A Honeybee Heart Has Five Openings

by Helen Jukes

  The tops of the trees are tinged with morning sunlight; the rush-hour traffic is starting up on the roads.

  ‘This way,’ Becky says, and strides across the green. The slope dips down again into a boggy wood.

  It’s quiet in here. A stream trickles along the valley bottom; birds fidget in the trees. We pick our way past brambles and trails of hanging ivy. Every now and then we hear creatures scuttling through rotting leaves.

  Somewhere near the heart of this valley – this dip of land beyond the golf course, between a housing estate and a hospital – a colony of bumblebees has nested in the dried-out carcass of an old tree. The tree stands upright, bleached and skeletal; the nest is hidden inside the trunk. I saw it once when I came here with Jack, but we can’t reach it today. At this time of year the path leads only so far, and then it’s lost to a bed of nettles. We try to hack a route through, then give up and flop down instead on a fallen log.

  I’ve been describing to Becky the process of honey-making – how flower nectar is collected by bees from miles around and brought back inside the hive where it’s regurgitated and passed around to draw the moisture off, before being deposited in the wax cells and sealed as honeycomb.

  ‘Wow,’ she says, pulling the thermos and two plastic-wrapped airline-supply biscuits from her bag, ‘that’s quite a process.’

  ‘Yeah,’ I say, taking a biscuit. In fact this whole experience of beekeeping – of learning and asking questions about the hive – has been nothing if not a process, and I wonder if such a process is ever finished; if it ever reaches a conclusion or recognisable outcome. I crinkle the cellophane wrapper between two fingers and suck the sugar from the biscuit, coursing back in my mind over the past year. Suddenly I’m remembering a question I had, when I was first considering getting a hive. What is the link between beekeeping and therapy – and what does honey have to do with healing?

  When you type honey + healing into a search engine you get a lot of links to health-food websites and some articles about honey’s medicinal uses, benefits and side-effects. More studies are needed to decide if it is safe and effective for various medical conditions states one website, a little ominously. Another urges me to consume honey responsibly. The list of ailments honey is said to alleviate is long. It includes chesty coughs, wounds and burns, insomnia, MRSA, dandruff, lung and liver problems, heart problems, gastrointestinal problems, and memory function in postmenopausal women.

  In fact the accounts of honey’s use in human medicine date as far back as records go. A Sumerian tablet from around 3000 BC recommends it for skin ulcers. Honey was common in the medicines of ancient Egypt, China, India, Greece and Rome: used as a treatment for both internal and external complaints, it was prescribed to heal eye inflammations, treat mouth and skin sores, and cure chest and stomach troubles.

  In Bee, Claire Preston writes about a verse in the Qur’an, which describes how bees were instructed by God to feed on all kinds of fruit . . . From their bellies comes a drink of different colours in which there is healing for people. It’s true that honey comes from all kinds of fruit, or flowers, and this means that – just like the bees – it is not easy to categorise. A bee can’t be thought of like a cow or a silkworm, since honey is not like leather, milk or silk; the honey doesn’t come from her body. She creates it from raw materials external to herself, and together – mouth-to-mouth, within the colony. This in-betweenness may well have been part of what made honey so attractive as a component of healing rituals and magic rites: it is so difficult to place, neither wholly one thing nor the other; not animal (since it isn’t extracted from the bee herself); nor completely plant-based (since it is processed by the colony). It is gathered from countless flowers and flower species, and produced by thousands of individual bees.

  I’m searching for milk in a health-food shop when I catch the tail end of a conversation between three men standing over the honey section.

  ‘A spoonful a day you’re supposed to have.’

  ‘On its own? I don’t like it on its own.’

  ‘It’s good for hay fever, my cousin says.’

  ‘Local, is it?’

  ‘Lavender.’

  ‘Christ – have you seen the price of this one? What the fuck’s mānuka?’

