The Honey For The General’s Porridge

 

New Albanian vocabulary: gështenjë (chestnut)

 

 

‘This is the bee lady.’

I was being introduced at an official reception I attended with Rob. It seemed that I had gained a rather odd role as a honey ambassador among my friends. People asked me – a novice beekeeper and simple stickied honey-taster – for the truth about the story that honey from flowers local to the sufferer can cure a person’s hay fever, whether I would recommend beekeeping for a young family, what I thought the causes were of the Colony Collapse Disorder reportedly wiping out the US and UK bee population... I had moved from unconscious incompetence, to the level of conscious incompetence. All I knew was that I couldn’t answer these questions with any authority. I had been in the presence of honey, of bees, of a beekeeper, but I didn’t yet feel I was confident to do anything with my knowledge.

I certainly felt tongue-tied in the presence of the British General who was now extending his hand. Even more so when I realised he wanted to ask me a honey-related question.

It turned out that this soft-spoken, urbane man of war likes to have honey on his porridge every morning, and that he prefers it to be chest- nut honey. When the bees have gathered their nectar only from chest- nut trees, the resulting honey has a darker, more treacly taste, with a hint of nuttiness which I could understand would go well with morning oatmeal.

’So do you know of anywhere in Kosovo where I could get hold of some?’ He was touchingly interested in my answer. His Lieutenant- Colonel standing by was also looking at me with great attention. I realised it was in many people’s interests for the General to have a com- forting start to his day.

I said that I thought I knew a shop where chestnut honey was sold, and the Lieutenant-Colonel thanked me on the General’s behalf. I hoped I had soothed many mornings for them all. Perhaps by way of thanks, as we talked on about beekeeping, she asked whether I would be interested in contact with Abedin, a beekeeper she had heard about who had previously been in the Kosovo Protection Corps, the civil defence force largely made up of the demilitarised guerrillas of the KLA. Abedin is apparently now on a pension, resettled to a quiet life of stings rather than arrows. It sounded a compelling story – this former fighter now producing honey, like Samson’s lion – and I hoped to be able to visit him, and see the reality of the transformation. She didn’t know the details herself but she put me in contact with the Kosovan Colonel who could give me the beekeeper’s phone number.

’Poverty doesn’t shame those touched by it; poverty shames society,’ read the sign tacked to the wall by Colonel Xhavit’s desk. It was accompanied by many others, some in Albanian, some in English, taking in Cicero and Dreyfus, war and peace. Maybe it was just that my Albanian wasn’t good enough, but none of the signs seemed to be of the ‘you don’t have to be mad to work here but…’ variety. Hallmark Cards has thankfully not yet opened in Pristina.

As well as having impeccable guerrilla credentials, Colonel Xhavit is an international affairs Masters student, and he proudly told me that he has also been a truck driver – during his refugee years in Germany in the ‘nineties. Now, however, he is a personnel officer and, as such, the person who was able to give me the telephone number of his former comrade, Abedin, the beekeeper.

There’s no good reason why Colonel Xhavit could not have given me Abedin’s number over the phone when I called him, but he had suggested that I should come to coffee in his office so I had dutifully gone, to spend a pleasant 45 minutes talking Hobbes and religious tolerance, urban planning and economics with this gentle soldier. All the same, I felt it was 45 minutes I could ill afford.

But that is ungenerous and ungrateful. I so often ended up feeling this way in Kosovo when people who have so little (Colonel Xhavit volunteered the information that he earns 300 euros a month) offered the only thing they have, which is their time and company. I, of course, have so much more when it comes to euros – but so much less when it comes to the time I am able (or perhaps willing?) to give to coffees and conversation. The difference between time and money as currency is that when you give your money to someone you don’t require simultaneous matched funding from them, but when you give them your time you are requiring at that moment exactly the same commitment from them.

So Colonel Xhavit gave me his time, and took mine too, and once I’d finished the drink he had also given me, and he had at last passed me Abedin’s number, I made my escape. Walking down the road, I quickened my pace so I wasn’t late for my next meeting, and I wondered about the time-poor in the world. Is their (my) poverty also something that should shame society or only the afflicted individuals? I had the uncomfortable sense that in the case of my own time poverty I really had no-one to blame or shame but myself.

