by Helen Jukes
A Note from the Author
All stories are shaped in part by their telling, and it should be noted that – in the process of putting this one down into book form – some names and details have been changed.
Contents
1 Doorway
2 Hive
3 Bee
4 Orientation
5 Losing Sight
6 Swarm
7 Honey
Acknowledgements
Bibliography
Further Information
1
Doorway
November
The day the idea arrives I am wanting badly to escape. Home from work and too wound up to stay inside I open the back door, step out. There’s a scuffed-up doormat at my feet printed with three faded purple owls and Welcome in big letters underneath. It’s the wrong way round, it welcomes leavers; it’d be upside down if you were arriving here. I stare down at it and blink. A nerve at the back of my eye buzzes as if the whirr of the computer screen has got inside my head. My shoulders are hunched and my neck is stiff. A thick wad of muscle has bunched itself at the top of my spine and now I knead it with my knuckles, hard.
I’m tired. And I’m still wearing my work shoes, which are not made for walking about in a frosty garden, at dusk. But this evening I need to cover some ground – to get somewhere else, not here. In the back garden of an end-terrace on a busy road leading out of Oxford’s city centre you can only get so far. I count the strides, and make fifteen. Past the shed with a vine like a trailing wig and the pond silted with fallen leaves. Along the wall adjoining our neighbours’ garden, which crumbles slightly when you touch it. Near the end of the garden this wall gives out altogether and becomes high beech hedge. Here is a compost bin, and then a thicket of weeds.
I moved in recently, with my friend Becky. I’d been offered a job working for a charity in Oxford just as the last project I’d been working on in Sussex was drawing to a close. It was a permanent contract, and after a lot of moving around over the last few years, that felt like an opportunity; a chance to stay in one place, maybe even settle down a bit. When I called Becky and told her I was moving to the area, she suggested we get somewhere together. So then we found this place. A red-brick two-up two-down with clothes moths in the carpets and a narrow garden at the back that’s grown overcrowded with weeds. That was a few months ago, and it hasn’t been an outright success so far. The job’s been tough, and I’ve been struggling with the workload. Wishing I had a thicker skin, and was better at managing things like office politics and fluorescent light bulbs and those desk chairs with the seats that spin and spin. Last week, a colleague told me that both my predecessors quit when they hit overload, and it was clear from her face that she was not expecting the story to be any different this time around.
At the far end of the garden is a wooden fence. It’s hidden behind a loping conifer and dried-up gooseberry bushes, hidden again under a mess of brambles, so you wouldn’t know it’s there or quite where the garden ends – except for a gap to one side, between a holly bush and a bird table, where you can see it. I squeeze through, and touch the fence. Tiptoe up, but I can’t see over it. And now for one moment, maybe two, sheltered by the holly, which also pricks my thighs, I forget where I am. Forget the house that doesn’t feel like home yet, and the hectic work schedule. This is when the idea arrives. Here is where the bees would be, I think, and then catch myself thinking it. Step back with surprise. It used to be a habit, looking for gaps like this. It’s been a while since I remembered it. But now I begin checking for prospect, wind exposure, the damp. I glance up, to where the trees won’t shadow them. There’s a warehouse roof some distance away, the sun sinking. A plop behind me, as a raindrop falls.
I learned a bit about beekeeping a few years ago when I lived in London, where I met Luke, a friend of a friend, who has hives all over the city. His beekeeping began as a hobby: he was given a small plot at the Natural History Museum in exchange for a pot of honey each year – but then it grew. Soon he was being approached by other companies who wanted to keep bees, and they were offering to pay him. By the time I moved to London and asked for an introduction he had hives at magazine- and fashion-houses, pubs, hotels – he was keeping the bees and training the staff until they could do it for themselves.
Urban beekeeping was still unusual at that time, and I’d never seen inside a hive. It sounded fun, and different, and – feeling dizzied by the scope and sprawl of my new home city – I was keen to meet someone with half an eye on the lives of small and humming creatures.