  They amble on down the aisle, and I edge my way around a stack of oatcakes to see the honey selection for myself. There is not just Local, Lavender and Mānuka; there is also Raw, Active, Organic, Unfiltered, Hilltop, Wildflower and Acacia. So many different health-food honeys that I’m not sure how anyone is able to tell what’s good for them.

  I come across a study by researchers in Switzerland, who tested honeys from around the world for traces of five common neonicotinoid pesticides. Of the 198 honeys sampled, 75 per cent were found to show traces of at least one; 10 per cent contained four or five. The colony’s own food supply is being contaminated – which turns the picture of honey as health food on its head.

  Snapping the laptop and the research study closed, I glance out of the window at the hive. It’s almost a month now since I last opened it up, but as August draws to a close I’ve begun watching it more closely again. If there’s honey in there, what will it be composed of, and what might I become composed of if I eat it?

  Today the flight paths are heading south, in the direction of a warehouse roof and beyond that who knows. In reflective mood, I take my boots and head outside; take up my position on the stump.

  I’d imagined that in getting a colony I might come to know the bees, understand something about what they are and how they’re linked to what’s around them. Perhaps, I’d thought, there might be something therapeutic about that. But the actual experience of a thing is always different from your imagining, and with the foraging season nearly over I’m not sure I understand them any better now than I did before. In fact, when I think back over the last few months, I’ve more often been struck by the sense of confusion and unsettledness waiting underneath the lid than any recognisable order. It’s been the same outside the hive, where the bees are all the time flying out, and you can’t tell where to, or exactly what they’re bringing back – so much so that it often seems impossible to define anything in its entirety.

  The wind rustles the leaves in the hedge, and I shiver. There’s a chill in the air, that first feeling of summer ending where the air is different but the light isn’t yet. I watch the bees drifting out from the hive and imagine those light-sensors on their heads, searching for it.

  I won’t ever hear what they’re saying to each other, but sometimes I’ve had the feeling that what’s happening inside the hive is speaking to things inside me all the same. I’ve tried to keep a healthy distance – to become a careful and rational observer of the bees, capable of seeing clearly – but at times it’s felt like a boundary has slipped, and the details I am noticing about the hive are in fact the ones I most need to notice about myself. Or it is the other way around, and when something shifts in the hive it also begins shifting in me, so that the bees are not just bringing things up, they are also affecting what happens, which is about as far from rational and detached as you can be.

  A finger of bindweed has wrapped itself around one leg of the hive and now I crouch down, crawl under, tug it out. Pulling myself up, I look back for a moment at the house. There’s a sense of activity and inhabitation about it now that wasn’t there before. The pots outside the kitchen window are brimming with nasturtiums; the back door is propped open most days by a rusted colander. There’s been a change here. It’s been happening while I’ve been sitting on my tree stump, not doing anything very much. While the bees have been busily getting on with life. I struggle to locate what it is, this change, and maybe anyway it’s still in process. The beekeeping season isn’t over, and we haven’t got to the honey yet.

  The next day I arrive home to find a large plastic box on the doorstep. I’m tired and hungry and the box is in the way so I climb around it, assuming it is something to do with Becky. But when Becky gets home late
r and climbs around it too she says that it isn’t. We go out for a closer look. It is not just a plastic box. There are six white tabs at the top and a wooden rack fitted inside the lid. There is no note attached, and we don’t know who it’s from.

  A while later I get a call from Jack. ‘Did you find it?’ he asks excitedly. ‘Can you guess what it is?’

  No, I say, we nearly threw it in the rubbish bin, and he sounds a bit surprised and disappointed that we haven’t recognised his new invention: a device for honey-harvesting.

  Techniques for honey-harvesting depend a lot on hive type. With a modern hive you take the frames out and uncap the wax-crusted honeycomb with a thin-toothed comb before fitting the frames into an extractor – a large, cylindrical spinning machine that spins so fast that the honey flies out and then drips down to collect at a tap at the bottom. The frameless comb from a top-bar hive would fall apart if it was spun, so instead the comb is removed from the hive and sliced clean from the bar before being strained through a sieve. It all sounds quite straightforward, except for one fairly major complication: how to separate the bees from their honey? They don’t give it up easily, and will even seek to claim it back where they can. So Jack has been working on a solution.

