans on a piece of paper—an uninsulated workshop, a mudroom/sauna, and a single big room with Japanese doors that could partition off the bedroom if he wanted. “I knew I wanted to make the smallest house that two at the most could live in it without it becoming a mental health problem,” he said. “And eventually I want a greenhouse attached to the south side. And I wanted it to be straightforward to build.”

  Which it was—the frame went up easily enough, but Kirk spent long hours finishing the inside. There’s a beautiful built-in writing desk carved from a slab of redwood salvaged from the beer tanks at the original Rheingold Brewery in Brooklyn, New York. (“When I was sawing it up I could smell the beer,” Kirk said.) The floor is made of pine boards, the same width and size as those used for the beehives; the oak trim is the same oak he uses for the stands that hold the hives. “It all came from Book Brothers sawmill in West Haven, where I’ve gotten the wood for my hives for years,” he explained.

  In some ways, then, he’s living inside his own version of a hive, and it’s just as free of chemicals. He bought the urethane to finish the floors from a plant in the small Vermont town of Hardwick; it’s made from whey left over from dairies (the other half of the plant produces its own brand of native tofu). The house is highly insulated—I’ve never felt a draft. But when the windows are open the cross-ventilation cools things off immediately.

  I ventured over the day after he’d spent his first night sleeping in the new home. “I was pretty exhausted,” he said. “I’m not very good at transitions. I’m not a great traveler. But I love it here. It’s a luxury suite compared to my old place.”

  Indeed. It was light, clean, quiet, airy, cozy. The few bookshelves were filled with his library: some Wendell Berry, some Chatwin, Tolstoy, E. B. White, Tolkien, The Complete Book of Furniture Repair and Refinishing, lots of old bee books, the journals of Lewis and Clark’s expedition, a little Scott and Helen Nearing, and Joy of Cooking.

  On the wall a small monitor tracks the amount of electricity coming off the solar panel on the roof, and the amount stored in the batteries—Kirk’s house is entirely off the grid. “I’ve got six lights on and I’m using one-tenth of a kilowatt hour. The refrigerator in the workshop isn’t plugged in, and it doesn’t need to be because it’s cold now, but when I plug it in it seems to go just fine.” (When I checked back a few weeks later he said, “I’ve never seen the batteries lower than 75 percent, but if it’s a problem I can just decide not to vacuum till the sun comes out.”) Like Thoreau, he’d kept careful count of the total cost: “It took $75,000 to build the house, and $113,000 to build the shop,” he said. “That includes hiring the backhoe, and what I paid for the tractor, and putting in all the road. If I didn’t have to do the septic in the way the town insisted on, I could have saved $15,000. If I’d had more time I could have done more of the plumbing and electricity by myself, and that would have been another $10,000 saved right there.” Still: lovely house, big barn, all for well under $200,000; even with inflation a bit more than Thoreau, but he was planning to spend the rest of his life there, not just a couple of years.

  We sat eating bread and honey, with honey in our tea, and what struck me most was the quiet. The pan of water on top of the woodstove hissed softly as it humidified the house. That was it. Calm.

  “I’m finally allowing myself to be exhausted,” Kirk said, and I nodded in agreement. “I tried to take one whole day off a week through this whole thing, but toward the end I just wanted to keep going. I had it down to a science as we were building, how to wring every last bit of progress out of the day. It was a massive change for me, to work that hard, and I enjoyed a lot of it—it was exciting. But now I can get back to going whatever way the weather goes. In nasty weather it’s a three-minute walk through the field to the shop. And when the sun’s out I can go to the beeyards.”

  * * *

  It was one of those uncomfortable moments when you suddenly realize you’re in the wrong place—that you’re a rube from the sticks in a sophisticated city whose customs you don’t quite understand.

