I told my wife today, while straining the last of the four gallons of honey they left behind, that someday, maybe next spring, we should put more bees in those boxes down by the road. But they would not be the same bees I came to know over the last year. They were our first hive.
Last spring, my neighbor Jakub Dvorak, a strapping Czech farmer, called me at ten o’clock one night. His son, Jakub Jr., had spotted a swarm of bees earlier in the day ten miles away, while plowing a field for a man. We drove over, pitch black outside, and found the swarm, about the size of a basketball, hanging from a mesquite limb just the other side of a barbed-wire fence. The three of us held the barbed wire open for one another, crawled in, and stood in the waist-high Johnson grass along the dirt road, me holding the flashlight.
The old man cut a cedar branch and pulled a jar of water out of the back pocket of his overalls, then wet the cedar fronds and gently sprinkled the swarm to keep them from flying away. Bees, when they swarm, are not particularly interested in stinging you, but in finding a new home. These had stopped on the tree for the night, to rest and prepare to resume their search at daylight.
The swarm now sufficiently wet, Jakub gingerly slipped a gunnysack over the bees and closed the mouth around the tree limb. With a saw, Jakub Jr. began taking the branch off. In the beam of the flashlight, I watched the bees that never quite made it into the sack begin to seek out their mates inside. Finding only Jakub’s thick farmer fingers iron-gripping the sack around the branch, the outliers began stinging the old man repeatedly. He didn’t flinch, knowing that if he weakened his grip we’d lose everything.
“Hurry up,” he said calmly to his son, as the bees ferociously attacked his clenched hands.
Jakub Jr. sawed faster, and when the branch came loose the old man carried the sack full of bees, the sawn branch sticking out the end, over to the truck where he tied it up with a piece of string. Then we drove home. No gloves, bee suits, face veils, or discussion of the distinct possibility they could have been Africanized bees, the killer bees, which have made it up to this area.
Looking back, I realize that I was in the presence of bee men that night, farmers rich in finer forms of pain, with memories of brothers and friends pinned under tractors, or burned alive using gasoline in foolish ways, or slaughtered in crashes en route to town or to the auction barn with a trailer full of cattle. Bee stings were nothing.
By headlights on the truck, we brushed the bees into a white, wooden hive box by my house along County Road 3304, near Penelope, Texas.
A couple of days later, I passed the box on the way to the post office and pulled off to watch a strange sight, bees in the air everywhere. Jakub Jr. happened by, and he, too, pulled over to watch. The bees were swarming again.
“Bees get a mind to swarm, they just want to swarm,” he said.
The next day, I opened the hive and there were no bees.
We tried again a couple of weeks later, taking a small swarm the size of a softball off some wood pallets behind a house being built over on the asphalt road, FM 2214. (FM stands for Farm to Market Road. They crisscross the rural parts of Texas.) The lady who was having the house built had called Jakub in a panic, like most people do when they spot a swarm. Most people who live in the country know the value of bees, and are hesitant to needlessly shoot them with a can of wasp killer, the spray that squirts out lethal dope from a safe twenty feet away. People call around to find a bee man, and Jakub was pretty much it around here.
Jakub came by and picked me up, and we went over and settled the bees down with a spritz of water from a spray bottle, then shoveled them into a hive box. A few days later, they, too, abandoned the hive along County Road 3304, and I was again without bees. I needed bees without a mind to swarm. So I called Claude Lester.
Claude is the bee man’s bee man, not a pleasure bee man, but a commercial beekeeper who sells bees and equipment out of his garage down south of Waco. I have no idea how old he is, but he seems ancient, a thin man with double hearing aids and a passion for bees. Many men his age are waiting for death in nursing homes, but Claude seems to me a man who might just live forever. Back behind his house is a big shed, and around that a bee yard, stacked high with hundreds of hives and millions of bees. I was a little hesitant to walk back there at first, but followed Claude, who just casually walked into the haze of bees in his shirtsleeves. The bees he sells are not wild, but Italian bees, bred for honey production, with a mild temperament. This, at first, you must take on faith. It is not to say Italian bees won’t sting you; it just takes them a little longer to get mad.
