Rite Of Passage
New Albanian vocabulary: bukë e bletëve (hive fondant, literally ‘bread for bees’)
My first, and only, direct contact with Kosovars before that day we’d landed at Pristina airport was with a refugee family who had arrived from Kosovo at my London school. The children were beautiful, motivated, bright, and passionate about their homeland. The eldest, aged ten at the time, told me that when she left school she wanted to train to do a job that would enable her to go back to Kosovo and help her people. At the age of twenty she is now at university in London and close to being able to fulfil that ambition. When her brother, Leart, heard that I was moving to live in Kosovo he said ‘you’ll like it – it’s a proper country, with proper seasons.’ Of course, Kosovo wasn’t a proper country – it was a UN protectorate, or a province of Serbia, depending on your point of view – but the seasons are certainly properly distinguished from one another: a battle between the Mediterranean and the Siberian, with hot summers and cold winters.
I’d found some evidence to back up Leart’s claim on the Kosovo statistics office website, one of the first routes for me to understand Kosovo. The Statistics Office offered such nuggets of information as land use (agriculture: 53%, forest: 41%, urban: 1%) and the percentage of homes with central heating (7%). But even more chilling, it told me that January’s average temperature in Kosovo was 2.5 degrees. This year it had been even colder than that and the bees hadn’t had the chance for a ‘cleansing flight’ – a trip out of the hive to evacuate their bowels. My book tells me that the temperature needs to be 14 degrees before they will leave.
Meanwhile, they had been bundled in a compact ball inside the hive all winter, fanning their wings to ventilate the space. The temperature of a beehive is the same as the human body and the bees work as a team to maintain this temperature. They take it in turns to be on the outside of the ball where it is colder. When they are getting very cold they circulate into the centre of the ball where the accumulated body heat of thousands of bees warms them until it is time again for them to take their turn at the extremity, exposed to the winter. I imagine this being rather like a huge tremulous human heart circulating its life-force and pulsing instinctively, despite the cold, in the hope of spring.
Adem had called to say that because of the cold, the bees needed food. He explained to me about the special bee food available in the shops as a slab of fondant. It is mainly sugar but includes some vitamins and medication to strengthen the bees against disease.
’The bees need you to bring some this weekend.’
This is the payback for having harvested my honey during the summer. If I had let the honeycomb alone then the bees would now be surviving on the food they had painstakingly gathered and refined during the warmer days. That, of course, is why they had gone to all that trouble. Naturally, when we harvested we had left them some honey to keep them going, and in a warmer winter perhaps what we left would have been enough. But at this point, without me adding more energy to the hives in the form of the fondant, my bees would die before the weather turned warm enough for flowers to bloom and for the colony to find and use new nectar.
Through Facebook I’ve ‘met’ backyard beekeepers from around the world. One of my virtual friends (who felt a lot less virtual after I posted her a plastic pot of my honey, and she was able to email me from Seattle with comments on its flavour) would never use fondant sugar supplements – she tells me she just limits the honey she harvests from the hives. Taken to extremes, this seems to turn the bees into little more than pets – creatures you look after but from whom you take nothing except their company. A beehive is, of course, the ultimate garden accessory, offering beautiful sounds and scents, movement and intriguing close-up insights into an awe-inspiring world, as well as the practical benefits of pollination. But if I was honest, and especially since the garden in question wasn’t even my own garden, it was the honey I was after. So I went and bought the fondant.
Adem and I robed up in our protective veils and approached the hives. We lifted the lid off the box and as we puffed smoke at the alarmed bees, we placed the fondant slab over the top of the frames of honeycomb. I felt rather like I was icing an exquisite cake. It’s possible to make your own fondant, one of my books tells me. And the recipe, without those added vitamins and medication, sounds tempting.
Ingredients:
1 part liquid honey to two parts icing sugar
Method
Add the sugar very slowly to the honey so that it forms a paste.
As we walked away from the newly candied hive, I felt a fluttering on my chest. It continued, and developed into a tickle. Doing some would-be decorous investigations with my hand up my protective suit, I discovered two bees wandering the skin over my ribs. I tried to brush them carefully away, and succeeded in putting off one of them from any more investigations of my underwear. The other was more intrepid, and by the time it had got caught beneath the underwire of my bra, it had been scared into a misguided attempt to defend the rest of its colony, and had stung me. The sting gets ripped out of the belly of the bee, so it would have died in the process, at just about the moment that I was saying ‘ow!’
The Greek myth is that the ability to sting was given by Zeus to the bee in gratitude for having been nourished with honey as a child, but that when a bee then stung Zeus himself, the god decreed that the creatures should die whenever they used their sting. I could sympathise with the old god. Yes, I owed these bees who had provided for my baklava and yoghurt and teatime toast, but did I really deserve this?
I had never been stung by a bee before, so I waited with some anxiety to discover whether I was among the percentage of the population who go into anaphylactic shock from a sting.
I am not. There was an intense burning sensation on my skin though, right near my heart. The poet in me wondered if this was what true love was like, the bee like some dark blundering Cupid.
Xhezide was less bothered by any of that, and when she saw what had happened, she shooed me into the house and then the back room, away from the curious gaze of Lavdim. With the beekeeper suit rucked up, she hurried with tweezers to pull out the sting. A bee’s sting can continue pumping venom for up to a minute, so seconds saved now would reduce the time my skin would need to heal. She was swift and accurate. She held up in her tweezers a sting that looked like a tiny gramophone needle.
Then she brought vinegar to ease the pain on the puncture. She wouldn’t let me go out again. I smiled bravely. ‘I don’t think it’s likely that I’ll be stung twice in one day.’ But Xhezide insisted. I learned later that she was right to have protected me – with their keen sense of smell the rest of the hive would have known immediately from the traces on my clothes that I had been stung, and from that they would have assumed that I was an enemy, and would have attacked again.
So I stayed away from the rest of the colony, but I thought of them, as I carried the tiny throb of pain around with me, close to my chest, for the rest of that day. It was a badge of pride – the vegetarian bee- keeper’s equivalent of being bloodied with the fox tail after a hunt.
Xhezide looked after me attentively for the rest of our visit with a mixture of embarrassment and culpability, as if one of the children had misbehaved. We were sat down for glasses of her home-made plum squash – cool and tart and very refreshing. In my mind it will always be associated with the unnecessary death of one of my bees, an apiarist’s coming of age.