It has been a strange Christmas for me this year. Maybe it was because we did everything the same way as usual and because of that I seemed to myself to be older, different, distant and less full of zest. A danger of ritual is that it evokes comparisons, which necessarily have their odious aspects. Added to my slight melancholy our turkey wasn’t good this year. We sourced it locally and though the butcher said it was free range, I rather doubt it. It seemed flavourless and misshapen and I had difficulty relating to this bird that had crossed our path to be eaten. It was probably not free range at all. But then old age gradually gets less free range, I thought. No blame.
But it is bees I want to write about, not Christmas, which is well behind us now. My sister Sarah and I both resolved to keep bees after our mother died a couple of years ago now. Mum was always reciting this very lovely poem by Yeats
“I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree,
And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made;
Nine bean-rows will I have there, a hive for the honey-bee,
And live alone in the bee-loud glade.
And I shall have some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow,
Dropping from the veils of the morning to where the cricket sings;
There midnight’s all a glimmer, and noon a purple glow,
And evening full of the linnet’s wings.
I will arise and go now, for always night and day
I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore;
While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements grey,
I hear it in the deep heart’s core.”
It seemed a way of remembering and loving Mum. Sarah enrolled in a course and Grant bought a special Australian invented beehive called a Flow Hive but rather lost heart when he found out it was only suitable for honeybees that sting and not the little native bees we have here.
I’d watched lots of videos and joined a bee club and been delighted by bees. Holding a comb full of the little furry things suddenly put life in perspective.
Finally before Christmas I drove to Hornsby and bought, with much trepidation, a box of bees with a queen and drove home, quelling all the while panicky thoughts of them getting out. It was good discipline staying calm when the satnav took against me and had me circling until I used my own inner bee to find my way home.
I tried to find someone to help me put them in the hive but everyone was away or unwilling (notably Grant). I realized how inculcated we all are with fear of bees. As a child I had a list of dangers that I thought were ever present possibilities – the Atom Bomb dropping, a train crash, a tiger getting loose from the zoo and biting me to bits, smallpox, and trailing along behind all these, being stung by bees. I had imbibed a perception of their relationship with humans as essentially an aggressive one.
The box had wire sides and was black and buzzing. A circular hole in the top accommodated a feeder full of syrup. I was to take this out and reach in for the queen’s cage attached to the roof of the box and then take the cap off. The bees would then eat the candy in its entrance and the queen would come out and take her place amongst them. I was supposed to tie the cage on to one of the frames. It all seemed very scary. Nobody was home and I didn’t have an epipen if I turned out to be allergic.
I pulled out the syrup can and put it aside and found the queen cage dripping with worker bees and suddenly I wasn’t worried any more. I felt like a goddess with all these lives in my hands. Maybe the bees themselves said something to me but I was OK. I put I the queen and then tipped the black box up and down and the bees fell into their brood box in a series of clumps. Not all of them went in so I left the box near the hive and set up their sugar water feeder and watched as they fussed and buzzed and settled in.
It is a great thing to sit and watch bees. I did a lot of that in the subsequent days until we had to leave for our South Coast Christmas. I worried that they’d be OK on their own and asked Fredi, my daughter in law to be, to top up their sugar water. The crepe myrtles were in flower. Surely all would be well.
It is a magic moment when you open the hive and the bees have begun to build combs. Mine, however, were contrary bees and had built plenteously but crookedly and rather haphazardly. I’d made my first mistake in not using foundation sheets to give the bees a bit of an idea about how to build. The Flow Hive is not supposed to need them but there the situation was – combs all cockameemy
Dear Fredi came to help me and we straightened some out as advised by bee people, with rubber bands, but it was a vandalistic process and honey was spilt, combs broken and bees were distressed. Fredi is Vegan but she coped much better than I did with our violent intrusion into the hive. “They are resilient” she said, and they were. One weird thing was the guard bees who normally patrol the entrance to the hive got confused and decided to protect the back of it for a couple of days after that.
They are still tidying up after our depradations. Three bees were shoving a bit of wrecked comb out this morning. It must have been like pulling yourself together after the blitz – getting rid of once cherished but wrecked property.
The brood box is about half full now so in another month I’ll put the Australian invention on top and wait for my honey. I hope I won’t have to do anything else horrible before that.
We licked our fingers after our intervention, though, Fredi and I, and the taste was delicate and delicious and beyond all expectations. I have lots to learn but oh, I am happy to have bees in my life. They remind me to be wise and to keep in mind life’s beauty and make me forget the burden of being one aging bee myself. It doesn’t matter. There are so many more of us.