The first time we met, Luke was wearing a cream three-piece suit, a pink shirt and a summer boater, and he was swinging a blue IKEA bag. He exuded charm – ‘Helen!’ he beamed when he saw me. ‘How wonderful to meet you!’ We were outside Coram’s Fields, a children’s park in central London, where he kept two hives in a thin strip of undergrowth behind the cafe.
‘So you’ve come to see the bees?’ he said, and I nodded. Underneath his hat was a head of short grey hair. He looked a bit like a mole, I thought, as I spied metal contraptions and gauze masks inside the bag. ‘Some people believe that bees can smell your fear,’ he said, as he unlocked a gate in the iron railings and we followed a gravel path around. So as we pulled on our suits I concentrated on not being afraid, but when he lifted a hive lid and they began seething out I was terrified.
I hadn’t even realised until that day that honeybees are different from bumblebees; that there are over twenty thousand species of bee in the world, and only a small fraction of them make honey. ‘Apis mellifera,’ Luke announced, as though introducing an old friend. That’s the western honeybee, and the one most extensively kept and bred.
These bees were not fuzzy and they were not soft. They were brittle and trembling and when Luke lifted the hive lid they didn’t buzz, they hummed – like a machine but more unstable, more liable to volatility. Beneath the lid the space was packed with wooden frames hanging perpendicular to the roofline, each one filled to its edges with comb covered and crawling with bees.
‘Look,’ Luke said as he lifted a frame out, pointing first to where the queen had laid eggs inside the cells, then to where the workers had stored pollen for feeding young larvae and finally to where nectar was undergoing its conversion to honey. Honeybees are among the few species of bee to live together as a colony – even bumblebees, who are social in summer, reduce down to a single queen in winter. They work to produce as much honey as they can while flowers are blooming so as to sustain themselves through the cold season.
They were crowding from the frames and from the entrance. We had unsettled them, and now they wanted to unsettle us in return. I glanced over at Luke, who was working calmly and swiftly, with an ease I hadn’t noticed before.
‘They’re swarming!’ I yelped.
‘They’re not swarming,’ he said. ‘Swarming is what happens when a colony splits and leaves a hive; these lot are just defending this one.’
I was hooked. By the bees, and by the beekeeping too – those precise and careful movements that were not unlike tenderness; not unlike a kind of intimacy. Soon I was beekeeping whenever I could. Luke would send a text message with an address and a time of meeting, and I’d jump on my bike and race through the streets to go and join him. It felt like slipping through a hidden side-door, stepping slightly outside the flow of things and into a different version of the city. Nothing was as it first appeared when we went beekeeping. Walls had recesses, windows could be climbed through, roofs climbed onto. We followed underground tunnels and hidden passageways, entered green spaces I hadn’t guessed were there. But all of this was peripheral to the actual task of opening a hive, when we had to set
tle down, become very attentive to the colony and ourselves. The beekeeping suits covered us from hooded head to boot-clad ankle, and looked more like they’d been designed for protecting against nuclear radiation than opening a beehive. Inside the suit I was both cocooned and strangely conspicuous – that space behind the cafe at Coram’s Fields bordered a pavement, and passers-by used to stop and point through the park railings as we worked. We hardly noticed them. Once the lid was off, we were absorbed. Each movement of arm, leg, hand and head was freighted – a sudden grab or drop would disturb the bees, and then we’d have to watch awhile and wait as the disturbance moved through the colony as a wave or a change in frequency or a shudder.
I could do with finding a hidden door now, I think to myself, crunching back over the frosted grass of the Oxford garden with my arms folded and my hands tucked into my armpits. Perhaps I will get bees, I think, looking up. And by the time I’ve reached the back door of the house the idea is already taking shape in my mind, gathering and becoming solid, bedding itself in.
Yes, I think, eyeing the collection of abandoned plant pots by the doorway. We could do with a bit of pollination here. Something to inject a bit of life. My fingers are like ice blocks and I’m not sure if they’re freezing my armpits or if my armpits are thawing them.