  About three weeks after the president announced the delay of the Keystone decision, the insider news organization Politico invited me to speak at its swank “Washington Year in Review” symposium. Politico’s young reporters had provided balanced coverage of the pipeline fight all fall, so even though I’d spent barely three weeks in Washington all year (and the most memorable nights had been spent in Central Cell Block), I found myself traveling down from Vermont to share a stage as an expert with Representatives Ed Markey (D-Massachusetts) and Lee Terry (R-Nebraska).

  I was a little nervous—the street outside the hotel was crammed with limos, and the green room was filled with congressional aides punching their BlackBerrys. It didn’t help that Terry, a Republican and reliable friend of the fossil fuel industry, had recently introduced a bill to force the rapid approval of the Keystone pipeline, overriding the president. But in Washington deep conflict doesn’t necessarily seem to amount to much. Our panel was perfectly amiable—Terry and Markey were joking with each other like, well, colleagues, and I did my best to fit in, pointing out with as much gentleness as I could muster why the jobs figures Terry kept citing were bogus, I mean ridiculous, I mean overstated. It was all “agree-to-disagree” harmony.

  Until, in passing, I said something that seemed so obvious it didn’t even occur to me that anyone would object. In response to a question from a reporter about why Obama’s delay announcement hadn’t stopped the process, I said that clearly Big Oil wanted the pipeline revived, and that the industry was using the congressmen it funded heavily to make it happen.

  Beside me I could feel Terry bristle. Are you saying, he quickly interjected, that we’re “bought off”? And I suddenly felt bad, as if I indeed had said something wrong. I’ve taught Sunday school; I was raised to be nice. Had I hurt his feelings? My face reddened, I stammered, and I tried to say I didn’t know anything about him in particular, that I was sure he’d eventually be part of the solution, and so on. But the frost stayed in the air, and I could barely focus on the rest of the questions. Was it really possible that people in Washington didn’t understand what the rest of the country—left, right, and center—believes about them? That they take campaign money from corporations in return for doing their bidding? I went home and looked up Lee Terry in the database of “Dirty Energy Money” compiled by Oil Change International. Koch Industries had given him $15,500—they have a “direct and substantial interest” in the pipeline. Exxon-Mobil had given him $25,000. The Petroleum Marketers Association of America had tossed in $12,500. Conoco, Chevron, BP—all in all since 1999 he’d gotten $365,798 from the fossil fuel industry, and in the latest tally he’d voted with them exactly 100 percent of the time.

  Sitting there on the dais, I was feeling rude, but also stunned. You really think this is okay? To take money from people whose interests you’ll then pretend to judge impartially? For most of us, it’s no different from going to a football game where one of the teams is paying the referees. But Washington has its own set of rules, and they’re even more lax in the aftermath of the Citizens United decision letting corporations spend at will. One recent poll had shown that only 9 percent of Americans approved of Congress (compared with 11 percent who thought polygamy is a good idea,
and 16 percent who approved of the BP oil spill). But it was their rules under which we’d fight the pipeline as the winter wore on.

  * * *

  Perhaps as an antidote to thinking about Congress, I lugged bee books with me all across the country, learning a steady stream of trivia about what may be the most remarkable animals on the planet. Some of the books were magisterial. In E. O. Wilson’s recent and controversial Social Conquest of Earth, he explains that the bee that stings you when you disturb the hive “is a product of the mother queen’s genome. The defending worker is part of the queen’s phenotype, as teeth and fingers are part of your own phenotype.” Okay, whatever. But there’s also Simon Buxton’s The Shamanic Way of the Bee, which describes his initiation into an ancient cult called the Path of Pollen. The process began with him sleeping inside a six-sided wicker basket and ended with him covered in a particular kind of honey that caused him to get an erection that “to my vision began to extend itself to an absurd length, some two feet in reach.” (If you were trying to choose between the two books, Buxton’s got a rave review from “singer/songwriter/pianist Tori Amos,” and Wilson’s didn’t.)

