by Helen Jukes
The last few foragers are returning for the evening and now I lean in and widen the entrance like Luke said. Inside the house I spend a lot of time worrying about the bees, but mostly what I do out here amounts to not much more than this. Opening a space a little wider in one place; sealing it off in another. Perhaps in truth it is the hive, and not the bees, that I am keeping here.
A hivekeeper.
I turn the word over in my head as I walk back up to the house.
It has a good ring to it.
The week after Luke’s visit it seems like there are swarms everywhere. I get four phone calls in as many days from people wanting to tell me about ones they’ve seen. My parents arrive home to find one in their garden; Dulcie glimpses one in the doorway of a shop on Oxford Street. Another friend calls me from Brighton where she’s hurried in from the street, which a swarm of bees is filling. She’s standing at the window with her baby under one arm, holding the phone to her cheek. ‘What’s it like?’ I ask, imagining something like you get in old cartoons, those black dots all moving in one motion. ‘They’re everywhere,’ she says, and her voice is high like a thing unhinged. ‘They’re all over the place!’
A friend in Hackney sends a picture of a swarm hanging like a crust over a car bumper. Another clinging to a lamppost. The pictures are uncanny – a wild thing taking on the forms of features in an urban landscape.
I want to see one for myself. I begin looking especially carefully at cars and lampposts.
On a lunch break I call Ellie and tell her about the crowdedness in my hive and about all the swarms flying around everywhere, and she says maybe I’m in need of a bit of light relief. After work I cycle over to her flat and we sit out on her fire escape, where she’s growing geraniums in pots, and drink elderflower cordial mixed with fizzy water.
She already knows about the Islington kitten-sitting and the psychic and the oversized moon, so now she wants to know what else.
I come clean. ‘I’ve been listening to his music,’ I tell her. ‘A lot.’ So much, in fact, that I’ve begun wondering if he’s noticed a spike in listeners on his website. ‘Do you think it’s possible to trace online hits? Find out who’s listening?’
‘I’m not sure,’ she says, ‘I don’t think so.’ Ellie is not a lot, but a bit, more computer-savvy than me, so I decide that probably she is right, and am reassured.
She wants to know about the bees too.
‘How are they doing?’ she asks. ‘Any signs of swarming?’
‘I don’t think so. But it’s getting difficult to see. There are so many of them. Silly, isn’t it? I spent all that time worrying the colony was weak, and now here I am worrying it’s too strong.’ I snap the stalk of a geranium flower, pull a deadhead free.
‘That reminds me,’ she says, ‘I have something for you.’ She goes inside and comes back with a bowl of olives and a notebook, sits down and rests her feet against the railings. ‘I was thinking about swarming. Remember when I mentioned the verb hive? How the meanings seem to contradict each other, so that in one sense it’s about collecting and gathering together, but in another it’s about breaking away, making separate? Well, it occurred to me this week that the verb swarm is just the same.’ She leafs through the notebook until she finds the page she’s looking for. ‘Here we are – I made a list. To swarm is to gather . . . to come together . . . to assemble . . . to crowd. But it’s also to escape from the parent organism . . . to found a new colony. Funny, isn’t it? Like two opposing pulls in one same motion. I wonder if your bees are feeling a bit torn.’
Perhaps they are, but it isn’t the bees that her list has made me think of. Don’t those two opposing pulls also describe the feeling I have as I open the hive? That sense of escape, of touching the edge of something foreign and new; and also the feeling – as I look – of gathering focus and attention? As though I retreat to the hive so as to come together; escape in order to find some reassemblage. Which is a kind of homing, I suppose.
From the top of Ellie’s fire escape you can see what’s happening in the driveways and back yards all down the street. Next door a man is building a large wooden structure in a parking lot. Behind him is a garage hung with a sign saying XMAS TREES, but there are no trees for sale at the moment. He doesn’t notice us watching him, or if he does he pretends not to.