According to C. P. Dadant’s seminal beekeeper’s manual, first published in 1917, beekeeping is ancient, recorded in the Vedas of India, the Koran, and the Bible. Pliny and Aristotle mentioned it. Dadant says that honey was the universal sweet, until Alexander the Great brought sugarcane back from an expedition in Asia.
The candles burning before strange gods in the temples of antiquity were the products of the bee’s tireless efforts. Consider the great literature written in the darkness of history by the light of beeswax candles. The countenance of Cleopatra was made more radiant by face creams made of beeswax. To the bee, the wax is just the utilitarian stuff with which it builds its home.
Honey is the food the bee lays by for the winter, when no flowers bloom. Honey and beeswax, Jonathan Swift said, are “…the two noblest of things, which are sweetness and light.” From the burning bush of Exodus, God himself promised to deliver Moses and his people to “a land flowing with milk and honey.”
According to Farmers.gov, honey bees alone pollinate eighty percent of all flowering plants, including more than a hundred and thirty types of fruits and vegetables. Apple, pear and orange groves pay beekeepers to bring in semi-trailer loads of beehives for this purpose. As the bee gathers nectar from the flower, she inadvertently deposits it on other flowers. I do not use the word “she” accidentally. All worker bees are female, and live to serve the queen. The queen lives to lay eggs, the only bee in the hive of say, eighty thousand, who does so. A handful of males, drones, are tolerated long enough to mate with the queen. Come winter, the males are driven out and die in the cold, having become needless expenditures of winter’s precious food stores. Such is the efficient justice within the hive. A bee with no further purpose receives no quarter.
In the summer, the worker bee lives less than six weeks, literally wearing herself out from work. Some workers are assigned to guard the entrance of the hive from predators, such as ants or other bees who seek to rob the honey. In the heat of summer, some bees stand at the entrance and buzz their wings, transferring air from bee to bee all the way inside the hive, fanning the interior to keep it cool, lest the beeswax combs melt. Other bees feed the queen; some build the comb, a perfect hexagon. Some seal the comb when it is filled with honey. Others go out and gather nectar, seeking flowers up to twelve miles away and returning, somehow, to find the tiny hive entrance. It is a perfect division of labor, utter cooperation, tireless sacrifice, not for the life of any one bee save the queen, but for the ongoing survival of the colony at large.
I imagine each bee knows, somehow, that its time on earth is short. Maybe it is the honor of those ancestors who did likewise, and the hope of the descendants that will follow, that motivates the individual bee to persevere until she drops lifeless from the air into the meadow, laden with nectar which she will never deliver. For those bees charged with gathering nectar, life will be a time hard and brief, but oh, what an existence: possessing the ability to fly over field and farm, to look down on the laziness of the hardest-working man and show him his vanity and weakness, to spend dawn to dusk among the flowers man never notices, blooms he calls weeds, among the yellow-flowered mesquite trees, the paler yellow cotton blooms, the clovers white and yellow, rich and sticky. “The pedigree of honey, does not concern the bee. A clover, any time, to him, is aristocracy,” wrote Emily Dickinson. She was half-right. Odd she never knew that the bees she noted were all girls.
But back to Claude, bee man of all bee men. He sold me five frames dripping with bees and honey, and a queen, dotted with a speck of blue paint to identify her. I installed them, and lo and behold, they stayed. I got the white bee-proof suit, the heavy gloves up to the elbow, the veil, and was in the bee business, down by County Road 3304.
The first time I went to inspect the bees, I was nervous. I took the smoker, a small canister filled with smoldering burlap and rotten wood, which puffs smoke into the hive. The smoke makes the bees think that a fire is threatening them, and they set about devouring honey as fast as they can, believing they are going to have to fly away and establish a new hive. The smoke distracts them, so that, up to a point, they focus on survival instead of on stinging you. It is a trick, and the act always made me feel a little bad, interrupting their sense of order, frightening them. But I was more frightened than they, having heard that if you panic in the face of thousands of stinging insects they will smell your fear or pheromones or whatever and attack you even more fiercely. In my head, a mantra of “stay cool, don’t panic” was running as I used the special flat knife to crack open the lid and reach into the basket of adders.
