A Keeper of Bees: Notes on Hive and Home - Hardcover

Wallace, Allison

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1400062713 ISBN 13: 9781400062713

Publisher: Random House, 2006

Synopsis

I was hooked. Call it adrenaline surge, call it honeybee venom in my veins–whatever the explanation, henceforth I would need these funky little critters in my life. Givers of sweet, thick honey, bringers forth of the fruits from trees and bushes and who knew what else, they also gave more food for thought than a body could know what to do with.
–from A Keeper of Bees

Allison Wallace’s devotion to honeybees and their amazing, intensely lived lives started years ago, when she was living in a cabin in the North Carolina woods. Ever since then, wherever she has called home, Wallace has kept company with bees. Now she gives us the honeybee in all its glory, dancing “the great, never fully knowable ecological dance,” striving like other creatures and plants to be all it can be in its short life.
With a philosopher’s perception and a scientist’s knowledge, Wallace interweaves the facts of honeybee biology with reflections on desire, intimacy, work, evolution, memory, and home. She shares the thrill of intimately observing thousands of busy bees cozily ensconced in their brilliantly designed, perfectly weatherproofed hive. She muses on the female workers’ unceasing activity, and on the male drones’ idleness as each awaits his acrobatic midair mating with the queen, followed by his instant death. She marvels at the cosseted queen, upon whom the future of the hive depends.

About this title

About the Author

Allison Wallace has published many articles and essays. She is a professor of American Studies at the Honors College of the University of Central Arkansas. This is her first book.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

1

The Work of Honeybees

Even the insects in my path are not loafers, but have their special errands. Not merely and vaguely in this world, but in this hour, each is about its business.

—Henry David Thoreau,

Journal, September 30, 1852

It is measured in droplets, flakes, grains. All natural materials, some produced by their own bodies. The work of bees aims at mass, strength, durability, longevity, achieving these with particles that, taken alone, would blow away in the slightest breeze. The work of bees appears in constant need of doing, though once they’ve established a solidly respectable colonial home, it’s hard to see why. I peer into one of my hives—a marvelous multichambered palace weighing a hundred pounds in wax, honey, pollen, and stored brood—and say aloud, “Look, gang, time to kick back and take it easy for a bit, don’t you think? Haven’t you earned a break?” But no: they’re as hard at it as ever, every one of these thousands of murmuring engines roaming across the comb on her particular mission of the moment. And if ever this hive begins to feel too small, if the volume of the bees’ work begins to push uncomfortably at the sturdy pine walls and inner cover, about half of them will take to the sky in search of nature’s vacant lots for sale or rent, some hollow in a tree or rock overhang where a new colony can be established. The work of bees can slow down, can pause (during a northern winter, for example), but it can never really cease. And though most of us don’t know it, we have reason to be deeply grateful this is so.
Every morning for a whole school year, the same thin-shouldered college boy could be found swabbing the tiled stairway separating me from my office when I arrived for work. Generally embarrassed at the sight of people doing any kind of cleaning on my behalf, I would tiptoe self- consciously onto the damp tile, apologize (“Sure, no prob”), and occasionally try to offer some variation on your basic “Nice work.” By degrees I came to realize that he worked some afternoon shifts, too, when once again he plied his mop over every step, perhaps ticking them off one, two, three in his head as he slicked them. Ignorant of the young man’s name, I was free to think of him as Sisyphus. He may have been fortunate in having only to drag a mop down the stairs rather than push a rock up a mountain, but there still remained for him the daily problem of ruined work in need of doing all over again. No matter that he’d left the tile a shiny chocolate brown before heading to class the day before: every morning and many afternoons there they’d be, a set of stairs newly begritted and grimed.

As I say, I was myself arriving for work each morn- ing that I encountered this fellow. And how many stu- dent essays had I already marked in my time, how many classes taught, meetings attended, sloppy committee reports mopped up? It did not much matter, since there was always another one waiting—and by some grace or other I never thought to drive myself daft ticking them off one at a time.

Such appears to be the futile nature of most work: for every floor scrubbed, shirt sewn, wall painted, brick laid, wire strung, bale tossed, net hauled, baby delivered, engine tuned, meal prepared, report written, form processed, purchase order filled, confession heard, steer branded, or broken bone set, another just behind awaits its turn. The fact may be the sweetest dream that labor knows (as Frost put it), but let’s not be fooled: each fact achieved by work is nevertheless a dream, a dissolution in the making, a ruin waiting to unfold. There is no such thing as work done that stays done: even God—or, if you prefer, organic evolution—seems not to have called it a day (not on the seventh, not on the six million and seventh), called it good, and given up tinkering. For mere mortals, the impermanence of achievement is an old, familiar source of grief. Listen to the Preacher:

Then I looked on all the works that my hands had wrought,

And on the labor that I had labored to do,

And, behold, all was vanity and vexation of spirit,

And there was no profit under the sun.