  ‘You put a piece of harvested comb in the box,’ he explains, ‘and then you put the lid on. Did you see the white valves at the top? They’re one-way exits. Once the bees climb out they can’t get back in, so you sit and wait until they’ve all come out; eventually there’s just the honeycomb left.’

  ‘Wow,’ I say, suddenly impressed.

  ‘So shall we set a date? For the harvest, I mean. September’s just around the corner – it must be about time.’

  I had been thinking that learning about beekeeping was a bit like the experience of a foraging bee, gathering scraps of knowledge and insight from all around like the pollen and nectar she collects and carries back into the hive. Now I’m wondering if it’s more like trophallaxis, that process of communal sucking and spitting that happens inside the hive when the nectar is there but hasn’t reached the honey stage yet.

  Conversations this year have fed into each other. New insights prompted others, turned old ones around, moulded new shapes out of partially digested forms. There were the conversations with Luke on the phone, and Huber’s letters, and the friends who came and challenged what I was seeing. There were also journeys out, to the ONBG meetings and the museum, and to that flat of his in Forest Hill that now has become a place I keep going back to.

  It is possible to gauge the range of communal digestion inside the hive by treating a sample of nectar with a radioactive tracer. James and Carol Gould describe how, if the nectar is carried into the hive in the morning, by evening almost the whole colony will be marked; nearly all the workers take part in its conversion into honey.

  ‘Hold still!’ Pat says, because I’ve been so busy talking I haven’t noticed that the coffee in my cup is about to spill. I can say his name now; I don’t have to call him the psychic any more. I’m in London to see him the weekend before the honey harvest. We’re sitting on a pavement outside a bakery eating day-old pastries, a late breakfast or an early lunch on our way to see a friend.

  He reaches over and takes a swig of the coffee. I make a swipe for his pastry, and miss, and he laughs and hands it over anyway.

  I’ve noticed we’re getting bolder and louder around each other. We laugh often and a lot. It is some great relief, I’ve found, to feel a want and be able to run with it. To have it welcomed, warmed, heated, spurred; to spur and welcome a want in him.

  On the pavement beside us lie my notebook and a pen. We’ve been drawing pictures and writing some things down about What Might Happen Next. We’ve begun thinking we might want to make some changes, move a bit closer to each other, sometime soon. It is not quite a plan yet; it is just like playing with shapes. And it feels fresh and frameless and deeply good.

  I look down at the scribbled notes, which are really the beginnings of a conversation about what home is or could be, and realise there’s a story circling somewhere in the back of my mind about honey and healing – I read it in Preston’s Bee last week.

  During the Second Balkan War, the Bulgarian army ran out of medical supplies. The fighting kept happening, and the wounded soldiers kept coming. Inside the medical tents, no one knew what to do; the cupboards were empty, there was nothing left to use. Then someone thought to try honey. They began using it under bandages, as a wound dressing, and it worked. Honey’s high osmolarity means that it is capable of drawing moisture off surrounding cells; it can kill bacteria, which is useful for preservation inside the hive and also makes it an effective antiseptic.

  But there was something else, too. Another property belonging to honey that made it an especially good choice as a wound dressing: it stays liquid over time. So it didn’t solidify under the bandages; it didn’t tear the flesh as it healed.

  Thinking of it now, that story seems to me like a whisper or a promise of something new. That fresh skin can form, new life emerge – that it is possible to feel protected and held and yet still able to move.

  I lean back, resting my elbows against the pavement as I stretch my legs into the street. He reaches forward, finds the gap of skin between my shoe and trouser leg, and wraps a hand around it.

  Three birds fly over and a rubbish truck turns.

  ‘Shall we move?’ he says, and pulls me up.

