Telling the Bees

Telling the Bees

The day before her scheduled D&C, the beekeeper walked across the field with tight steps, her cart and dark suede boots compressing the tender grass into marked furrows. The air felt clean, like something newborn: a spindly calf licked into life by its mother’s rich tongue, wet and fresh, an hour or so from standing. A cabbage butterfly bobbed, its white wings held aloft and then frantically beating to stay afloat over erupting crowns of clover. Somewhere near, the short warbling cheeps of a finch cut through spring’s sanguine susurrus. She breathed in the glistening air, and it made her want to cry.

Four Langstroth hives stood tall, stacked on cinder blocks, and lined in a neat row facing south. She had hurriedly supered them last week after seeing the ivory blackberry blossoms along the highway after her appointment. Who knew when she would next be up to completing a real inspection. Her stomach tightened for her neglected bees, then for her own confused child. She had yet to figure out how to tell them.

She had held her young daughter’s hand, pointed to rounded bellies, and talked about brothers and sisters. They imagined futures, pictured faces, practiced names. Her child had seen the ratty blue jay wings gifted at their door, the cup or so of bees from each hive they sacrificed monthly to study mite levels, and had found the desiccated foragers, wing side down on the sidewalk, tattered. But birds and bees had not prepared the beekeeper to tell her daughter that her sibling would not be coming home. 

She approached her easternmost hive and dropped her cart handle. Habitually, she pumped the bellows of her smoker and tested the temperature against her exposed wrist. Thick plumes of cool, white smoke engulfed her arm, and she welcomed the cathartic scent of burning pine straw. Calming, masking. Blackberry nectar was flowing; she likely would not need to use it much. These were happy honeybees. Wrapping the sun-bleached ties of her veil around her waist, she knotted it firmly under her breasts, her hand lingering a moment on her swollen belly before remembering.

Right.

A fog of ignorant honeybees slowly swayed in lazy figure eights, each in various stages of their expanding orientation flights. Some flew in small arcs inches from the hive entrance, while others flew five meters in the air, orienting themselves to their home. A honeybee held a headstand at the edge of the landing board, its abdomen arched up like a skunk ready to spray or a ballooning spider trying to catch the wind. A closer look revealed the discrete, white Nasanov gland, and fanning wings dispersed the alluring pheromone that calls back the foragers. Indeed, a returning forager weighed down with rusty pollen pants bumbled her landing and flipped onto her back at the entrance before righting herself. Several more arrived bearing blackberry pollen, light gray like television static, their pollen baskets resembling fat ticks on their hind legs. The beekeeper pictured their pollen combs, the stiff hairs on their hind legs, raking whiskery stamens, their moistened forelegs brushing the dusty pollen from their tawny hairs towards their pollen baskets. She thought of scraping and shuddered.

She and her daughter had painted this hive in preparation for the bees. Her fingers met the smooth wood and traced the swell of a salmon tulip, following each long brush stroke of rose and apricot. The beekeeper tacked a piece of delicate black lace in the space next to the mossy stamp of a youthful handprint. Tradition mandated telling the bees. 

She gently struck the side of the hive three times with the curved end of her hive tool. 

“Please, little bees.” But she could not say the words aloud, even to them.

Ignoring the call reverberating in her pocket, she stooped, pressing her ear into the wooden wall of the brood box, and tried to internalize the rosy hum. The scent of cedar filled her nostrils. Cedar boxes that smelled of gin, and her grandmother’s hope chest, the large bureau that now sat at the foot of her bed and held the things the beekeeper saved for her children. Old drawings. Photos. A lock of hair. Ultrasounds, but not the last one.

She gently tossed the shining, telescoping outer cover, cumbersome in her fingers, into the grass. Next, she hefted the honey super, pausing briefly at the weight, mixed feelings of pride at their job well done and apprehension of the twisting strain. Though weight limits should not matter now. “Good job, girls,” she told them.

It was amazing what could be done with just a little time.