So when I contacted Abedin I was determined to try a little harder to relish the time I spent with him. I explained that I’d had his number from the Colonel, and wondered whether I could come to visit him in his village near Mitrovica. ‘You would honour us by doing so,’ he assured me. I asked when would be suitable; ‘this afternoon?’ he suggested.

Before I answered his question I had to check what I was free to spend on him; not by looking in my wallet, but by looking in my diary. As I’d feared, it told me that I really couldn’t make the three-hour round trip to see him that day. And like any pauper, like any Mr Micawber, hoping against experience that some income might just turn up, I leafed through the diary trying to work out when I could make the visit. The best I could do was in a week’s time. Abedin was obviously surprised – perhaps disappointed – but he didn’t make too big a deal of it (after all, one doesn’t rub any kind of poverty in people’s faces) and we set a time for me to go and see him then.

Inevitably, I was late. But I called Abedin en route to warn him. ’It’s no problem,’ he said. ‘I’ll be at the bus station to greet you when you arrive.’ I didn’t ask how I would recognise him – I had to hope that a British woman carrying a bag of beekeeper’s protective clothing would make it easy enough for him to identify me amid the crowd of students and old women who shared my coach journey.

But as I looked through the window and scanned the people waiting in our bay at Mitrovica bus station, I wondered whether Abedin and I should have set up a better system for finding one another. There was only a scattering of people there – a guy much younger than Abedin must be, an older man carrying a bunch of flowers presumably waiting for some loved family member back from their travels, a few women…

No-one new had appeared by the time I descended the steps of the coach, so I presumed Abedin was delayed. While I was getting out my phone to call him, the guy with the flowers approached me. ‘Mrs Elizabeth?’ he asked me, ‘Welcome to Mitrovica.’ The bouquet was a foretaste of the beautiful garden he took me home to; but in fact there was nothing flowery about Abedin. He spent33 years ‘in boots’ as he put it, and was keen to tell me about his experience as a professional soldier in the Yugoslav army, and then in the KLA.

But he was just as passionate about beekeeping – possibly more so than anyone I had met in Kosovo. He and his wife had planted a careful garden full of nectar-rich flowers; here were none of the flouncy cultivated flowers, the double-headed roses, chrysanthemums, dahlias, which are all show but little nectar and no pollen. The day I visited was such beautiful sunshine that we were able to sit in this bee-loud glade full of thyme, geranium, lupin, and enjoy it.

Abedin’s wife,Valdeta, sat with us and told me about their family, her children at university in Pristina. She is a sensible woman with beautiful clear skin, working as a nurse, and obviously pleased by my compliment on her lovely garden. I told her that it was the closest thing to a traditional English country garden that I’d seen in Kosovo. I joked about how obsessed the English were about their gardens: ‘in England if there’s a garden only this big’ – I sketched the table we sat at – ‘there would be at least four little patches of flowers tak, tak, tak, tak’ I gestured. She laughed back: ‘But in Kosovo if there was a garden only this big there would be at least four little houses tak, tak, tak, tak…’

Luckily this rampant building virus hasn’t yet reached Abedin and Valdeta’s little village, unless you count the flourishing suburb by their house, inhabited only by bees. And in so many ways, this community of three million or so is superior to its human counterpart. Not only is its unemployment rate zero, but thanks to its benevolent dictator, Abedin, its design is harmonious but varied, like the best garden suburbs. In place of the blockish hives mirroring each other in rows like a Le Corbusier dream, Abedin has experimented with different styles of hives. ‘I plan to have a museum here to show different approaches to beekeeping through the ages.’ He had a skep, and a hollow tree trunk also used as a hive. A friend had given him a beautiful Slovenian model, which Abedin had cleaned and repaired. It opens like a spice cupboard.