Fast-forward a few hundred years nearer our own time, and here comes the thin, robed figure of Gandhi stepping up to say, maddeningly, that although everything I do will be insignificant, I must do it anyway. Stopping short, I peer into the apparition of his raisin-brown face: But why?

Animals generally and insects in particular appear not the least afflicted by such questions, though their work, too, is consistently undone by the same law of entropy that has set its face against permanent human achievement. Those bees of mine, for example, and their exquisitely built environment inside the hive: they tend it endlessly because it is endlessly subject to the vicissitudes of temperature, humidity, and the differential pressure exerted by thousands of tiny, hairy honeybee feet. To leave off housekeeping for even a day would be to court disaster, since the hive (especially in summer) is a very active nursery, where the near constant birthing of bee babies makes for a constant mess in need of tidying up.
The great majority of honeybees in a given colony are infertile females, and there’s a reason they’re called worker bees; there’s reason in the phrase “busy as a bee.” While the males or drones have their one job, that of mating with queens from other colonies (outside the hive, high up in the air), and while the queen has her one job of laying eggs (as many as two thousand on a really good summer’s day), each worker bee has nearly a dozen jobs. Certain tasks are usually taken up as she reaches a certain age, and she usually takes them up in roughly the sequence followed by her sisters, though the overall condition of the colony can affect these patterns somewhat: the colony’s needs always take precedence over any one worker bee’s “need” to fulfill a given role. Like human children in a well-ordered home, the workers have their various chores, all assigned according to the bees’ ages and abilities, or more precisely, their degree of physiological development. But unlike children’s growth, honeybee development appears to speed up or slow down as the colony’s well-being demands. Imagine being able, at will, to turn your toddlers into teenagers overnight, just because the housework has come to include some heavy lifting.

Suppose it’s high summer. In some nondescript region of honeycomb in one of my hives, a newly matured worker bee is chewing and pawing her way out of the wax cell in which she has been nestled, growing, for a couple of weeks. In order to keep up with her in the throng of bees she’s about to join, let’s daub a bit of fluorescent orange paint on her back, and for ease of reference, let’s call her Bella. When she is finally freed from her chamber, the first thing she does is turn around and clean it of any debris she may have left behind, like a newborn tidying up its own afterbirth. She soon moves on to do the same for other brood (larval) cells, joining thousands of newborns who are simi-larly occupied, many of whom will poke around in Bella’s cell, too, to be sure it’s clean. (Honeybees are nothing if not thorough.) Bella and her young sisters may keep this up for only a day, or for as long as thirty days in rare instances. During this time, many will also begin capping brood or nursery cells—that is, sealing off with a wax cap the larvae that are ready to pupate. The wax has come afresh from the bees’ own bodies, one flake at a time emerging from the upper abdomen like paper from a fax machine, in response to glandular signals. Or it could be that some of the caps are recent castoffs from newly emptied cells; recycling of this sort saves precious energy.

Before long Bella’s body has responded to further physiological prompting and has begun to produce “brood food,” a glandular secretion mixed with a bit of honey, water, and digestive enzymes. (As larvae age, until their cells are capped for pupation, they will also be fed some pollen, important to them for its protein.) This brood food Bella will dole out in tiny, one-droplet doses at the inner edges of larval cells, each time she pokes her head into one and determines the larva therein is deservingly hungry. By no means does she often reach that conclusion: she’s at once a fussy and a stingy nanny, unable to refrain from constantly looking in on the babes yet rarely willing to dispense a warm bottle. Which is just as well, since, again, Bella is one of thousands making the nursery rounds at all hours: honeybee young are among nature’s most doted upon.

Days pass. Having reared her share of brats in her time, Bella’s about ready to move up into royal service—tending the queen. The lady of the hive must be frequently stroked, petted, and generously fed mouth-to-mouth helpings of brood food. She must also have her chamber pot emptied—that is, her feces carried away. Her every need anticipated by Bella and a half dozen or more daughters who keep close beside her, she moves steadily all the while over the brood comb, looking for clean, empty beds in the nursery to fill with more eggs. (And though Her Majesty seems to reign over the scene, let her fail regularly in this, her one grave duty, and the otherwise servile worker bees will forthwith have off with her head, trotting in a replacement queen raised by themselves.) Now Bella is more heavily drenched than usual in the queen’s perfume—her special pheromone. This substance she and the other royal attendants will unwittingly spread...

Edition details

• Publisher: Random House
• Publication date: 2006
• ISBN 10: 1400062713
• ISBN 13: 9781400062713
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 208