Next day I’m at work again, pinned between a laminate desk and a wall.
The office is small. There are five workstations jigsawed in, each one a slight variation on a type. Desk, computer, chair, worker – like not-quite-conjoined cells, and you can’t see who’s inside each one except by leaning, which is a dangerous game when you’re seated on a swivel chair with wheels. Each desk has a hole in the top the size of a clenched fist, through which a bunch of cables runs down into the floor. The carpet is made from nylon threads, like a head of hair that’s been squashed down or sat upon – I know this because once when I was here and there was no one else in the room I lay down and looked at it close up. The walls are white. As I walk in each morning I feel the muscles at the back of my neck clench, and they stay like that until I leave.
It’s late afternoon and my attention has strayed. The plant I brought in to brighten my desk has died, and I am unsure how to dispose of it. Outside in the corridor people are shuttling past, shoulders pinched, their feet thudding dully over the squashed-down carpet hair. A girl from the marketing department hurries in and dumps a pile of papers on my desk. ‘You asked me to print the posters but I can’t print the posters,’ she says, loud enough that everyone else in the tight-packed room can hear her. She can’t print the posters because the printer is broken, and the person who normally fixes it is off with stress.
We look at the pile of papers. She shrugs at me. Then she turns on her heels and leaves.
I shift the pile to the edge of the desk and blink at my computer screen. I want out, I think, then quickly bury the thought. Because I can’t just get out. I’ve moved houses, changed cities, to take this job – I can’t just up and leave.
The skin around my eyes is tight. Maybe the screen is too bright or my focus is too narrow or maybe the muscles are tired of bracing themselves against everything that has been pressing in. I rub my eyes, refocus. This is when the idea comes back again.
‘I might get a beehive,’ I say out loud, to no one in particular.
Joanna who sits at the desk opposite bellows a laugh and gestures over to my sorry pot plant. ‘Madness,’ she says bluntly, and returns to her screen.
No one else says anything. I don’t say anything.
And that, it seems, is the end of it.
But I forget that words are important. Once you’ve gone and said a thing out loud, people start holding you to it. Once you begin describing something in your head, you are already setting it in motion.
Later that week my friend Ellie comes over with a bunch of grapes and a box of peppermint teabags. Ellie is almost a whole head taller than me, with long dark hair that always looks windswept. If she were an animal she might be a hare, because of her long legs and her eyes that are wide and green and rimmed with black. She has a love of language so precise and clear that sometimes when I listen to her I think it doesn’t matter what happens; everything is okay, as long as you can find a way to describe it.
‘How’s things?’ she says, as we stand beside the kitchen counter and wait for the kettle to boil. The grapes are small and green and their flesh is so tart inside their tightened skins that we wince with each bite into them.
‘Okay,’ I say. ‘Busy. I’ve been thinking of getting a beehive.’ Throwing a grape up and catching it between my teeth, as though getting a hive is a thing that one might quite casually fall into.
In fact, I haven’t stopped thinking about it. Over the weekend I hunted through cupboards for my old beekeeping suit, which I found in a trunk under a pile of curtains and dried-out mothballs. I’ve hung it from the banisters to air. And now whenever I walk upstairs the top of my head brushes its sleeves.
‘I didn’t know you kept bees,’ Ellie says, leaning over the sink to get a better look at the garden. ‘Could you have them here?’
‘Oh yes,’ I tell her. ‘We’re bordered on two sides by vacant land. It’s just wild space over the fence there, and allotments behind. And that beech hedge is screening the neighbours’ garden. It’s perfect, really.’
She leans further and looks. But it’s been raining all day, and everything is sunk into the same dull grey as the traffic and the street beyond. It’s difficult to imagine there being enough here to sustain even a single bee, let alone a whole colony of them.
So instead we begin a kind of game, imagining the kind of person who becomes a beekeeper; sketching a character in words:
‘It’s a man.’
‘Yeah, it’s definitely a man.’
‘Likes his own company.’