Time, this week, had slipped by, greasy and oiled, like the jellied probe in an OB’s hand. Schrodinger’s uterus, like Schrodinger’s hive, had no telling what was inside until one took it apart. But there was no question this hive was doing well. And time was not always greasy. Sometimes it stopped, triggered by something unexpected and cruel, hitting her hard again and again. Time displaced by moments like air displaced by lead-footed trucks on the highway, shaking her violently as they passed. Again. And again. And again. The turning away of a stagnant screen. The silent retreat for a second opinion. Or maybe someone to share the burden of bad news. Are you sure about your dates? the doctor had asked.

And the night after her appointment, in the early morning stillness while her daughter dozed and her bees took sleep in shifts, granite countertops had cooled the underside of her weary forearms. Kitchens were different at night. Neutral. With loud lingering silences, like censored ghosts haunting the gallery with their echoes of domestic bustle. The clicking of loaded dishwashers after dinner. Scratching pencils and ringing timers. Sounds that crescendoed in the waves of their absence.

Her phone had buzzed angrily, ready to sting her from two states away with her mother’s inquiring message. Is everything okay?

No, she had wanted to type. She could ignore her. Pretend she was asleep. But instead, she texted that she’d forgotten to call but was tired and would call tomorrow. This would make sense in the morning. But her phone vibrated again, pulses she could feel in her teeth, and that once pushed away, abandoned on the counter, reverberated against the stone surface and echoed in the kitchen until she answered. Mom. It’s really late. 

Honey… Her mother had insisted. Remember…For everything there is a season—

Her heart droned in her ears, every beat tingling her cheeks and lips. And great breaths filled her lungs, but she could barely exhale before sucking in more useless air, her mother’s voice growing increasingly distant. She searched for words, any words, that would work. Happy words to let her know she’d be okay. But as her fingers gripped her glass so hard she was sure it would burst, she couldn’t think over the mute palimpsest of sound, the deafening roar of nothing where there had once been promise. She focused on her daughter’s magnetted crayon artwork of the baby they had prayed for, waxy and naive, and she hung up the phone.

“I can’t answer the phone anymore,” she told the bees. “I can’t keep praying.”

The second trimester was supposed to be safe.

Setting the super perpendicular on top of the overturned lid, she crouched on her haunches and examined the frames inside. She had given them a few empty frames to work on, but they had built them out quickly. Each frame beamed with new white wax, heavy with the wrinkled facade of capped honey and open cells of glistening nectar.

The beekeeper stood and turned to the next level of the hive, the top brood box, and scraped away the comb cresting the top bar of the wooden frames. The sharp edge of her hive tool slid under the wandering wax, rubbing the wood and squishing the comb into a compact glob. Clear nectar leaked from the compressed cells and was drawn up in the long, inquisitive proboscises of investigating workers.

She hooked the edge of a deep frame and pried it up with the hive tool like a nail with a claw hammer. As she pulled the frame, a chain of long and lacy bees festooned behind, clasping claws, and forming a bridge from the frame in her hands to its neighbor in the box. With a gentle pull, she broke their body-made scaffolding. 

Heavy with melliferous fodder, this frame held a curved band of hexagonal cells near the bottom center of the capped brood and uncapped larvae, their grubby white bodies spiraling wet and bright at the base of each depression. A kaleidoscope of pollens, various shades of yellow, orange, red, brown, and gray, stippled the frame and surrounded the young, providing vital protein to the hive. A rough peanut-shaped cup hung off the bottom of the frame—a swarm cell. Carefully flipping the frame over, she peeked inside. Empty. The remaining frames were similar, full of food, with reflective nectar backfilling empty cells within the compact lunules of wormy brood. She found two more occupied swarm cells.

As she twisted away the upper brood box and held it to her chest, arms shaking with effort, she was hit suddenly with the overwhelming smell of an active hive. She had thought it would comfort her, but the warm, homey scent of beeswax and honey turned her stomach.

Separating the brood boxes had torn the bridge comb, and nurse bees were already dragging away the ghostly, pupating drones that fell from it, their bodies soft as the fresh flesh of a new scar. She scraped clear the remaining comb from the tops of the frames, smoking bees away as needed, and carefully picked through the pebbly drone comb with forceps she kept in her pocket, searching for the dreaded crablike bodies of Varroa mites. She was on autopilot now, relying on muscle memory to complete these tasks she once enjoyed.