We spit the olive pits into the patch of grassy rubble at the bottom of the steps where there are dandelions growing, and nettles and cow parsley and a small clump of ox-eye daisies.
‘I wonder what it feels like to be a colony preparing to swarm.’
‘Well, you’d be feeling constrained, I suppose.’
‘And confused.’
‘And wanting to take flight.’
‘But uncertain about leaving, maybe. It’s risky, no? To fly up without knowing where to.’
‘You’d be watching the light at the hive mouth.’
‘Mm, and then a rush of flight. All those bodies throwing themselves out.’
Fifty thousand bees exposed and freshly vulnerable, flung upon the air. I wonder if I’ve been experiencing something like a swarming impulse recently; pondering a boy with white hair and blue eyes who lives a long way from here, wondering what a step into the unknown might do.
‘But how do they do it?’ Ellie asks.
‘Do what?’
‘Leave, all in a mass like that? How does it happen?’
I realise I’m not sure.
When I get home that evening I prop the scrap of notebook paper with Ellie’s copied-down definition on my bedside shelf, beside the piece of torn-off comb and the bottle of hornet whisky. Then I search for my button jar.
It’s at the bottom of a cupboard, underneath a pile of shoes. I pull it out and turn it around in my hands, sending the buttons tinkling. Some of the buttons I’ve collected myself, others I’ve been given. Mostly they’re different colours and shapes, but if you empty the jar and spread them out it is possible to find a few that are the same. This is what I do. I sift through them all until I’ve picked out six of the metal ones with the shiny mirror faces.
Next I drop the buttons inside an envelope, and write the psychic’s address on the front. This looks a little formal. So then I take a magazine and flick the pages until I find a picture of two painted animal masks. I cut these out and stick them to the envelope, beside his address. At least it is a bit more colourful now.
On the way to work the next day I pop the envelope in a post-box, but when I hear the papery swish of its landing inside I wish suddenly that I hadn’t. I wonder about hanging around until the postman comes, asking if he’d mind returning it to me. Probably he’d be too busy. I check the collection time: six o’clock this evening. It is a long time to wait.
At work I cover my desk in paperwork, make lists. File things into cabinets. As I’m eating lunch at my desk I knock a glass over and watch in horror as the water floods, the ink blossoms and the paperwork ripples and rucks and turns a light shade of blue. I should pull myself together, I think, mopping up. It is no good to go around spilling things. Thank goodness it’s Friday, and there’s a weekend ahead.
With the hive entrance widened the bees are bottlenecking less. There’s less congestion and more flow to their passages back and forth, but inside they’re seething. I’ve begun scanning for signs of dormancy – some indication that there might be a swarm brewing. There are no queen cells and the bees are busy, but when I opened the hive this week I found another bar full – they’re still expanding fast.
I’ve been trying to keep steady, not do anything yet except wait and keep watching for the signs. But, away from the hive, I’ve wanted to know more. I’d like to understand how a swarm forms; what happens inside the hive to trigger a colony to split. What is this movement that is about both gathering and breaking away? On Saturday I’m restless, unable to settle to anything. So I fetch my books and spread them out.
There’s a story we like to tell ourselves about the hive as a place of cohesion, with all
bees working towards a common goal. It’s not true. In The Honey Bee by James and Carol Gould, I learn that what actually happens is a lot more unsettled and shifting. The decision to swarm doesn’t arrive as a single event; it’s a much slower and less defined process, whereby queen cups (the protruding cells in the comb in which young larvae are raised as queens) are continually being built and taken away. This is true even in a colony with a healthy queen and no particular impetus to swarm. One worker might begin preparing a queen cup on an area of brood comb, and the next might tear it apart. Or the next might add to it, and then another, so that the queen cup begins forming, until a fourth worker comes past and destroys it. Later another worker begins repairing the cell, and another. Eventually a threshold is reached; a new queen is raised, and the colony swarms.
