by Helen Jukes
I scoop the sticky crumbs from the books and floorboards, return them to my plate. So what is attracting us to beekeeping, if it’s not directly about saving the bees – and how do we become better custodians of their future? Perhaps it’s unfair to see the resurgence only as another form of avoidance of what’s really happening outside, to our climate and landscapes. Isn’t it possible that there is some experience we’re seeking, which we believe we might access, by bringing ourselves into an encounter with a hive?
The British Beekeepers Association describes beekeeping as a therapeutic pastime. It sounds a bit like a tagline from a tourist brochure – Get closer to nature! – and it makes me cringe. Our species has destroyed their habitats, moved inside the hive to manipulate their most intimate processes (you can now order an artificially inseminated queen, her wings clipped – and she’ll arrive by airmail); it’d seem a little ridiculous to now turn round, seek nature out, and expect it to make me feel good.
But beekeeping is about more than gaining proximity to a hive; it’s about entering into a relationship with a colony. So now I try a little exercise in my head. I try stretching my understanding of the word therapy, pulling its meaning at the edges to see what it can hold. And I wonder about a definition that places a different emphasis on feeling better – not feeling better, but feeling better: an approach to beekeeping focused on paying attention, becoming more attuned to the world around us, perhaps even adjusting how we sense and see. This might not always feel good, since it is not nice to see a colony perish. But if therapy is about gaining a more rounded perception of ourselves in relation to the world around us – how we affect our environments, and are affected by them; if it is concerned not simply with the business of tending tired egos, but the slower and more effortful labour of creating more sentient, compassionate and capable human beings – well, then perhaps lifting a hive lid and taking a look inside wouldn’t be such a bad way to start.
I pick the honey jar up from the tray and turn it around, reading the label. Even this talks about health-giving properties – it seems you can’t get anywhere near bees without some mention of healing. And who am I to question it? All those layers of history and meaning don’t fall away because a marketing campaign got hold of them. Something happens when we come into contact with a hive; it’s been happening since as far back as beekeeping began. Bees do something to us – they capture our imagination and beliefs, and our feeling.
They captured my imagination, for sure. When I was beekeeping with Luke he’d speak as we worked – naming things, telling stories – so that slowly my sense of the bees’ world expanded. I began to enjoy the tang of fear I felt as we opened the hives, which gave way each time to a kind of intimacy or a quiet. In the city I was surrounded by people every day – crowds of them, wherever I went – but somehow it was by the hives that I felt most human. The colony was strange – wild and restless, and following a logic I could sense but never understand completely. Fascinated by the hive but often clueless as to what was actually going on inside it, getting closer in this context had added its own particular kind of complexity.
There’s a clatter in the kitchen, and a shout. Becky’s uncorked a bottle of homemade elderberry cordial, and it’s exploded everywhere. She’s in the doorway now, her face spattered with red juice. ‘You thirsty?’ she says, and grins.
‘Have you opened this one?’ It’s Christmas Day. My brother reaches under the tree for a small handmade envelope and holds it out towards me.
‘Who’s it from?’ my mum asks, leaning over the sofa and my dad.
‘Becky,’ I say, remembering how she’d slipped it into my hands as I left the house two days earlier, juggling gifts and wrapping paper. ‘I think it’s a Christmas card.’
But it is not a Christmas card, or not really. Inside the envelope is a pencilled drawing of a honeybee. On the back are the names of friends in Sussex and London and Oxford and beyond, who have all somehow got in touch with each other and put money in to buy me a colony of honeybees. Next to their names is the address of a farm near Banbury. This is where the bees are waiting, the note says. You can collect them in the spring.
‘What is it?’ my dad says, and they’re all staring, a little bemused, because I must have turned white or started gaping.
‘Bees,’ I say, holding up the picture. ‘I don’t know how they . . .’ How they all got in touch with each other, I want to say. What made them do it, why.
‘It’s all the excitement,’ my mum says. ‘It’s been a difficult few months. She’s very tired.’
And I’m touched, and thrilled, and panicked. I’ll really have to get a hive now. A colony both bought and freely given – I’m not sure if that makes it lucky or not, according to the old folklore.
The journey back to Oxford on Boxing Day is slow. I take a late-night rail-replacement bus, and the bus gets stuck in traffic. Rain plastering the windows, two seats not quite big enough to lie along, even if I curl. Outside in the street, Christmas partygoers are returning home, and I spot three Santas with a crate of beer between them. They’re shouting and jumping, trying to catch the attention of a Christmas fairy. She has a flashing tiara and furry silver wings and is doing a good job of pretending she hasn’t heard them.
I look back down at my phone. I’m online, reading about a study by researchers at Sussex University, who used hives to monitor ecological health in areas that had been intensively farmed. Following planting schemes aimed at increasing biodiversity, they installed hives and recorded the types of pollen and nectar collected by the bees, thereby learning which flowering species could be effective in improving the diversity of the region as a whole. This is hive as barometer, as weather vane. We gain a sense, from looking in on this small place, of a whole landscape.
