by Helen Jukes
The load at work has eased a bit in recent weeks; the pressure lessened. Perhaps people’s attention has strayed – there is a lot of sunshine outside. Or perhaps I am a bit sunnier myself. Anyway, with more light and longer days I have more energy to hand, so it felt good to offer our house as a meeting place when Paul sent an email round with the date (Tea would be nice, he advised, but no biscuits. Biscuits set a precedent).
The swarm collector arrives at my house before anyone else. He’s wearing a bright-orange builder’s vest, which I expect him to take off, and he doesn’t. His hair is frizzy and grey and it’s tied up in a big ponytail which hangs bushily down his back. Next to arrive is Paul, whose arms are full of books and boxes, and then fifteen or twenty more, far too many to fit in the front room, so I open the back door and they filter out as I gather all the cups and mugs that I can find so as to meet everyone’s tea requirements.
I spot Helle, Jude and Mary, but there’s no sign of Mark, who has to drive twenty miles to get here. There are a few long skirts and quite a bit of flowing fabric, a lot more hair, some office suits and an anorak. They’re a funny bunch, and I like them. Each one trying to keep his or her own corner of wild nature in the city. One lady, recently divorced, will be keeping a hive for the first time this year on a rooftop near the city centre; another has two hives and four children and lives in a small cul-de-sac in a village just out of town; she’s got a rabbit hutch too.
I move around the group with a pot of tea, filling cups. Inside the pot, fresh peppermint leaves are stewing and tipping against the china sides. When I pour it, the water comes out softly green.
Paul gathers us around so he can introduce the swarm collector, whose name is Mo. Then Mo takes centre stage. He gets around sixty calls a day in high summer, he tells us, though most of these won’t actually be about honeybees. ‘People get confused,’ he says. ‘Mostly they’re looking at wasps or bumblebees.’
The group forms a circle around Mo, who is leaning with one elbow against the hive. ‘You have to really push them,’ he tells us. ‘People tell you what they think you want to hear, just so you’ll come. I have to get them to describe exactly how high the swarm is from the ground. If it’s too high up or inaccessible for whatever reason, there’s no point in me going.’ He’s wearing big boots and he’s speaking louder than anyone has ever spoken beside my hive; I imagine the bees inside hushing. ‘And,’ he goes on, ‘truth is, usually they’re miles away. So they’ll tell me, “Ah, it’s just a metre off the ground!” But really they’re inside the house with all the doors and windows closed, and the swarm is in the neighbour’s garden.’ He stamps a foot, prods a steel-capped toe into the grass. ‘People can’t judge distances,’ he says, looking around at us. ‘That’s what I’ve found.’
‘If they’re on a low branch, or something removable, it’s easy. You just cut the branch they’re clinging to. Hold a bucket underneath, and they drop right in. Sometimes I don’t even wear a suit,’ he says, his chest puffing under the luminous vest.
After Mo’s talk we break out into smaller groups, and I take a seat beside Paul. I tell him I’ve been learning a lot about swarms this year.
‘It’s a hot topic,’ he says, and shuffles excitedly in his seat. ‘Many beekeepers these days order from professional breeders. Queens and even whole colonies get flown across continents – that’s one of the main reasons why varroa has become so widespread. But if we allowed colonies to swarm naturally, in a carefully managed way, we’d have local stocks readily available.’
This is something that the ONBG have been organising locally for the last few years, and now Paul takes a piece of paper and a pen from his pocket and writes Swarm List across the top. ‘Excuse me,’ he says, then moves off and begins working his way around the group, writing down the names of anyone on the look-out for a colony. Over summer, the ONBG functions as an unofficial swarm-collecting network. Staying vigilant as to the movements of their bees, when a colony swarms the members alert Paul and a text message is sent around to everyone on the list and arrangements are made for someone to go and collect it. Last year everyone on the list at the beginning of the season had a new colony by the end of it.