This ambivalence of the colony – whereby questions remain open, and answers are always in a state of process – is highly adaptive. The bees respond faster and more flexibly to changes in their environment than if all acted with a single mind.
I sit up, and close the books. Human movement, also, is tempered by this push-pull. I lift my arm and feel the muscles contract and stretch. Imagine the bees out there, inside the hive, sensing thresholds. That constant building and tearing away, in a place between staying and leaving. The solid wooden frame and the sturdiness of its legs; all those thousands of wings rasping. The sound of them, when I open the lid. It is almost like paper rustling.
There’s a lesson in here somewhere. As I feel new spaces forming, new possibilities opening beyond the hive, I too have been preparing to lift up, break out. I feel ready for it. The bees have chewed through some of my congested bits just like the wax moths do; I’m feeling better resourced, more in touch with things around me, more able to begin something new. Perhaps in a way – unbeknownst to them – it is the bees who are the open-handed ones; they who are setting me free.
‘Helen!’ Becky’s shouting to me from the kitchen. ‘Something’s happening. They’re buzzing. Come quick!’
I join her at the door. The smooth flight paths have disappeared and the bees are churning around the entrance. There’s a loud humming, almost a throbbing, coming from the hive.
‘Perhaps they’re about to swarm,’ Becky says, and I nod, but they don’t, and a while later they are quiet again. No swarm has departed, and the colony hasn’t split. But something has happened to unsettle them.
The first picture he sends is of that brown envelope that I put in the post-box, taken on his phone. It has landed on the edge of his doormat, one corner and an animal mask perched over bare floorboards.
The hive is like a heart and it pulsates. Or the hive is like a brain with a million synapses. I can’t decide. Anyway, there’s more honey in the hive this week – and still they haven’t swarmed.
There are occasions when bad weather or some other event external to the hive can mean that a swarm is imminent but delayed. At such times there may be a few moments in which two queens – one unhatched, the other waiting to depart – communicate through the comb using sounds known as tooting and quacking. The old queen toots by pressing her thorax against the comb and sending out a vibration, causing the workers to freeze. If the unhatched queen is old enough to respond, a quack will be felt through the comb. On hearing this, the workers will move to keep her forcibly in her cell until the old queen has departed with the swarm. Once a virgin queen has hatched, she’ll use the same system to locate and kill any other unhatched queens by stinging them through the comb; if two or more queens have hatched they’ll usually fight to the death, and the survivor will replace the old queen.
The next time I see the psychic I visit him at his flat.
‘You’re wearing dungarees?’ Becky says, as I’m about to leave.
‘You think better not?’ I say, glancing over at her astonishment.
‘Not unless you want to give him the impression that you’re a kid. A kids’ TV presenter, or a kid.’ I am not sure what impression I want to give, but anyway I go back upstairs and change into a pair of trousers the colour of a terracotta pot and a black vest, and I plait my hair and put a pair of sandals on and then I come back down again.
‘Sex!’ she says, when she sees me. ‘Great!’ Which makes me nervous.
We meet at Forest Hill station and he grins when he sees me, and springs a little on his feet. ‘I’ve just finished work,’ he says. ‘I could do with some air. Shall we go for a walk?’
The Horniman Museum is at the top of his road and there are gardens in the grounds where you can sit down on the grass, so we buy a bottle of beer from the petrol station around the corner and walk in through the gates as the sky turns pink behind the distant skyscrapers and cranes. It is easy to feel as though you can see the whole of London from here, but I imagine London is probably bigger than it looks.
He’s going on holiday to Scarborough next week, he says. I’ve been to Scarborough, I tell him. I ate fish and chips. And he tells me about a haunted house on a hill nearby and about the sea and the old fishermen’s cottages along the coast.
The conversation wanders on, and I notice that I feel quite bare beside him, as though when I speak I lose my coverings. I realise it right then and there, which is unusual, since normally I don’t notice things until it’s too late and they’re already gone and finished.