Abedin clearly loves working in wood, making things as efficient as possible, as beautiful as possible. He has modified the traditional hive design to allow for better ventilation, a real problem for bees during the winter when they may be inside for months at a time, building up potentially lethal carbon dioxide in the hive. And since bees need a nearby source of water as much as they need nearby flowers, he has designed his own water-drip where water falls softly from a controlled tap down a sloped board where the name of his bee farm, also the name of his son, is elaborately carved, ‘Loriku’.

We walked around his tiny estate, for him to point out for me the innovations he has implemented. I suggested that I should get my protective suit, but he was blasé about such things and assured me that I would be OK, speaking like the owners of vicious dogs do to nervous guests.

As we walked, Abedin showed me the scaled-down hives that he uses for manufacturing queens for sale. He also explained his system for maximising the harvest of the bees. The hives are grouped and numbered in threes, and during the early summer he takes one of every group of three down to Deçan where the flowers open earlier.

I wondered how this is done, thinking about cats and the way they have to be oriented when they move to a new house. Don’t the bees lose their way when they go out from the hive in its new position?

Apparently bees can tell when the hive’s surroundings have changed and this will trigger them to redraw their mental map. The only time this doesn’t work is if the hive is moved less than a few miles. It’s not enough for the bee to think to redraw the map, but the old map will be useless for finding the way home. Under these conditions, bees will get lost and die looking.

And how can he be sure that he has taken all the bees from one colony with their queen – surely some must be out foraging at the point where their hive is removed?

’That is why only one from each group of three is taken away – the bees belonging to that hive who happen to be away from the colony when it is removed will return to where their hive should be. They’ll smell what’s called the ‘queen scent’, of one of the neighbouring hives’ queens, and won’t think twice about following the scent and starting working for her.’ Little traitors.

Suddenly I felt a tickle on my neck. Without my protective suit I was nervous. I put up a hand to try to brush it away, but the bee that had landed there was investigating me further and did not want to be brushed off.

’Did you put perfume on this morning?’ Abedin asked with an accusatory edge to his voice. But I hadn’t – I felt insulted that he thought me such a rookie beekeeper as that, because I knew from all my books that you shouldn’t even wear deodorant when you are tending your hives as it’s likely to arouse the attention of bees who are attuned to smells.

With one swift movement, Abedin snatched at my neck. ‘There,’ he said, and held up his finger and thumb. He was holding the bee’s sting, plucked from its belly, and now well clear of my neck. This was a beekeeper with not just military, but ninja training. The limits of my own skill had never been more evident than in the presence of real bee- keeping expertise. I realised what a very long way I had to go.

We sat down to the lunch that Valdeta had been preparing for us: a salad fresh from the soil, with lettuce and spring onion and a perfect vinaigrette. But Abedin the enthusiast had saved something to show me, and once we were all at the table, he produced it – a diseased bee larva, a little gelid lump with the tell tale brown mark of a varroa mite on it. I hadn’t ever seen a varroa infestation up close, but this is a beekeeper’s biggest nightmare. Impossible to eradicate, and capable of wiping out a whole hive, the varroa mite, related to the tick, attaches itself to the bee and sucks at their vital ‘haemolymph’ fluid until the bee dies.

’For a honeybee having one of these mites attached to it would be like you or I having a monkey clinging to you.’ A blood-sucking monkey. I shivered. Abedin jabbed at the larva with his fingernail and told me about these revolting creatures. The mite creates a feeding site on the larva that her offspring can eat from as they develop. Then she lays an egg that develops into a male. Five more female eggs are laid after that. Abedin was tactful as he described how the mites breed, but the book A World without Bees I read afterwards described the Jacobean drama of what happens next. When the mites emerge from their eggs they ‘begin an incestuous affair on a mound of their mother’s faeces, as the brother mates with his sisters, starting with the eldest.’

’Put it away,’ Valdeta told him in her best nurse’s voice. Of course, she was quite right, and we meekly submitted and settled down to her really delicious lunch.

That weekend I went to buy a pot of chestnut honey which I sent to the General’s office with greetings from The Bee Lady. He and his staff had done me an enormous favour, leading me to such a wealth of bee expertise, and I wished him many happy breakfasts.