The History of Bees

Chapter 13 GEORGE

I woke up an hour and twenty-two minutes before the alarm went off. The bedclothes were sweaty. I threw off the duvet, but knew that it was impossible to fall asleep again. It was the day for the quality control of the hives, the first inspection after the winter. I often slept poorly before this day, my head was way inside the hives. Beeswax, boards and larvae occupied my thoughts. I had no idea what I’d find when I opened them, had experienced winter death of close to 50 percent. And that feeling, when you discover that there are neither larvae nor queen bees in almost half of the hives, it’s horrible. But the winter had been normal, nothing worth mentioning there. Not especially cold or warm, no reason anything should be out of the ordinary.

Nonetheless, I was shaking as I stood waiting for Rick and Jimmy. I had asked them to get here by seven thirty. I just wanted to get started. I would have preferred to have started already, but it was a tradition we had, the three of us, that the first quality control day we met here in the yard, we talked, we drank.

Rick arrived first, as always. He was tall and skinny, not properly put together—he looked a little like James Stewart, just without the winning face. Long, sharp nose, eyes that were set deep into his skull, thinning hair, even though he wasn’t even thirty years old. He struggled out of the car. Rick always moved ten times more than he needed to, regardless of what he was doing, his whole body was badly organized. But he was eager. Had taken a mail-order agricultural course, and read a lot, all the time. No matter what we were going to do Rick could give us the background on it. And the history. And the theories. It was like dropping a coin in a machine. The man was a regular anecdote vending machine. He dreamed about a farm of his own, but truth be told, he should have been dreaming about sitting behind a desk and using his head.

He stood there swinging his arms; as usual he couldn’t stand still.

“So,” he said.

“So,” I said.

“Do you have any thoughts about how things are?”

“No. Good? Just fine. No reason to think otherwise.”

“No. No reason.”

He wrinkled his forehead, tugged at his thinning hair. “. . . Well.” He was scratching himself with both hands now, you’d think he had lice. “You never know.”

“No. You never know. But with the past winter…”

“Yes. Clearly…”

“Yes.”

“But then there’s those disappearances.”

“Ah. Those.”

I acted as if I hadn’t thought about it. But of course I had. I kept myself informed. Even The Autumn Tribune had mentioned the mysterious colony collapses that a number of beekeepers down south had experienced. In November a guy in Florida reported beehives that were suddenly empty. David Hackenberg was his name. Suddenly everyone was talking about what happened on his farm. And since then, new reports kept coming in all the time from Florida, California, Oklahoma and Texas.

It was the same story every time. Healthy beehives one minute, enough food, larvae, everything perfectly fine. Then, in a matter of days, in a matter of hours, the hive was as good as empty. The bees were gone, abandoning their own larvae, leaving everything. And they never came back.

Bees are clean animals. They fly away to die, not wanting to leave their remains behind to contaminate the hive. Perhaps that was what they’d done. But the queen always stayed behind with a small cluster of young bees. The worker bees left the mother and her young, left them to die alone in the hive. It was contrary to the laws of nature.

Nobody really knew why. The first time I heard about it, I thought it was because of poor beekeeping. That this Hackenberg hadn’t taken proper care of his bees. I’d met many keepers over the years who blamed others when they themselves were actually to blame. Too little sugar, too warm, too cold. It wasn’t exactly quantum physics we were working with. But after a while there were too many stories, too similar and too sudden. This was something else.

“That’s only in the south,” I said.

“Yes. They run more intensive operations down there,” Rick said.

At that moment Jimmy’s green pickup skidded into the yard. He got out of the truck wearing a big grin. While Rick was worried, thought too much, Jimmy was the cheerful, simple, opposite. Not a single extra movement, not one turn of the wheels in his head that wasn’t absolutely necessary. But he worked hard; you had to give him that.

What Jimmy lacked on the inside he made up for on the outside. He was handsome in a high school kind of way. Blond, thick bangs, a cleft chin, powerful jaw, the right proportions. He should have worn a football uniform around the clock. And he took good care of his appearance, too. Always freshly ironed and groomed. But it was unclear who he was dressing up for—there were never any women in the picture.

In his hand he held a thermos. A new one for the occasion, I noticed. The shiny steel reflected the sunlight for a second, blinded me momentarily, until he held it at another angle.

Each of us took out our cups. Jimmy had bought them a few years ago. Small, green hunter’s cups from the outdoor living department at Kmart that could be squeezed flat. Rick and I pressed out the cups at the same time and held them out to Jimmy. Without a word he opened the thermos.

“Fresh-ground beans,” he said and poured.

I was first.

“Colombia. Dark, roasted flavor.”

Could have just as well been instant for all I cared. Coffee was coffee. But for Jimmy coffee was probably the closest he came to art. He bought beans over the Internet. The beans had to be fresh. In his opinion, preground coffee was considered the work of the devil. And then the coffee had to drip at the right temperature. To achieve this, he had invested in a European coffeemaker, a drip-brew machine that was stuck in customs for weeks before he could finally bring it home.

We raised and knocked the three cups together. Soft plastic hit soft plastic, almost without a sound. We each took a sip.

Then came the moment when we were supposed to praise the coffee, say something intelligent. It was a part of the routine. For appearances’ sake I squinted, while I swirled the coffee around in my mouth, like some wine expert.

“. . . rich… full.”

“Mm,” Rick said. “I can taste the roast, yes.”

Jimmy looked at us expectantly, like a child on the Fourth of July. Waiting for more.

“Yes, sir, nothing like instant,” I said.

“Best coffee this year,” Rick said.

Again Jimmy nodded. “Just buy yourself a grinder and be sure to get good beans. Even you two can manage it at home.”

