Third Person Post--Bee Story HAWMC

She wakes from a dream of falling, organ failure. The correspondences between numbers and foods are warping and winding, and the "or else" doctor visit is drawing closer. "Should I stay or should I go" insistent, through her head. Poems, growing things, intimate glances, are bringing tears to her eyes far more often than wontedly. Loved ones are leaving town and she's running out of manic, even boosted by contraband caffeine. She can't crash yet!


Whoa! Wake up! It's a beautiful, sunny day! The sun is shining, the ground, tired from its long snowload, greener every day.


Today's prompt: write about a memory from the third person perspective. Don't use "I" unless you include dialogue.


Ela got back to the farm community late Sunday afternoon, after visiting with friends, helping out on their farm. The "lead woman" on the farm, with whom she had an uneasy relationship, came to meet her, somewhat friendly, and told her there had been a lot of bees around that day.


Next morning after the rain, she was out on her walk around the farm with wheelbarrow and fruit-picking equipment, harvesting fruit, seeing which trees' crops were maturing, checking up on that ripening jackfruit. When she came back to the homestead area, barrow loaded with avocados and two racks of bananas, the woman ran to meet her. Many bees were buzzing around, heading toward the office and packing shed which doubled as her bedroom.


The two women stood, looking up into the air, gradually joined by several other community members. There was a throaty hum, like voices in an auditorium before a grand entrance. The whole sky darkened briefly--an airborne life form composed of thousands of four-winged beings, one mind, one intention. The colony landed on the wall of the office, her bedroom, and milled around, quieting, gentle.

She ran over to the next-door farm, where a self-styled "bee rustler" and carpenter was staying, and invited him to join the party. A small crowd had gathered at a respectful distance from the colony on the wall. There were "wows," oohs and aahs. One skeptical voice worrying about stings and allergic reactions. One puzzled voice, obstreperous from the break in routine, "Why are they here?" A confident response, "I guess Ela called them in." Ela and the bee rustler showed the crowd how calm and docile the colony was, how you could put your hand into their midst and have their velvet legs crawl over you. Some community members hung back, others were delighted to join in. The property owner noticed scout bees checking out some cracked timbers, working their way into the building; expressed concern. Bee rustler got up on the ladder with a Sawzall--a surprisingly common beekeeping tool--and opened up the timbers so that there was no hidden spot for them to build into.


Ela brought a hive box and set it beside the colony, filled with frames redolent of old honey. After clearing a spot for the hive to rest, out by the farm pond, she spent most of the day hanging out with the colony, singing to them, playing her flute to them.

this was in AZ, but a similar image

When the sun began to set, still in shorts and flip flops, she took a soft brush and dustpan, and gently brushed the bees down toward the prepared box. She aimed for the center of the clump, where the queen would be, and when that part of the colony had dropped into the box, the rest followed, like a silk scarf. As darkness fell, she gently covered the box and, with the help of a strong man with some bee experience, carried the hive out to their new location. Next morning, she woke to the sound of some bees straggling outside on her wall. But out by the pond, the hive was full of bees, entering and exiting, getting to know their new territory.


Over the months that followed, Ela visited with her bees often, but didn't make huge efforts to increase their colony, although theirs was a small group and she had heard that despite the area being full of fruit farms, there wasn't enough nectar and pollen at any given time to sustain a large colony. She felt some guilt. Just as people suffered from deficiencies in this hugely abundant climate and didn't address them because of their dogma about eating only from the land, so she was hesitant to interfere with the bees' needs. It was "natural" to them to forage from the surrounding trees and vines, not to be fed white sugar. She never took any of their honey. Still, the guilt persisted. But were they really "her" bees? She hadn't even been home when they first scouted the place out. Yes, they came to her bedroom in swarm, but again, she was out harvesting fruit when they first started to arrive. And of course, it wasn't "her" bedroom at all--just a bed in the corner of an office where she shook down at nights, a person with very few needs or demands. Was "letting nature take its course" a form of cruelty, both to the bees and to her own body?

Bee Musings

Happy Midweek everyone! Mittwoch - that's what Wednesday's called in German - no getting over the fact that you get past today and you're on your way home, so to speak. I like how I see people calling it 'hump day' - a different visual for the same concept.

I'm at the Safeway and the internet is much faster than it was at the library yesterday, so no browser-collapse mayhem and I've successfully uploaded the pictures for yesterday's post - a very stubby maca plant and two oddly angled photos.