You see, a bee hive is not just a collection of boxes stacked on top of one another; the boxes are all stuck together by a substance the bees gather from trees called propolis, a sticky, sap-like glue. They caulk every crack and seam. Removing the lid, breaking apart the boxes, or pulling out the frames inside, upon which the bees build their combs and store their honey, requires breaking the seal of propolis at every turn. This is how the bees keep out ants, wind, cold, and blowing rain, a society sealed from within. My hive had four boxes, two on top called supers, which hold only honey and from which the queen is excluded by a metal screen with holes large enough for the workers to enter but not the much-larger queen.
The bottom two boxes are the actual hive, where the queen and her loyal subjects live, and the young are reared. To allow the queen up into the supers would mean larvae laid among the chambers of pure honey, the two of which could not be separated when it comes time to take the honey. I pried all the boxes apart until I reached the bottom ones, the hive proper, puffing smoke as I went, angering more bees as I went. By the time I lifted the frame containing the queen, my hands were black with crawling bees, stinging at my gloves, flying straight at my face, hitting my veil head-on. The smoke only does so much.
A bee dies when it stings, sacrificing itself to protect the hive. Many bees died that day, and on subsequent days, fruitlessly placing their stingers in my canvas gloves. There was no approaching fire; no need to flee. There was no need to die. There was, however, a thief. Me.
A few days ago, I went down and robbed the bees of their fall honey, taking one super and leaving one for them to eat during the winter. Some bee men take both supers, and feed their bees sugar water during the long winter, but something about that seemed so unfair that I never did it. I figured they were entitled to half their provisions, for which they had worked so hard.
I commented to my wife how few bees had been in the supers when I opened the boxes, and I laid that fact to my good bee management and to opening the hive in early morning, when, logically, most of the bees would be outside gathering honey rather than inside the hive waiting to sting me. Such is the reason bee men don’t rob when it’s cloudy, for fear too many bees have stayed home in the hive, unwilling to risk being caught twelve miles from the hive in a rainstorm.
But, as I learned yesterday, when I went to replace the frames in the top super, good management was not the case for not having many bees present to bother me. Opening up the hive itself, down in the lower two boxes, I found strange spider webs covering everything, the unmistakable sign of wax moths. This is the bees’ most-feared enemy. A wax moth is just that: a moth, to my knowledge serving no purpose on earth besides eating your sweaters and destroying bees and their hives. Frantically, I pulled out frame after frame, killing wasps that had already invaded to help themselves to the honey, and ants, which trailed among the frames. It was the end of my colony, the gang under my watch, my sturdy and noble workers living to serve their queen, and doing so in spite of me, the robber of honey, the threat greater than fire. I loved these bees, and I believe they were worthy of that.
After much hesitation, I took most of the honey-filled frames from the other super, the ones the bees would have used to survive the winter, and my wife and I extracted the honey. It took a couple more hours, and was sweet as only honey can be, and somber as only emptiness can be.
I left a couple of frames of honey in the box, letting the few remaining bees eat their fill as their days ran out. I found the body of the queen, the blue spot still on her back. The queen, the only source of new eggs, had died, for whatever reason. The moths had gained entry, and the colony was doomed by attrition. As they died off, there were no fresh replacements, no-body to succeed them, and they just petered out. Bees maintain a handful of larvae intended to serve as backup queens. But clearly, they had not been able to get a succession plan going in time. Bees, it seemed to me, are so meticulous and careful in their actions. Even so, something greater than all their preparations and industry and cleverness had surprised them and cost them everything. For all the richness to be squeezed from knowing of a bee’s life, I sometimes think there is even more to be learned from its demise.
By their ceaseless efforts during the summer, they produced a full store of honey for the winter. But as fall approaches now, down by County Road 3304 near Penelope, Texas, there will be no one left to taste the sweetness of their labor save me and my wife, and the few friends we can think of who, around Christmas, would appreciate the rare taste of those bees’ honey, while never knowing it was the last batch that noble colony would ever make. You just can’t tell people something like that.
David Fowler raised bees and native plants on a ranch in central Texas. He now lives and writes in Jackson, Mississippi, and is legally blind.
