Telling the Bees (2 page)

Two

A
PIS MELLIFERA:
A mixed zoological nomenclature meaning “honey-carrying bee,” it is used to designate the so-called Western or European honeybee.
Apis
derives from the Latin word for “bee.”
Mellifera
combines the Greek words for “honey”:
melli
, and “to carry”:
ferre
.

T
he bees began speaking to me through the utility wires that crisscross the sky above my home nearly twenty years ago. It was an unseasonably warm Sunday morning in early May—May 10, 1992, to be exact. I was at the kitchen sink scouring the remains of my usual breakfast of two poached eggs and a slice of toast from my plate when I heard a low-pitched hum that sounded at first rather like a small group of monks softly chanting their matins, but before long there was no mistaking the collective whine of wings that denotes an angry swarm. The hum seemed to come from nowhere and everywhere at once. Drawn outside, I expected to see a great dark cloud of bees. Instead, my eyes were drawn to the five black utility wires that overhang my house—the wires were alive with the sound of this feverish, disembodied hum. As I walked beneath the wires, the deepening hum grew louder and more insistent as I approached the house next door where the two women I had once called my friends lived.

The Bee Ladies’ house was clearly at the epicenter of this strange disturbance, and so I knocked on their front door, and when there was no answer, I knocked again. It was not altogether surprising that they did not answer at once, but given the persistence of my rapping, it concerned me that I heard no response, not even a curt command to go away, and so I went around to the rear of the house and knocked this time on their kitchen door. Again, no answer.

In days gone by, the next place I would have looked for them would have been in the farthest reaches of their almond orchards. Their family had once owned nearly five acres of land, and the Bee Ladies spent hour upon hour deep within the groves tending their hives. But over time, my neighbors had slowly sold off all but a small sliver of their family’s former property, holding on to just a small copse of almond trees, their three remaining hives, and the modicum of privacy they craved. While I had been forced to make similar concessions over the years, thanks to my family’s thriftiness and the success of our long-standing honey business I’d managed to hold on to more than an acre of our old groves, which were more than enough to sustain the sixteen hives and the simple distribution network of farmers’ markets, consignment stores, and mail-order sales that continued to support my modest needs. I do not say this to boast. Business was the last thing on my mind that awful morning. Since I could see that the Bee Ladies weren’t in their backyard, I assumed they were most likely in their house.

Putting my ear to the Bee Ladies’ door, I heard tinny radio voices projecting from inside, and I thought for a moment that perhaps they had gone off to the market and left the radio playing, as I myself do when I run errands, so as to lend the appearance of occupancy in my absence.

I cast this notion aside, however, as soon as I peeked through the side window of the little garage at the end of their driveway and saw their Rambler station wagon parked inside. I knew that neither of the Bee Ladies cared to stroll the neighborhood for pleasure or need, nor were they likely to travel about in the company of anyone other than themselves. I began to fear something was truly amiss.

I knocked again at their back door, and then I jiggled the doorknob; that was how I discovered the door was unlatched. Opening it slowly, I hesitated on the threshold for a moment, but only for a moment, as I was unable to dismiss the foreboding that urged me past my more cautious self.

I called out their names as I stepped into the service porch just off their kitchen. Still, there was no response, and so I called again, louder, as I proceeded into the kitchen proper.

An iridescent yellow and gold-trimmed china tea service that I keenly recalled having once been served from when I was a boy sat oddly abandoned upon their chrome-edged dinette, leaving the eerie impression that the two women had been enjoying a cup of tea together one minute and had disappeared into a rapture of thin air the next.

A skin had formed on the milky liquid that floated atop the tea. I picked up one of the half-filled china cups. It felt cold, though the liquid in the matching creamer felt warm, which I am sure was more a matter of my own expectations as to what should feel warm or cold than it was an actual temperature differentiation.