  Anyway, I know a lot of things: there’s a cave painting from 15000 BC showing people taking honey from a wild hive; bees have two tiny hooks on each foot that stick like burrs, which is a good thing since the ones at the top of a swarm are, in proportionate terms, the equivalent of “a man, hanging by his knees and trying to support … thousands of pounds.” Also, when the queen’s time is up, the hive executes her in a formalized death ritual known as “balling the queen,” which involves many bees forming “a solid ball around their mother, pressing harder and harder” till she dies. Honeybees pollinate a hundred thousand different plants. Their visual range spans blue, yellow, green, and ultraviolet. Nurse bees look in on each brood cell three hundred times in the course of a day. If human infants grew as fast as baby bees, your kid would weigh four tons within a week. A bee’s wings beat 160 to 220 times per minute, “producing the note C sharp below middle C,” and allowing it to travel as far afield as nine miles in search of food. If the hive gets too hot in summer, workers rush back with drops of water, and “all bees in the hive cease whatever they are doing to beat their wings vigorously, in unison.” The resulting draft evaporates the water, resulting in a primitive form of air-conditioning. A single bee would have to fly fifty thousand miles to gather enough nectar for a pound of honey.

  I can tell you about bees in Greece (Plato thought there were too many hives on the mountains of Attica, and Solon, the prototypical legislator, passed a law mandating a distance of three hundred feet between one beeyard and the next) and in England (soon after Elizabeth I perished, her royal beekeeper published a book called The Feminine Monarchie; or, The Historie of Bees, celebrating the general advisability of having women in charge). The hive that swarms when it becomes too crowded was held up to encourage Englishmen to leave their overpacked native isle for the new world: John Cotton, for instance, pointed out that “when the hive of the Common-wealth is so full, that Tradesmen cannot live one by another, but eate up one another, in this case it is lawfull to remove.”

  One place they removed to, of course, was North America, and Tammy Horn’s excellent Bees in America demonstrates that by 1621 the Jamestown colony was importing beehives. In 1623 a new arrival planted apple trees on what is now Boston’s Beacon Hill; when they fared poorly, he sent home for some bees to pollinate them. “Honey-hunting” for wild colonies “became one of the first American past-times,” and it wasn’t long before the hive metaphors were as widespread as the hives: colonial Americans, for instance, loved having “quilting bees,” “husking bees,” and the like. George Washington kept bees, and Martha Washington liked rose-flavored honey, which required a half cup of rose petals for every cup of the sweet stuff. The Continental Congress put a beehive on its first currency. Both Shakers and Mormons took bees as icons.

  Bees went to war—or at least, by the time World War II rolled around beekeepers were urged to increase their wax production to “waterproof canvas tents, belts, and metal casing of bullets.… Airplanes waxed smooth with beeswax saved thousands of gallons of valuable fuel.” The Pentagon has used bees to track land mines in Afghanistan and truck bombs close to home, but so far has not emulated the Roman soldiers who would thrust beehives into the tunnels of their adversaries, launch them in clay pots over the walls of besieged cities, and lob them onto enemy ships, where “they would so unnerve opposing sailors that they would often jump overboard to escape.”

  Could I go on? Sure I could. Summer bees live about six weeks. For the first three they stay in the hive, working as carpenters, guards, and nurses. In middle age they go out to forage—they’re good for about five hundred miles, or three weeks, of flying before their wings are too tattered to go on. Queens lay 1,500 eggs a day. Since it’s hard to see what’s going on in the hive, observers have often made mistakes. Aristotle believed bees had teeth; somewhat less understandably, he believed that while bees made honeycomb, they used it to catch the honey that “falls from the air, especially at the rising of stars and when the rainbow descends.” (Pliny the Elder called honey the “saliva of the stars.”) Virgil thought bees were born from the rotting carcasses of cattle, and so did Samson in the Bible. When Jesus rose from the tomb, the disciples gave him a piece of broiled fish and a honeycomb; when the Buddha broke his long fast, it was with a honeycomb that a monkey brought him in the forest of Kosamba.