The taste of copper dread rose steadily in her throat and settled uncomfortably on her tongue. She wanted to throw things. To squeeze the waxy wads of drone comb until their soft bodies squelched from between her clenched fingers. She was Demeter, ready to scorch the earth.

The tickling thrill of a solitary bee tunneled up her sleeve, and, for a moment, she wished it would sting her if only to ground her in the present with pain. The kind she could tolerate.

The doctor’s patronizing handshake. His reminder that she was still young.

Her mother’s reminder that God has a purpose for everything.

Her movements were too jagged, too forced, and the bees were noticing. They peered up at her from between frames, rows upon rows of bulging compound eyes turned her way. A few bumped her veil in warning, and others followed the waving of her tools.

She had been neglecting the smoker, and it faltered as she raised it to the frames. A few quick pumps of the bellows expelled thin wisps of soothing smoke and soon the bees returned to their duties.

This was her mutt hive. She had requeened the hive with a Carniolan queen, but they had quickly rejected her. The queen may have been damaged in transit or injured during an inspection. Perhaps she had been ill-bred and lacked the sperm to adequately fertilize her eggs. Maybe they did not like her laying pattern. Possibly they did not like her. She was not their mother. They did not know her. 

Sometimes nature simply says No. It does not work out for everyone.

Nurse bees may have taken one of her eggs and moved it into a waiting queen cup or simply rebuilt the cell of a young larva to fit the larger body of a growing queen. Fed only royal jelly and never tasting the bee bread given to the worker brood, the bee would develop into sexual maturity.

This new queen was certainly active. Each frame in the lower brood box held a solid pattern of textured hexagons, corners and edges lined with pollen and honey. The keeper found the sun and held the frames at an angle to check seemingly empty cells. The light reflected off tiny rice-like eggs, barely there and easily missed. Queens may lay up to 2,000 eggs in a day during their peak population build. This queen hardly had room to lay, and the scattered, backfilled cells of nectar found amidst the brood meant this hive was honey bound. More than one frame held occupied swarm cells, grubby larvae swimming in thick royal jelly and nearly capped.

If they had not already, soon, the nurse bees would cease feeding the queen the royal jelly excreted from glands in their heads, and she would slim down, stop laying, and prepare to swarm, taking to the air with half or more of the hive’s population in search of a new home. The beekeeper adjusted her grip on the swarm cell-laden frame, and a bee protested beneath her left middle finger before she carefully lifted it. She squeezed the wide frame back into its place and began to create her simulated, artificial swarm.

She pulled the components of another hive from her cart, a hive stand, a landing board, a slatted rack, two deep hive bodies, and another honey super. The frame holding the white-marked queen found a new home in this second hive, along with several frames of brood, pollen, and honey. 

Once the remaining swarm cells were capped, it would be nearly three weeks before a virgin queen hatched, embarked on her mating flight, and began laying eggs. In the original hive, the first emerging virgin queen would likely kill her remaining quacking sisters with barbarous stings. This new queen could be the future, but a loss would be felt. A pause while things took their course.

You’ll want to wait a few cycles before trying again, her doctor had told her while her baby floated leaden and lifeless in her belly. 

I don’t want another baby, she had told him. Lifting a frame crowded with nurse bees, she whispered to the bees, “I wanted this one.”  

The beekeeper jumped at the faint sound of a truck door slamming, dropping the frame and stepping back from the eruption of honeybees at her feet. Possessive guard bees bounced off her chest and bumped her veil. Her arms burned where they found entry into her sleeves. She pumped her smoker once, twice, the billowing smoke enveloping her body. Carbon and caustic, it pricked her watering eyes and irritated her throat. 

The air vibrated with the unsympathetic tension of disturbed homes. No comforting buzzing, no false hope for the future. Already the original hive roared for their missing queen with fanning wings dispersing air that lacked her vital queen pheromone. Foragers, heavy with pollen and nectar, vanished into their hives, oblivious to the beekeeper while fanning bees held handstands and orienting bees circled in figure eights. The newly hatched still cleaned out their cells, and nurse bees still fed young larvae. As the smoke dissipated, her easternmost hive waited for its new mother.

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