The phone beeps. It’s a message from Jack to say he’s dropped two concrete paving slabs at my house. Found them in a skip; from an old doorstep. Thought they might make a good base for a beehive. Carried them down the hill in his rucksack. A weight. I look out, and the rain streaks. So now I have something to put it on, the hive. And maybe I’m going to need a few friends around after all. I imagine the sludging earth, the slabs sitting down over it. Try picturing the bees like a lightness above.
I can’t imagine them yet.
2
Hive
January
A new year begins. Before returning to work after the Christmas break I make a trip to London. I’m at my friend Dulcie’s house in Forest Hill, sitting with her daughter. Her name is Corinne. She’s four years old, and likes to draw pictures.
‘A house,’ she says, throwing her felt-tips down. ‘Look!’ She holds the paper up in front of her face, forgetting that just because she can see the picture, it doesn’t mean that I can too.
‘Come here,’ I say. ‘Let me see.’
A square shape with a rectangle inside and a triangle on top. House, door, roof; our first symbol for home. In Corinne’s picture there is no ground below, or sky above. It is a house floating in space.
‘It’s good,’ I tell her. ‘Does it have any windows?’
She thinks for a moment. ‘Behind,’ she says. ‘At the back.’ And presses her chest against my knees.
Our template image for the modern beehive follows exactly this pattern. A square shape, with a triangle roof. A small entrance at the bottom, and a ledge like a doorstep.
The modern hive first came into use in the nineteenth century, and revolutionised beekeeping. The basic structure is composed of a set of wooden boxes stacked one on top of the other, each packed with a series of rectangular frames hanging vertically and in parallel, on which the bees build their beeswax comb. With a lid on top and those removable frames inside, this new kind of hive made it possible for beekeepers to carry out regular inspections of the colony for signs of disease, and to extract honey without harming the bees. Until then most beekeepers had used traditional wicker, clay or log hives, and common practice had been to destroy colonies at harvest. Of
ten they were smoked with noxious fumes; sometimes they were drowned. Either way the bees were killed, so as to allow the keeper to reach into where the honey was waiting.
With the modern hive, beekeepers could begin influencing the internal functioning of their colonies. The interior could be monitored, even tweaked – component parts could be added, removed, reworked to increase honey yields. Beekeepers learned to split colonies and breed them artificially, developing a new confidence in their ability to sustain and manage stocks. Dependency on the availability of wild colonies seemed a thing of the past.
On the way back from Dulcie’s house I sit on a crowded commuter train and think about the endless adjustment and modification permitted by the modern hive; the will towards ever-increasing productivity. Don’t the preoccupations begin to sound a bit familiar after a while? Don’t they seem to infiltrate everything? As though that impulse for more, and faster, and modifiable has reconfigured not only our hives, not only our places of work, but also our homes, our inner lives, our minds. What’s happening out there is also in here, wrote Rebecca Giggs. We are the by-products, the weather vanes, of the times we live in.
I rub my neck and stare dimly at the reflection in the window of the man next to me, who seems to be falling asleep. It must be the time of year for booking holidays, because in the advertising space above our heads a travel agency has bought up almost the whole carriage. There are couples lounging on deserted beaches; families heading out on safari. They’re all touting words like getaway and escape. Above the sliding doors an ad for a new smartphone promises a life companion. For a richer, fuller, simpler life, it says. Which seems like a contradiction in terms.
There are people standing in the aisles. Someone whispers a joke to the person next to them; someone else laughs. Pages of newspaper are being turned. A woman with a pregnant belly and a badge on her chest saying Baby on Board shouts ‘Isn’t anyone going to let me sit down?’, and a man moves quickly for her.
We had a lesson at primary school once on tessellation. The teacher called it a maths lesson, but it seemed more like making pictures to me. Tessellation is the process of arranging shapes so that there are no gaps or overlapping edges. We were given sheets to colour with the patterns all laid out ready – I had one with hexagons, like honeycomb.
I sometimes think that life must be a bit like tessellation for some people. You take one shape and fit it to the next and they sit comfortably together – you don’t mind a bit of repetition because it’s what makes the pattern form. Life is not like tessellation for me. Sometimes the shapes don’t fit, or I don’t fit into them, or I’m looking at the patterns but they don’t feel real or right to me.
Back in Oxford after the trip to London, I get to thinking about hive shapes. Now I know there’s a colony of bees actually destined for my garden, I had better find something to put them in. But do I have to get a modern, conventional hive? Or might there be different shapes to work within – other ways of doing things?
I fire up my laptop and begin looking into what’s available. Within a couple of hours I’ve gathered umpteen recommendations from umpteen people – websites, books and blogs – and they all tell me different things. Which is the best hive and how best to keep it. The entrance should be at the side, in the middle, and what about the roof? There should be a slanting roof or there shouldn’t. A slant will leave a void inside, and then the bees will fill it. They’ll build up into the cavity and the roof will stick, you won’t be able to get in. But if the roof is flat then what about the rain? The rain won’t run off, and imagine the puddles; imagine the damp sinking in from outside.
Before long, I get one of those overwhelming feelings that seem to come quite often from spending time on the internet, when you realise how much information is out there and yet how little you know. It’s a bit like looking at the stars and realising how small and insignificant you are, but it is not so romantic and has absolutely nothing to do with awe.