Today, I wanted to talk about bees a bit. I spent a large amount of my time working bees when I lived in Hawaii, and I got into it because I found myself eating a lot of raw honey. At that stage, it really seemed to help my digestion. Specifically - and I have no good explanation for this - it seemed to enable me to digest fat better than I had been able to. At that point, I was a high-fruit raw foodist and deathly afraid of fat, partly for the good reason that any kind of fat made me feel sick. In Hawaii, eating honey, I found myself eating more avocado and coconut without difficulty and built some muscle for the first time in a very long time. Probably the best explanation is that it was partly in my head, partly that local avocados and young coconuts were more easily digested than the nuts I'd been eating in California, and partly that it stimulated my appetite a bit and enabled me to eat a bit more. That said, the communion with bees piece, the connection with such a different species that can teach us so much, was a big draw for me too. I read The Shamanic Way of the Bee and some other books like that, and was very influenced by that too. But for many people it's just another form of farming. And some of the diseases that afflict modern honeybees send one into a vicious cycle of overmanagement and overdependence.

I still love bees. But I can't eat honey anymore - I don't know if I ever will, although I eat some bee pollen, and I truly believe in honey's magical and healing potentials. And now I live in Alaska. I'm very mixed about the whole thing...

Bees. There are people who have been keeping bees up in Alaska for decades. The Russians first introduced them here in the early 1800's. So it's a well-hallowed practice. But rather like growing tomatoes in a greenhouse here, you can only keep bees in very well-insulated hives, and even then many hives don't make it through the long winters. Homer's maritime winters, which often feature spells of thawing lasting up to two weeks, are even worse for beekeeping than the bitter months of unbroken 40-below of the Interior. In the latter case, the bees simply hibernate solidly for more than half the year. But in the freeze-and-thaw scenario, they can often wake up, move around, feed, only for the temperature to drop again, at which point they can often either freeze or run out of food and starve. And this is even when they're well-managed. 

In other words, of course there are no feral honeybees in Alaska. Yes, people keep bees over winter successfully, but most bees are brought up from California in the spring. Just like the tomato, growing something that can't live wild here is something that I feel uneasy about. And even more so, because of the level of interference in their natural cycle of activity involved in managing them. 

When I took advantage of the sunshine on Monday and went to work a friend's pair of strong overwintered hives, what I was essentially doing was castrating the hives. Bees want to swarm in summer. A colony of bees is an organism that reproduces itself by rearing a new queen, who flies out to mate with drones - hopefully a non-incestuous union bringing in new blood - and then the old queen flies away, taking many of the old bees with her, to found a new colony. Swarming is discouraged in the lower 48 (and elsewhere) too, because it interferes with the honey harvest - making a new home and putting stores in the current one are two opposed activities. But if they swarm here, there are no wild drones around to mate with (although in there may be drones from managed hives if you're not too remote), and more importantly, once they've flown off, there's nowhere for them to set up home that they could possibly last the winter - or even the late summer night time temperatures.

So, there I was, barehanded but with a veil over my head, going through every frame of the two hives, removing every drone cell and queen cell that I could find and so retarding any efforts at colonization in this inhospitable land. I was doing 'the right thing,' as no swarm could ever survive up here, and the colony left behind would be weakened by their departure to the point of diminishing its chances of survival too, but it felt so…rude. On the one hand, I'm being as gentle with my hands as possible, trusting them barehanded and seeking the thrumming bee communion that I've always loved about working bees, but on the other, whenever I find drone cells or queen cells (which was extremely often on Monday - on almost every side of every frame, in fact), I'm brushing aside the bees to scrape off their inanimate infants with the sharp point of the hive tool!

I've heard that some folks up here remove the queen and a skeleton staff of workers when the flowers are in full bloom, so that the workers can focus on gathering as much nectar and pollen as possible, rather than being distracted by the reproductive/swarming business. But I've never known hives to be happy not having a queen for long…

Meanwhile, my own two hives with their difficult start and nightmare journey here… I need to merge them, their numbers are so depleted they don't have a chance as two separate entities… But I've been dragging my feet over getting it done, partly because I was going to do it at the same time as moving them, which is best done at night and I'm generally wiped out in the evenings, and partly because I was loath to kill the queen of the weaker hive, which is what I'd have to do to merge them. When I checked them on Monday, the weaker hive no longer had a queen. Did she swarm? She'd certainly made some drones earlier on… She wouldn't have had a moth's hope in a candelabrum if she did that. 

It makes me a little sad, but despite today's sunshine it's been a cool and wet summer so far, which is unlucky for trying out something so chancy.