Clearing up later that evening, I begin wondering if there’s a difference between a honeybee colony that’s been allowed to follow its swarming impulse, and one that hasn’t. So when the washing up is done and the house is settled again I write an email to Paul, asking him, and he responds almost immediately with a carefully worded reply. He describes definite survival traits developing among colonies that have been shared through the swarm list. Maybe it’s genetic, he writes, maybe it’s our low-intervention approach, or hive type, or maybe it’s just luck. But our group seem to have bees that can tolerate and coexist with the varroa parasite without treatment, and maybe some diseases too.
Which suggests that changing our keeping practices affects the colonies in our care, even when that change is about less intervention, not more; about stepping back, giving way to the bees’ own logic and rhythms. I think I could become an advocate for the frameless top-bar hive. That odd, unlikely, trough-like shape standing out in my garden, overshadowed sometimes by the holly; tangled sometimes by the weeds. The riskiness and daring of it – of beginning from nothing, from all that empty space and readiness inside.
I wish I’d spoken to Mo more. I would have liked to ask him what disruption is caused when a swarm turns up in the middle of a city centre. And how far it can be managed, and do people or the bees get scared, and if anyone has ever been hurt in the process. But I don’t have Mo’s email address, so I don’t ask him any of these questions, and possibly this is just as well.
Once a fresh swarm has collected on a temporary landing spot, scout bees will fly out to explore potential nesting sites in the vicinity, testing them for damp and pests and watertightness. Here begins a new process of decision-making, whereby each scout will cast a vote for her favoured location by dancing on the bodies of other bees. There are no fixed opinions, and she will visit a range of alternatives; having initially selected one site, she may switch and begin dancing for another. She takes time making her selection, and will monitor it over the course of several hours or days (the Goulds’ book The Honey Bee describes one experiment which found that when water was poured on a particularly popular site, dances for that site dwindled). There is much at stake; the colony will be starting from scratch in its new home, and must build enough stores to last the winter. Slowly, a consensus builds. More and more scouts dance for the same location; a destination is set.
There he is in London and here I am in Oxford. We are living in different cities so there are distances to travel, and gaps. Text messages in the pauses, and feelings in the wake of things. It is like Mo the swarm collector said: people can’t judge distances. They get caught up, and start trying to block or bridge them.
I wish that you were here so you could put your hand on my heart to make it quieter.
I put the phone down and get up, draw the curtains. Perhaps I will rearrange the furniture in my room. And then my phone beeps out a reply.
I want it to sing.
During these first few months each new exposure is like a question: where are we, what is this, how far might it reach? We’re testing at surfaces, searching around for a ceiling, wondering if it might be secure enough to risk building from. ‘I’m going to fall in love with you,’ he blurts suddenly one night, shocked by it, shocked at himself. Can I, should I, I am.
I see him again, and then again and again. A lot happens in a short space of time. And time does peculiar things, seeming to stretch and warp, so that we fit a lot of life inside it, as it also seems to be making life.
Back in February when we were assembling the hive I talked to Jack about Huber’s blindness and Langstroth’s muteness. It gave them something in common, I said. They were both missing a sense. But speech isn’t a sense, he said. Senses are about reading the world, they take things in; speech is about what goes out.
I’m not so sure any more. Inside the hive there is all that fine-tuned communication happening; it is all so close, I’m not sure it’s possible to tell speaking from listening, language from perception. It makes me wonder. How much of speech, how much of what we put out, is about what goes in – about how we listen, look, touch? And what does this say about the need for proximity, or for distance? I’m thinking of the detached gaze of a scientist-observer, and of the bees passing messages body to body, and of where I stand as I look at the hive and try to form an understanding of it. How close should I get, to know the detail? How far back, for some perspective?
Almost a whole beekeeping season gone, and I still don’t know a right distance from them.