Whoever is in charge of the Horniman gardens has decided that they should not stay open indefinitely. Just after sunset a man with a golf buggy and a big handbell arrives. He clangs the bell and walks around a bit, and then he clangs again. This is the signal that you should pack up your bags and go, so we get up, but the man is not paying us any attention. He’s busy arguing with two girls at the bottom of the slope who won’t get up and don’t want to leave and why doesn’t he just fuck off. He clangs the bell in their faces and gets back in his golf buggy, and as he drives off the two girls pull themselves up and head for the exit gate anyway. A fox standing behind a tree a few metres from them has been watching all this unfold.
We walk back to his flat. Outside his bedroom window is a box bursting with geraniums, bright red like the ones on Ellie’s fire escape. There’s a bird feeder too, but it’s empty.
‘They get through it in a few days,’ he says, seeing me looking. ‘I have trouble keeping up with them.’ I give him an understanding nod like I know how it is with wild creatures, you can never be enough for them; just wait until I tell you what’s been happening with the bees.
But I don’t tell him about the bees just then. Instead, I tell him I’d like to kiss him. And then watch his surprise. There is a pause of a few moments that feels like a very long time indeed. He is not uncomfortable. I am immensely uncomfortable. This makes him smile. His nose comes close up.
And the time to leave and catch my bus arrives, and I don’t leave. Later, I have a feeling of something pulling free, somewhere in the middle of it, as if my ribs are splitting open. It is a kind of violence wrought through tenderness, and it comes as a shock.
‘This doesn’t happen to me very often,’ he says after.
‘This doesn’t happen to me very often either.’ The morning is still early when I leave, and the air is cold enough to sting my teeth. I am peeled, and ringing.
‘Like being steamrollered,’ Dulcie says matter-of-factly, after I’ve blundered up a hill and down a road and in through her front door. She’s talking about falling in love. We’re sitting in her kitchen and I can’t talk much because I might have lost the place where my language comes from. Or the place where my language comes from might have shifted, or something. Her kitchen is white and clean and I’m watching her move around in it.
‘What, like emotionally?’ I say. ‘Like being overwhelmed?’
‘No,’ she shrugs. ‘Just like being steamrollered. All my organs mashed into a pulp.’ She turns and takes a tin of sweetcorn from the cupboard. She’s got twenty minutes while Corinne naps to clear the surfaces and have a shower and get everything organised before college. She’s back i
n full-time study this year, training to be a speech-and-language therapist – juggling essays and exams alongside and in among everything else. I can’t seem to move; I’m just sitting there watching her do everything. She lights the gas, empties the sweetcorn into a pan.
‘Doughnuts!’ Her partner, Neil, appears in the doorway, rubbing his eyes and yawning; he works nights and has just woken up, ready to take his turn as childminder. Dulcie looks at him and grins.
The doughnuts are sitting in the middle of the table, still crispy and warm, greasing the waxed bag that I brought them in. I saw them in a bakery window on my way here, and ducked in to buy us one each. We all sit at the table now and eat them slowly, the grease smoothing the tips of our fingers as the sugar sticks to them and to the edges of our mouths.
We don’t lick our lips.
The second picture he sends is of a road sign perched high on a cliff-top road just outside Scarborough. The sign is an upside down triangle and it says Give Way. Beyond is a rim of field and the wide-open sea stretching far into the distance.
July
I’ve understood that swarming is a natural function of a colony, but what about when it happens in a city centre? What do you do when thousands of bees begin flying around, or clinging to things, right there in among the cars and kids and offices and shops, and everyone trying to go around as normal? What then? That’s what I want to know.
I find out at the next Oxfordshire Natural Beekeeping Group meeting, which I am hosting, when we’re visited by our local swarm collector. Every urban area now has a dedicated swarm collector. This is who to call if you find a swarm, so that they can come and safely remove it for you.