Then I noticed the smell. I was not so much struck at that time by the unpleasantness of the sour odor I perceived as I was by its ability to overpower the memory of disinfectant and camphor that had been the dominant aroma in my neighbors’ home for as long as I could recall.

Standing in my neighbors’ kitchen, I remembered a conversation with my father.

I was six years old. I asked him why we hated the Straussmans. My father was a man of few words. He said that
hate
was a very strong word. He explained simply that there were two kinds of people in the world: those who love bees and those who fear them, and that these two types seldom found common ground. The flowering hedgerow my father planted between our property and our next-door neighbors’ was the concrete extension of his philosophy: Out of sight, to him, was out of mind. For the first dozen years of our coexistence, this seemed to accommodate both our families’ fairly reclusive natures.

Then one April morning in 1932 we were rousted from our breakfast table by the sound of a sharp rapping on our front door. When I was sent to answer it, I found our neighbors’ two daughters standing uncomfortably on our porch.

The smaller, and the bolder, of the two girls was more than a year older than myself, though she stood a good six inches shorter. Her roan hair was parted in the middle and plaited into two neat braids that hung just below her shoulders. Her sky blue eyes were wide set and frank in their expression. From her pale complexion I surmised that she did not spend nearly as much time out of doors as I did.

“My name is Clarinda Jane Straussman,” she said, which of course I knew, having watched her from our back porch since I’d grown tall enough to see over the hedgerow from that vantage. She cleared her throat rather ceremoniously and nodded to my parents. “But you may call me Claire.”

The tone of her voice, even then, was more commanding than permissive. She said she needed to speak to my father, and so I bade her and her sister to follow me into the dining room, where I presented them to my family.

“How do you do,” my mother replied, a bit more formally than I would have expected until I noticed she wore the same indulgent smile she displayed when sampling one of my sister’s more problematic culinary experiments.

“I’m very well, thank you,” Claire replied curtly. She turned to the taller, silent girl beside her, whose name should have seemed familiar but did not. With a sweeping gesture that bespoke as much theatricality as maturity she said: “This is my sister, Hilda.”

Whereas Claire’s features were delicate and finely molded as a porcelain doll’s, Hilda’s face, and indeed her entire body down to the tips of her limbs, appeared to have been shaped from modeling clay by a child’s clumsy fingers. Hilda’s short-cropped hair, which sprouted like tufts of dried corn silk from her head, was more lifeless than straight. Even today, I can only guess at the color of her eyes as she so seldom looked directly at anyone.

Hilda curtsied rather stiffly, to my father’s seeming bemusement. My mother, who stood by my father’s side, gave him a reproving glance.

“How nice to meet you both, at last,” she said. “Of course you must already know Albert and Eloise from school.”

Strictly speaking, we did not. Both the Straussman sisters were at least several grades ahead of me, and in all the years we had attended the same grammar school we had scarcely spoken to one another, and only in incidental passing. I was only ten years old. I did not understand the reason behind my sister’s practiced indifference toward Claire and Hilda any more than I understood the festering power of the insult my mother had been nursing against our neighbors since her initial gift of huckleberry jam had been received indifferently. All I knew is what my father had told me: They weren’t bee people. As my father’s son, I had been content up until that moment to more or less leave well enough alone.

“Mr. Honig,” Claire said, fashioning an expression of impatience at having her clearly rehearsed speech interrupted, “my mother has sent me to ask if you would be so kind as to come with me now to our house. She says there are bees living in our parlor wall and she would like you to remove them at once.”

To my young mind, our neighbors’ assumptions were manifest: Bees were troublesome creatures to be avoided, the swarm of bees that had taken up residence in their parlor wall must have come from one of our secluded hives and therefore they were our responsibility to remove.

I found such wrongheaded assumptions particularly irksome as the swarming season was nigh upon us and for that very reason my father and I had been particularly watchful that week for signs of restlessness from our hives and we had not yet seen the slightest indication that even one new queen was ready to hatch from any of them. I was prepared to point out to the Straussman sisters that even the most overcrowded hive does not produce a swarm until a new queen is born either to lead the excess bees or, in the case of a weaker regent, to push the old queen and her loyal escort out to search for a suitable new hive.