There’s a film showing at the old cinema down our road about a family of peasant beekeepers in northern Italy, and I meet Ellie after work and go and see it. The film is called The Wonders. In one scene the daughter picks three bees up by their wings and places them in her mouth. She sits very still and parts her lips a little, then the bees crawl out one by one. When they crawl out sometimes they climb up and around her cheek, and sometimes they climb down her chin.
There are traditions in cultures from across the world that link bees with speech. A ritual in ancient Egypt compared the voice of the soul to the humming of bees, and in a ceremony called the Opening of the Mouth the soul was released from the body with the line The bees, giving him protection, they make him to exist. In her book Sweetness & Light, Hattie Ellis describes how if bees hovered over the lips of a newborn in ancient Greece it was seen as an omen that the child would grow up with a mellifluous – literally, honey-flowing – tongue. Bees were also believed to have flown near the mouth of the infant Virgil.
After the film has finished we’re unlocking our bikes from a lamppost. I’ve just reeled off this list of stories and ancient rituals to Ellie, and now I pause to take a breath. She puts on her bike helmet.
‘But it seems a strange connection, bees and speech,’ I go on. ‘To be so widespread, I mean. Because bees don’t actually make sounds with their mouths at all.’ And I tell her about the places they do make sounds from: their wing muscles and their abdomens; and then there’s the waggle dance and the pheromones, which are also kinds of speech.
I’m speaking too fast and I get a bit muddled, it all comes out sounding garbled and confused. And really it’s late, and we’re tired, and we both have work in the morning.
‘It’s reminding me of something,’ Ellie says, getting on her bike, ‘but I’ll need to look it up. Check your emails in the morning.’
As I cycle home it is not the ancient rituals I am thinking of; it is that girl with a mouthful of bees. If you look very closely at something over a period of time, I imagine it must start getting inside you. Not literally, and I’m not thinking of merging exactly – but it becomes a part of you, you begin carrying it around, and I might be absorbing the bees; they might be getting into my lungs and my heart and bloodstream. Maybe one day I’ll open my mouth and bees will come out, wild and humming, instead of words.
I’m making breakfast before work the next morning when Ellie’s email pings through on my phone:
In Hebrew the word for bee is (deborah), derived from the root (debar) meaning to pronounce or speak. In the Hebrew language all words derived from a single root are closely related, so that each derivation of debar is linked by meaning: debar, debar, debir, deborah, midbar, midbar. Meaning, to speak; a thing made to come about (an act, word, literary text); an inner sanctuary inside a temple (literally ‘place of the Word’); bee; wilderness (a place where things live within a larger system, as words live within speech); mouth.
Speech, act, inner place. Bee and mouth and wilderness.
I read through the list again. It’s peculiar, the way the definitions seem to draw a neat circle around the very different themes that have been turning in my head this year. Learning how to feel better, and what it means to look and listen and speak; how to define keeping as an action, a doing, and how a colony is generated and grows; how hives and homes and heads are each a kind of inner place, each voicing something about who we are and how we relate to our wider landscapes; and how finding or losing a sense of place can feel like a wilderness sometimes.
That is a lot of things. There has been a lot turning around in my head this year.
At the bottom of the email is a short note from Ellie: So it’s a curious connection, bees and speech, if bees don’t actually make sounds with their mouths. But then that fits with the word midbar, or ‘mouth’, where the ‘mouth’ is understood not as part of the face but as the origin or well of words.
I find that I’m thinking again of the faceless, formless colony. Can it be said to ‘speak’? Perhaps it has not one but multiple voices, which now and then combine to create sound or a decision or a movement. And the inside of the hive is where all those thousands of voices well, working over and between each other, escaping out sometimes from its . . . mouth.
I drop my breakfast bowl in the sink and pick up my bag, set off for work.
If a colony can have multiple voices, I think, pulling out my bike and pushing off from the kerb, then maybe humans have multiple voices too, with different places and parts of ourselves to speak from. Not just mouths but also feet, backs of the knees, hearts. In fact maybe we are all speaking from different parts of ourselves all the time, even if we’re only accustomed to listening along particular registers and lines.
