Even in winter, bees make a slight buzzing sound. Flapping their wings slightly is a way of generating heat. Most insects, as you might recall, are cold-blooded—they don't generate heat; they use whatever is provided to them. If it's warm, they get active; if it's cool they get sluggish (as do, coincidentally, slugs). If it's cold they stop moving completely and act dead. (Sometimes the act is so convincing that they stay that way forever.) Bees, in contrast, are able to generate minute amounts of heat by aggressively flexing their wing muscles like buff guys waiting to use the weight room. Not enough to keep themselves alive if they were alone outside, but enough to keep themselves, their queen, and their grub-like brood alive when crowded together by the thousands.
In the summer, they use their wings in a different way, this time to keep cool. Approaching the colonies in the heat of a summer afternoon, a beehive resembles a modern office building. If you've ever gone into a business district early in the morning on a weekend, before the noise of traffic starts in earnest, you may have noticed how loud buildings are. Their ventilation systems roar in a loud hum, moving a vast amount of air through a building where the windows don't open. Well, beehives are the same, only in miniature.
In a quiet bee yard far away from traffic, I can hear a hive's ventilation system from a distance of thirty feet, that powerful, buzzing rush as lines of bees pump air through their sun-heated, windowless home using nothing more than hundreds of their tiny wings.
Listening to the hum, watching the bees bustling in and out the doors, sometimes flashes me back to my corporate days working in a subgroup of a subdivision of a subsidiary of a major phone company. I can imagine the bees in business suits as they enter the hive, flashing their badges at the guard bees, texting and talking on their cellphones on the way to their cell-like cubicles. Each with a plan for the day, a schedule, an assigned set of tasks, and a grim determination to get them done.
A bee produces a
teaspoon or two of
honey as its life
accomplishment.
A bee produces a teaspoon or two of honey as its life accomplishment. When no longer able to do a full load, the hive thanks her for all the hard work by tossing her out of the hive to die. And no, I'm not presenting this as a metaphor for our times.
Every February 1.6 million beehives converge from all over to pollinate California almond fields. The problem isn't just finding that many healthy hives in February, before the honey season has really started; it's also that the bees really don't like the pink and white almond flowers and will avoid them if anything else is available. Almond honey is unusual in that it's very bitter, drowning out honey's normal sweetness with a retchy medicinal taste. (I was once given a spoonful to taste—one of those practical jokes beekeepers find hilarious.)
If you go out into the bee yard at the right time of day, you will suddenly witness hundreds of bees tumbling out of each hive, frolicking around the entrance before flying exuberantly around their home. These are the graduates, the new bee “newbies” leaving the hive for the first time.
A week or two earlier, the new bees had emerged from their cells and immediately gotten to work. Their first job had been cleaning out the cell they just hatched out of, but then they had taken on new in-hive duties, such as cleaning, building comb, guiding the queen to empty cells ready for eggs, taking care of the brood, guarding the hive from interlopers, relocating pollen and nectar, etc. Finally, though, they became ready for this day: graduation to a new job, in an infinitely big world, as field bees, collecting nectar and pollen.
They start out cautiously, hugging the outside of the hive, facing the entrance as if worshipping it, using it as a familiar sight and smell of home as they adjust to the brightness of the sun and strangeness of the outside air. After a while, they start flying slow, tight little sideways figure eights, the math symbol for infinity. This is the first time they've been airborne, and they test their wings while keeping the hive entrance always in sight.
As they gain confidence in their abilities, the bees begin swooping and banking, intoxicated by the world's vast sensations and sights, by the smells of blossoms wafting in on the wind. Their circling becomes wider and more freeform. Yet they keep making figure eight patterns with their hive at the center of the crossover. You can see they're balancing between exploring the world and reassuring themselves that they know where their home is.
Finally, having burned the details of their home location into their memories from all directions and angles, they're ready to go. With one final swoop they take off in a beeline, heading straight to who knows where, following a faint scent that promises distant blooms of unknown sweetness.
Watching this always brings a sense of déjà vu, of the eternal figure eight dance every person, perhaps every animate thing, does from the moment they can move independently: giddy loops of exploration balanced with needing repeated assurance that there's a way to get back home again.
Watching my bees, I feel like a parent on graduation day, looking on with pride, no little worry, and a realization of my own powerlessness and irrelevance in the process. The onlooking beekeeper can only hope they'll find what they're looking for, not get blown off course or eaten by a bird along the way, and return safely again.
WHY BEES MAKE THE BEST PETS, TAKE 2