Perhaps sensing my agitation, my father gently suggested it was much more likely that a wild swarm, freshly emerged from a nearby hollow log or abandoned shed, had chanced upon a tiny crack or some other such entry into the space between the inner and outer walls of the Straussmans’ house, which was, unfortunately, where this particular colony had chosen to establish a new hive.

I say “unfortunately” because there is no easy way to remove bees from a wall once they have decided to take up residency inside such awkward quarters. Removal usually requires great skill on the part of the beekeeper, and even more patience on the part of the homeowner, unless of course the homeowner doesn’t mind having his wall torn apart and the unwitting home invaders summarily murdered for no good reason other than human convenience.

My father chose not to belabor this point to our young neighbors. Instead, he motioned for me to follow him out to our honey shed where we kept a store of prepared hives ready to receive wild swarms.

I should explain that while beginning beekeepers generally get started by purchasing established hives from a reputable supplier, experienced beekeepers whenever possible prefer to add to their stock by acquiring wild swarms each spring; wild swarms are usually quite robust and free of disease, and they are always without cost. For this reason my father was careful to keep a goodly supply of empty hives ready for new colonies to occupy come the first of April, which is when the Valencia oranges that used to surround our property began to bloom. This way we were ready to act at a moment’s notice when the groves reached full blossom and the bees began to swarm.

My father explained as much to Mrs. Straussman when he came to her door with his hiving equipment in hand and me and the Straussman sisters in tow. I was expecting to help my father set up the catcher hive, but Mrs. Straussman had other designs.

A remarkably large woman with gray hair and matching gray eyes the color of winter clouds, Mrs. Straussman came out onto her front porch and leaned heavily on a polished wooden cane as my father told her that it would likely take up to a month to lure the entire colony out of her wall and into the catcher hive. With her permission, he said, he would place the catcher hive just outside the crack in the wall the bees were using as an entryway. The catcher hive was already equipped with two fully drawn brood combs filled with honey and pollen, as well as young brood and larvae and eggs and nurse bees to tend to them all.

My father then showed Mrs. Straussman the ingenious cone he had fashioned from a twelve-by-sixteen-inch piece of window screen that he planned to nail to the opening of the telltale crevice where the brick facing of the chimney met the roof. The wide end of the cone would cover the opening in the wall, he explained. The other end, just about a half inch in diameter, would be wide enough for the bees to exit when they left the hive in search of nectar and pollen.

“Reentering the hive will be another matter entirely for our tiny friends,” my father said with a knowing wink. He explained how, after crawling around the wall of the house in search of the screened opening, the disoriented worker bees would eventually give up and turn to the primed catcher hive, which would stand invitingly unimpeded beneath the cone. In this way, the great bulk of the hive’s inhabitants would gradually transfer themselves to our new hive to combine with the starter brood.

“The new hive is queenless at present,” my father said. “But the workers will soon rear a new queen from the brood cells to preside over the bees in the catcher hive and, God willing, the new queen’s scent should over time lure the rest of the old colony out from inside your wall.”

Mrs. Straussman appeared uninterested in the intricacies of my father’s inventive procedure.

“I can hear those bees buzzing inside the wall, right there next to our chimney,” she said to my father, pointing peevishly around the side of the porch with her cane. Beckoning to me with her free hand, she said: “Come have a cup of tea with me while your father gets rid of them.”

Like the rest of the neighborhood children, I was more than a little cowed by Mrs. Straussman, who passed many an afternoon hunkered down on the large rattan chair on her front porch, only to rise ponderously and shout invectives at any child who strayed onto her front lawn. I tried to politely decline her invitation, explaining that I did not much care for tea, and that my father would certainly be in need of my assistance, but the woman would have none of my excuses.