We’ve made it through the swarming season, and the colony is still in one piece. The bees are thriving, busy outside and in. I call Luke, check in.
With the summer solstice passed, the focus inside the hive will be shifting. As the bees feel the days shortening they’ll move away from colony expansion and into a more concentrated period of honey production. They’ll start building stores, shoring up reserves; beginning the long journey towards winter.
‘Will you take a harvest?’ Luke asks.
‘I’d like to,’ I say. When you take honey from a hive you’re also taking the bees’ winter food supply; if you take more than a surplus, or if the winter is particularly long or cold, they won’t have enough to survive.
‘Well, wait and see,’ he says. ‘You’ll know in a month how it’s looking. And you’re still opening the hive every week? You might as well stop that now. Many beekeepers won’t open the hive at all through August. It’ll be getting colder outside, and you don’t want to chill them. Best leave them to it. Let them make their honey. Step back.’
So I do. I put my gloves and suit inside the shed, and although I keep watching the bees moving in and out, I don’t open the hive for thirty-one days, from the beginning of August to the end of it.
7
Honey
August
Early morning. Earlier than rush hour. Earlier than binmen or the postman or school runs or my alarm clock. The sun just lifting over the roofs of the houses opposite; the light just seeping through the curtains. The light is golden. Soon the window, the walls, my whole room, is aglow with it.
A crash from downstairs. The front door flung open, then the sound of feet and slim wheels clacking over the floorboards. Bags dumped, breath drawn. A pause.
I tiptoe along the corridor, crouch down and peer through the banisters to see Becky standing in the hallway, back from two weeks in India.
‘Hi!’ she whispers.
‘Hi!’ I whisper back, stealing down the stairs, wrapping my arms around her neck. She smells of airport departure lounges and of sandalwood soap. ‘Welcome back.’
She wheels the suitcase down the hallway and puts the kettle on; she’s pink-nosed and tanned brown by the sun.
‘I haven’t slept,’ she says, rummaging around for her thermos. ‘I won’t sleep, I think. Are you up? I thought I might head out.’
‘I’m awake,’ I say, ‘I’ll come with you.’
Outside, the sun has scaled the tops of chimney pots opposite; it’s already too warm for coats. We cross
the road and walk away from Oxford’s spires, away from the city centre, following a wire fence around the edge of the recreation ground and ducking through a patch of undergrowth.
This is the edge of the Lye Valley – an area of undeveloped boggy ground (calcareous fen is the proper term, since it’s fed by lime-rich springs) threaded through Oxford’s east side, a hidden wash of untrammelled space.
Old drinks-cans glint up from the dirt; carrier bags shroud the trees. We startle a fox, and the fox startles two blackbirds. There’s a heap of sleeping bags a few feet away that might be a person asleep under a bush.
We know about this place from Jack; he comes badger-watching here. Apparently there are a couple of setts along the bank, and if you sit quietly at dusk and keep an eye out, sometimes you get a sighting.
Becky leads the way, telling me about her trip as we go. Now she pauses a moment, scanning the slope for a path up.
‘How are the bees?’
‘I haven’t opened the hive all month,’ I tell her, ‘but I will soon.’
As we climb I tell her about hefting the hive, an old technique of testing how much honey’s inside by rocking it gently, gauging the weight. I tried this last week, and the hive did seem heavy – but since I wasn’t sure how much a colony of bees should weigh, it was difficult to tell how much was added load.
‘And if there’s honey,’ she says, ‘will we take some?’
‘We’ll take some,’ I say, ‘if there’s enough.’
At the top of the hill the path opens onto a golf course, the grass spongy and dense and trimmed to within an inch of its life. To our left, on the other side of this hill, are the community gardens where Becky sometimes helps out. Together with friends, she’s set up the Food Surplus Cafe – a group of volunteers who collect up the leftover food from local cafes and shops, and use it to cook a meal for the community. Last time they held an event, they fed over 250 people.