  One book stood out from the rest of the library, though—a new volume called Honeybee Democracy, by a friend of Kirk’s named Thomas Seeley. An apple-cheeked professor of biology at Cornell, Seeley seemed to be widely acknowledged as the bee man of his generation. He’d already written one classic book, The Wisdom of the Hive, that explained how honeybees managed to efficiently gather and process nectar. Honeybee Democracy attempted to answer another puzzle: when bees swarm, how do they agree on a new home? His answer, gathered by ingenious experiments over two decades, was not just fascinating; it also bore directly on the political fights we were entrenched in, and on the vexed question for me of working close to home or away in the world.

  In the spring or early summer, a successful beehive gets too crowded—it’s time for some of the bees to depart and form a new hive, finding a home and filling it with honey so they can overwinter and begin the cycle again. (Beekeepers obviously don’t want swarming—they work to divide colonies before it happens, so they get a new colony instead of watching it disappear into the woods.) When they’re getting ready to swarm, each bee will swallow a drop or two of honey, increasing its body weight by 50 percent—that gives them the fuel to make it to their new home and settle in. At the right moment, the queen and ten thousand or more followers will take to the air and alight in a huge mass, which usually looks like a beard hanging from a branch. (A third of the old hive stays behind, raising a new queen and eventually restoring the remaining colony to strength.) So—you’ve got ten thousand bees hanging from a limb. Here’s the problem: how do they decide on a new home?

  The answer is an exercise in consensual democracy. The mass of bees sends out a few hundred scouts, who scatter in every direction, seeking out suitable cavities in trees or walls. Over the years Seeley established that a dream home for a new colony has a capacity of about forty liters—big enough that the honey supply can last the winter, small enough that it’s not too expensive to heat via the metabolism of the bees. Such a home, about the size of a wastebasket, is best if it comes with an entrance hole about 2.5 centimeters in diameter. Scout bees spend a half hour or more assessing a possible site, walking back and forth to figure out, apparently, how big and how cozy it is. And then they fly back to the swarm, which is where things get interesting.

  Scout bees are coming from every direction, each with its own potential home site to report on. When they arrive, they do a dance to describe the location of the potential home—by watching the angle, Seeley and his students can determine how f
ar away the site is and in what direction. And over time, he discovered that the bees danced longer and harder depending on just how well the new hole fit the colony’s needs: a forty-liter cavity and the bees were practically on Soul Train; if it was only fifteen liters in size then the dance was feeble by comparison. At first, the scout bees put a “sizable number of widely scattered alternatives ‘on the table’ for discussion,” Seeley observed. But as the hours pass (this process usually takes a couple of days) a few leading contenders emerge. And eventually, almost all the scout bees are dancing on behalf of a single site. By running tests with hive boxes of various sizes on desert islands, Seeley was able to prove the colonies almost always came to the right choice—and once they’d done so they flew there en masse, escorting the queen (who’d played no part in the whole drama) to her new home. By painting a lot of little dots on bee thoraxes, Seeley and his colleagues even figured out how big a quorum you needed before the holdouts for other sites conceded and everyone decided to join in a consensus.

  Seeley describes how he put the insights from the hive to use in meetings of the Cornell biology department (oh, to be a bee on the wall at the first meeting!), where professors now cast secret ballots and where, as department chair, he attempts to stay entirely neutral while new information comes in. “My colleagues are always good ‘scout bees,’” he reports, “and most are as uninhibited as a dancing bee about sharing their knowledge.” He also compares the hive process at length to something I’ve known all my life, the New England town meeting. In our small towns, we gather on the first Tuesday in March to figure out the town’s business for the year to come. It’s sometimes heated—for most of us, garbage collection has a more profound influence on our daily lives than, say, the defense budget—but with the obvious need to work together, the help of Robert’s Rules of Order, and the advantage of workable scale, we make decisions and adjourn for cookies. (I would never miss a town meeting, if only because my neighbor Barry King makes this particular kind with her own maple cream.) It’s essentially Athenian, and it’s worked for several hundred years, which is not as long as bees have been swarming, but considerably longer than other arrangements.