He always said that and knew perfectly well that we would never drag a coffee grinder over our doorsteps. At home it was Emma who made the coffee. And she went for freeze-dried. Lately she had tried out some dull-as-dishwater stuff with powdered milk and sugar added, but I stuck to black.

“Did you know that the earliest reference to coffee is from a fifteen-hundred-year-old story from Ethiopia?” Rick said.

“No kidding, you don’t say,” Jimmy said.

“That’s right. Kaldi the shepherd. He discovered that the goats behaved oddly after having eaten some red berries. They couldn’t sleep. He told a monk about it.”

“Were there monks in Ethiopia fifteen hundred years ago?” I said.

“Yes?” He looked at me in confusion, his gaze wavering slightly.

Jimmy waved his hands from the sidelines. “Of course there were monks.”

“They weren’t exactly Christians? I mean, Ethiopia, isn’t that in Africa, at that time?”

“Regardless. The monk became interested. He was struggling to stay awake during his prayers, so now he poured hot water over the berries and drank it. Voilà! Coffee.”

Jimmy nodded in satisfaction. Rick had done research, it was in honor of his coffee.

We drank up. The coffee quickly turned cold in the spring wind. The last sip was sour and lukewarm. Then we each walked towards our own cars and set out in the direction of the hives.

It was when I rested my hands against the steering wheel that I noticed how much I was sweating. They stuck to the leather, I had to dry them off on my work pants to get a good grip, in the same way that my shirt was sticking to my back. I didn’t know what was coming. Was dreading it.

It was just a few hundred yards down a bumpy dirt road. The car shook along with my hands, then we arrived at the meadow by Alabast River.

I climbed out, putting my hands behind my back to hide the trembling.

Rick was already standing there. Jumping a little. Wanted to get started.

Jimmy got out of his car. Pointed his nose at the sun, sniffing.

“How warm is it?” He closed his eyes, looked like he wasn’t planning to move one inch and especially not get started on the task at hand.

“Warm enough.” I walked quickly towards the hives. It was important to set an example. “May as well get started.”

I checked the flight board, the entrance to the first, a pistachio-colored hive. The color clashed garishly with the grass sprouting from the ground below it. It was full of bees, the way it was supposed to be. I lifted the cover. Took off the cloth on top. I expected the worst, but everything was fine down there. I didn’t see the queen, but there were plenty of eggs and larvae in all stages. Six full frames. The hive could remain as it was, there was enough life and there was no need to combine it with another one.

I turned to face Jimmy. He nodded towards the hive he had opened “All’s well here.”

“Here, too,” Rick said.

We moved on.

As the sun beat down and hive after hive was opened and checked, I could feel how my body began to loosen up. My hands became dry and warm, my clothing detached itself from my back. In some places there were problems, of course. Some bee colonies had to be combined, some places we found no queen. But nothing out of the ordinary. It seemed as if the winter had been kind to them. As if the stench from the widespread annihilation further south hadn’t reached us up here. And it was only fitting. They were well taken care of. They hadn’t wanted for a thing.

We gathered for lunch. We perched on our creaky lawn chairs and ate sweaty sandwiches in the sun. All three of us were, for some reason or other, as silent as the grave. Until Rick could no longer contain himself.

“Have you heard about Cupid and the bees?”

Neither of us answered. Yet another story.

“Have you?” he asked again.

“No,” I said. “You know perfectly well that we haven’t heard about Cupid and the bees.”

Jimmy snickered.

“Cupid was a kind of love god,” Rick said. “According to the ancient Romans.”

“The guy with the arrows,” I said.

“Yeah, that’s him. Son of Venus. He looked like a big baby and went around with a bow and arrow. When the arrows hit people, passion was awakened.”

“Yuck, isn’t a love god who looks like a baby a little perverse?” Jimmy said.

I laughed, but Rick gave me a dirty look.

“Did you know that he dipped the arrows in honey?”

“Can’t say that I did, no.”

“I haven’t even heard of Cupid,” Jimmy said. “Before now.”

“Yes indeed, he dipped them in honey, which he stole,” Rick said and stretched his body so the chair suddenly shrieked.

We had to chuckle about the loud noise. But not Rick. He wanted to continue.

“So this baby went around stealing honey from the bees. He took entire hives. Until one day…” He paused dramatically. “Until one day the bees had had enough and attacked him.” He let the words hang in the air. “And Cupid was stark naked, of course, the gods usually were in those days. He was stung everywhere. And I mean everywhere.”

“He sort of deserved it,” I said.

“Maybe so, but remember that he was just a little boy. He ran to his mother, Venus, for consolation. He screamed and was surprised that something as tiny as a bee could cause him so much pain. But do you think his mother consoled him? No. She just laughed.”

“Laughed?” I said.

“Yup. ‘You’re little, too,’ she said. ‘But your arrows can cause even more pain than a bee sting.’ ”

“Wow,” I said. “And then what? What happened?”

“That’s it. Nothing more,” Rick said.

Jimmy and I stared at him.

“That was the whole story?” Jimmy said.

Rick shrugged his shoulders. “Yes. But lots of paintings were done of it. Venus just stands there. She’s beautiful, right, porcelain skin and lovely curves. And she’s naked, too. Her baby is standing beside her and crying, with wax plates in his hands, while the bees are stinging him.”

I shuddered.

“Some mother,” Jimmy said.

“You can say that again,” Rick said.

Finally it was silent again. I blinked, tried to get the image of the howling baby, swollen from bee stings, out of my head.

The sun warmed my neck. It was what Emma called a lovely day. I tried to feel exactly how lovely it was. And how great it was, that the sun was shining like this. Because sun meant honey. It looked like it would be a good year. A good year meant some money in the bank. And money in the bank could be invested in the farm. That’s how it should be. Who needed Florida anyway? I’d tell her so this evening.