  It’s funny what happens when you ease up a bit; it seems to prompt others to follow suit. In recent weeks people at work have softened, even opened up, and those tough exteriors don’t seem so impenetrable any more. Still, I’m beginning to see the truth in what Dulcie said: some environments are toxic to certain life forms – and sometimes a bad fit is just that. I’d like to say that I’ve found ways of adjusting, even making it good – but I’m coming to realise that the best thing in this instance may be to cut my losses, and – movable thing that I am – move on.

  We throw our empty wrappers into a bin and walk up the street to a park and playing fields. There are people, pushchairs, a football. Above us the trees are filled with layer upon layer of dry and shifting leaves, and we look up as the light splits through the spaces between them.

  September

  On the day of the harvest there are four of us arranged at different distances from the hive. Or there are three of us, with the side-gate open – Ellie arrives when we’ve already begun, dropping her rucksack by the fence and pulling on a borrowed suit before slipping in beside us.

  Jack and I are standing on either side of the roof; Ellie and Becky are on the grass beside the plastic box, which is filled with our collected equipment. The equipment consists of a hive tool, a bee brush, a large knife, an assortment of spoons and forks, four sieves and a large metal pan.

  ‘Ready?’ Jack says.

  ‘Ready.’

  A low buzzing rises as we lift the lid. Jack asks Becky for the hive tool but Becky doesn’t know what a hive tool is, so Ellie picks the box up and brings it closer – but then she’s blocking the entrance and the bees get flustered about it.

  ‘Careful,’ I say. ‘Not the flight path.’

  ‘Oh – sorry.’ We’re all a bit over-polite and unsure of ourselves, and I begin to wonder if we should have planned this better.

  ‘Let’s start at the back?’

  ‘Here?’

  ‘Got it?’

  ‘Yep.’

  ‘Ready. Go.’

  It is clear right away that the inside of the hive has been transformed. Where eggs and larvae lay only a month ago, we now find row upon row of honeycomb. Perhaps row isn’t right. The comb is more like waves. It undulates, making rounds, not lines. In parts where the honey-making process is still incomplete we see liquid shining in the uncapped cells. Elsewhere there are swathes covered over with a light wax skin. The skin is so thin you can see the honey through it, and it’s white and crisp where it touches the cell walls.

  ‘Look here – there’s more.�
� The whole substance of this place has changed. I’m tempted to stop what I’m doing and just marvel at what’s happened here, but the bees won’t put up with us for long so for now I keep my wonder to myself. We work our way through the bars one by one, and find six filled with honeycomb.

  ‘That’s got to be enough for a harvest,’ says Jack.

  ‘Shall we?’

  ‘How many?’ We take two; and the bees cling to them. Jack shakes each bar once, hard, and a ream of bees falls down and lifts up around us.

  A honeybee will make around one-twelfth of a teaspoon of honey in her whole lifetime. If you were to cut a piece of string equivalent to the combined flight distance made by foragers for just one jar of honey, it would reach almost one and a half times around the world. As I carry the comb away from the hive I wonder how many lifetimes this is; how much is it okay to want?

  At the back door Becky is waiting with the bee brush and we sweep the bees off like dust, except we keep getting legs caught in the brush hairs. When only a few bees are left we place the comb inside the plastic box and fit the lid on; the one-way valves work just as predicted, and we watch as the bees crawl out one by one.

  Back inside the house we arrange ourselves in a kind of circle, but the circle is crooked because of the furniture. Jack is squashed between a chair and a lamp stand; Ellie has one leg under a table. Becky’s begun plucking open the wax capping with a fork, and now the rest of us lean in. Inside each cell is a droplet of honey, and inside each droplet is a spot of light from the window. Jack sticks in a finger and licks it.

  We take the sieves and hold them over the pan, then begin straining the comb and mashing it with our spoons. The honey gloops. We’ve all begun licking our fingers now, which makes us jittery and a bit rushy too. The taste makes me think of something high up and intricately spun, clear and sharp and full of the sun.