‘On the edge of retirement.’
‘Retired already.’
‘Or with a lot of free time.’
‘And a sweet tooth.’
‘And a thick skin.’
‘Or a thick suit.’
‘Keeps his calm in the midst of a swarm.’
‘Uh-oh,’ I say, and make a face. I am not always good at keeping calm.
I’m still in my work clothes, thin tights and pinching shoes and a dress that itches at the knees. We could go on. But the more we do, the more remote I feel from actually becoming a beekeeper myself. The idea that had begun taking root in my head begins to twist, contorting itself until I wonder if getting a hive really is a kind of madness. Aren’t I supposed to be heading out of the front door, getting to know the area, rather than hiding away by the far fence?
‘I saw a film last year about commercial beekeeping in America,’ Ellie’s saying. ‘It’s not just about honey any more; some of them make half their income supplying pollination services in places that have been over-farmed. They drive around in massive trucks, hundreds of hives on the back. Migratory beekeeping, it’s called. The film followed one guy who spent most of the year on the road.’
‘I remember a news story last year about one of those trucks,’ I say, pouring tea and passing her a mug. ‘A big crash, I think it was Washington State. Four hundred hives fell out and scattered across the road. It was just before dawn. The sun came up, and swarms of bees came with it.’
‘What happened?’
‘To the bees? Firemen came, and hosed them down. Killed a lot of them. I think beekeepers from a nearby town arrived and caught some.’
‘There was a bit in that film about China,’ Ellie says, cupping her hands around the mug. ‘Places where there are no bees left. The owners of apple orchards were employing people to do the pollinating. They showed a clip of it. Farm labourers up trees, clambering around with tiny paintbrushes. Bodies half-hidden by the blossom.’
On her way to the loo she passes the suit hanging over the stairs. ‘Wow,’ she says. ‘You’re really thinking about it.’
I look up at the suit arms dangling and their elastic
ated cuffs and realise suddenly how different it would be to keep a hive of my own. When I was beekeeping before it was always under Luke’s guidance. All observations drawn, all decisions made, could be checked and passed by him. We were moving between places, covering distances. I never quite took responsibility, I was never really accountable to a single hive.
It would be another story to have a colony of bees here, outside my own back door. And me dressed up as the keeper of them. In truth, in the rest of my life I’m not so well versed in keeping things. Like a lot of my generation, I’ve moved around a lot. I haven’t lived anywhere longer than eighteen months in the whole of my adult life. I’m thirty. I don’t find it difficult to make new friends, but bar a few misjudged kerfuffles, I haven’t had a boyfriend for years. Restlessness doesn’t sit easily with intimacy or is a neat way to avoid it, and there is something a bit terrifying now about the thought of inviting another creature in.
There does seem to be something about beekeeping that gets in. I’ve met beekeepers who talk about getting the bug, that it gets under your skin – as though bees had become an obsession, and keeping them a compulsion. Luke doesn’t talk like that, but he did tell me once that soon after he started beekeeping, he began noticing colour differently. Bee eyesight spans a different part of the colour spectrum from ours; they see more blue than we do, and many insect-pollinated flowers have evolved to bloom in blues and purples so as to make themselves more visible to bees. Luke found that he too had begun noticing blues around him. Not just the lavender bush outside his door but also the napkin beside his plate, that man’s watch-strap, this bottle top skittering over the pavement. He’d been drawn towards colour, and also drawn into the uncertainty of changing weather patterns. ‘If it rains, my plans change. The weather decides if I can go beekeeping, not me.’
‘It’s been a strange year,’ he said to me one spring, after it had seemed to rain for a month, and then was hot, and then snowed. I also began noticing things I wouldn’t have otherwise. Stepping out of the suit, unfettered by any real beekeeping responsibilities, and returning to the city streets, I’d see details I’d overlooked before; I became aware of what creature life existed behind and between London’s walls. Sometimes my eyes felt altered after opening a hive. I wondered what it was about the bees that made the looking different.