So. Rather than make a decision I begin wandering around on the screen, clicking links, scanning the range of beekeeping tools and equipment available. I order a hive tool and a bee brush, which feels easy and unintimidating enough. A hive tool is a flat, narrow piece of metal, about thirty centimetres long, with a chisel at one end – you use it to prise things apart inside the hive when they’ve been gummed together by the bees. A bee brush is for sweeping them away when you need to – I pick one made from 6-cm soft pure pig bristle. I didn’t know that pig bristles could even grow to six centimetres.
I also discover it is possible to buy sheets of factory-produced wax foundation comb to fit inside the wooden frames – like a base for the bees to build out from. Wax comb is used to house the eggs and young larvae known collectively as brood, as well as to store pollen for feeding the young and nectar for making honey. The foundation sheets are intended to give the bees a head start – with less comb to build, so the idea goes, they can put more energy into the important business of making honey. The sheets even come specially designed to manipulate the ratio of females to males within a colony. Left to build from scratch, bees manage the ratio themselves by adjusting the size of the comb cells. When the cells are smaller, the queen (the only fertile female in the colony) will know to lay a female egg; when they are larger, the queen will lay a male. By adjusting cell size artificially beekeepers can push the ratio further, upping the number of female workers and thereby increasing the productivity of the whole.
It’s beginning to sound less like keeping a colony of bees, and more like keeping oneself in honey – and it’s enough to make me uncomfortable.
‘Want a cup of tea?’ Becky pokes her head in through the door of our study-cum-dining-cum-everything-else room, and I look up in surprise.
‘Yes – I mean no. Thanks.’ Two hours have passed. There are thirteen or fourteen tabs open on the screen, and none of them are websites for hive stockists.
‘What are you looking at?’ she says, coming into the room.
I’ve been poring over diagrams of early hive forms. There are coil baskets, clay vessels, a skep. A bunch of reeds woven into a hat shape, plastered with dung, puckered at the entrance with handprints. Clay pots, upturned, their lips pushed flat and hard against the ground with a crack near the base for the bees to come and go from.
Wild bees nest inside naturally occurring cavities, and the practice of honey-gathering – finding these spaces, which might be a hole in a cliff face, or an inner recess inside a cave – was one of the earliest human activities. Beekeeping was different. This began when hands moved inside these spaces, feeling to the edges of them. Fingers smoothing an empty tree hollow, working at it, making it bigger, filling the gaps where a raiding wasp might slip inside.
Soon these spaces became objects in themselves. They were found objects at first: a hollow log, picked up and strung from a tree branch. Cavities became containers, something people could place in relation to themselves, and the bees came closer. There are records of organised systems of apiculture that date back to ancient Egypt. Paintings of beehives on the inside of temple walls, 4,500 years old.
They might have heralded the beginning of a new social order, but the first hives were crudely built. Twisted, smoothed and shaped from whatever materials happened to be lying around, and different across different regions. In her book Bee, Claire Preston describes how over the dry and arid areas of the Middle East, North Africa and Southern Europe the earliest hives were horizontal, the comb inside forming in rows along their length; whereas in the forests of Northern Europe where wild bees nested in hollow trees, the hives stood upright – as though each one took something of the landscape they were built into. It is all a long way from the hives for sale online today, made in one place, shipped to another, and replicated over and over.
Becky peers over my shoulder at the screen. It shows a painting from medieval Italy, a single wicker hive drawn as a cross-section. The walls are thick and smoothed like gathered skeins of golden thread; the comb inside
is depicted as a series of horizontal levels like the floors in some grand building, with sculpted white pillars holding each one very neatly in place.
It’s an artist’s impression, and parts of it are accurate (the dark colour of the comb is just how I remember it); but it is more human than bee. The comb wouldn’t have formed in horizontal layers like this, but vertically – and there would have been no need for pillars. Perhaps the artist split open a dead or abandoned hive and, finding a structure inside, opted to present it as a human society in miniature. Because, right up until the beginning of the Enlightenment, there were no lids – the inside of the hive was sealed from view. Early beekeeping was mostly just keeping an eye on.
‘What’s this?’ Becky points to a piece of paper.
‘Oh – it’s a list of old words for honey.’
‘Milit, mez, mesi,’ she reads. ‘Mit, mitsu, mi, mil, miele, mel.’
They sound good read out loud.
Preston describes how the words for honey share a single root across Indo-European languages, tracing all those parts of the world where the western honeybee Apis mellifera evolved and spread. (It is thought that at some point languages along the Germanic branch made a split, and began to describe honey by its colour – from which came the Old Norse hunung, the Old German honang, the Old English hunig. Which is how we arrived at honey.) The words for bee are less similar; the Aryan and Germanic bai and beo are unrelated to the Greek api – maybe because for the first beekeepers the focus was the honey, and not the bees themselves.
Which reminds me – I am supposed to be choosing a hive, not wandering around through ancient history. I close the dozen-plus tabs.
‘Which kind will you get?’ Becky says, pulling on her coat as she makes for the door.
