Tag: bees

drunk on summer

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I TASTE a liquor never brewed,
From tankards scooped in pearl;
Not all the vats upon the Rhine
Yield such an alcohol!

Inebriate of air am I,
And debauchee of dew,
Reeling, through endless summer days,
From inns of molten blue.

When landlords turn the drunken bee
Out of the foxglove’s door,
When butterflies renounce their drams,
I shall but drink the more!

Till seraphs swing their snowy hats,
And saints to windows run,
To see the little tippler
Leaning against the sun!

~Emily Dickinson

It’s easy to be drunk with summer these days. Though it’s not technically summer yet, schools are out, gardens are bursting into bloom, and the air is full of the golden trajectories of honeybees. Here in the north of the South, we’re having perfect weather–warm but not hot, balmy breezes, blue skies punctuated by puffs of white cloud.

It won’t last–it never does. We’re typically in a drought by August, and before that, temperatures have become wretchedly hot and the air is humid. It’s hard to sleep at night with the windows open.

But for now, we are living in a temperate paradise. The soft wind carries the scent of sun-warmed pines through the screen, and in the evenings, the crystalline song of a wood thrush traces invisible lines of silver through the perfumed air. Impossible not to be drunk on summer these days. It’s best to just sink into it.

“wrecks in peace”

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A sloop of amber slips away
Upon an ether sea,
And wrecks in peace a purple tar,
The son of ecstasy.

~Emily Dickinson

Yesterday evening, grimed with sweat and smoke from an afternoon of picking up and installing new hives, I sat on the grass in front of the newly-homed colonies of honeybees as the half-moon hung overhead and the sunset splashed amber and purple across the western sky. I love these liminal times best, the moments when day is becoming evening and evening is becoming night. Bees, I think, are liminal creatures. They trace thin golden paths through the ether between life and death–they are so fragile individually, yet as a group they are strong. They persist.

There is something vital about a hive in a way that no other creatures can emulate. Bees hum, zoom, dive, buzz, sing and vibrate life, spilling it out in wild trajectories through the still air. They dance the winds, trace the edge of sight and possibility. They are so tiny, yet so wildly, fiercely, abundantly alive.

Yesterday afternoon, in the beeyard, I watched, rapt, as the beekeeper pointed out two-day-old larvae, four-day-old, six. And then he pointed to an opening cell and said, with all the excitement of a kid on Christmas morning at the top of the stairs, “Look!”

A brand-new adult bee was hatching from her cell, the front of her head just showing, wriggling with life. I have never seen that before. I cannot explain the power in that moment, that instant of transformation from shapeless grub to complex insect, from needy little soft squishy thing to shining, valiant warrior-girl. What will she become? Will she guard the hive? tend the babies? wait on her queen? How long will she live? Not long, doubtless. A worker bee’s life is short. And yet that brief existence will bolster the eternity of the hive (here’s hoping…beekeeping is notoriously tetchy).

It is in these liminal spaces, these in-between moments, whether the setting of the sun or the hatching of a bee, that magic resides. It is there for the finding, if you wait, if you look. Catch it, and you too will be wrecked by the peace of it, in the most beautiful way.

Rain and not bees

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A drop fell on the apple tree
Another on the roof;
A half a dozen kissed the eaves,
And made the gables laugh.

A few went out to help the brook,
That went to help the sea.
Myself conjectured, Were they pearls,
What necklaces could be!

The dust replaced in hoisted roads,
The birds jocoser sung;
The sunshine threw his hat away,
The orchards spangles hung.

The breezes brought dejected lutes,
And bathed them in the glee;
The East put out a single flag,
And signed the fete away.

~Emily Dickinson

If we were having the kind of summer shower Dickinson is writing about, I would be picking up my bees today. No such luck. Bees, like other witches, do not appreciate getting wet. They get downright grouchy. When the barometer falls, otherwise lovely honeybees become Not Very Nice People.

So today, instead of picking up my bees, I am daydreaming of bees, reading Dickinson’s poems about or referencing bees, and wondering when this rain is going to end.

This is not a summer shower. This is a summer monsoon. It’s just not stopping. It’s supposed to rain all day tomorrow, too, so no bees until Tuesday.

I’ve waited two years. I guess I can wait a little longer.

Butterfly-carts and bee-wagons

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A little road not made of man,
Enabled of the eye,
Accessible to thill of bee,
Or cart of butterfly.

If town it have, beyond itself,
’T is that I cannot say;
I only sigh,—no vehicle
Bears me along that way.

~Emily Dickinson

I too can only sigh. It seems Emily was often wondering what it would be like to experience the world as its tinier denizens do. This road is doubly inaccessible because it is little and not made for humans, and is also a road through the air. It is for butterflies’ carts and bees’ wagons. (I had to look up “thill.”)

The notion of butterflies and bees pulling little carts is amusing. Or are they driving them? What on earth would insects do with carts? The idea that this road is for vehicles I find quite bemusing. Dickinson must have been in a whimsical mood when she penned this one.

Baronial bees!

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Some rainbow coming from the fair!
Some vision of the World Cashmere
I confidently see!
Or else a peacock’s purple train,
Feather by feather, on the plain
Fritters itself away!

The dreamy butterflies bestir,
Lethargic pools resume the whir
Of last year’s sundered tune.
From some old fortress on the sun
Baronial bees march, one by one,
In murmuring platoon!

The robins stand as thick to-day
As flakes of snow stood yesterday,
On fence and roof and twig.
The orchis binds her feather on
For her old lover, Don the Sun,
Revisiting the bog!

Without commander, countless, still,
The regiment of wood and hill
In bright detachment stand.
Behold! Whose multitudes are these?
The children of whose turbaned seas,
Or what Circassian land?

~Emily Dickinson

There’s much to love about this poem. In my edition, it’s titled “Summer’s Armies,” which I really like. It seems fitting. So many armies–hordes and throngs of birds, insects, blossoms, marching on into eternity, felled cyclically but always resurrected.

And the “baronial bees,” of course. The image is amusing to anyone who’s ever spent even a few minutes bee-watching. Never have I ever seen bees march one by one. Order they have in spades, but not in any way we think of it, and certainly not in a single-file way. There is a beautiful order to a hive, to its comings and goings, but on a warm day, to the human eye a bustling hive looks at first like sheer chaos. It’s an airport where no one appears to be performing air traffic control. Bees are everywhere. They clot the air, zoom in for crazy landings, twist and squiggle their ways around each other. Yet they know exactly what they’re doing, and nobody crashes into anybody or anything else.

They are a murmuring platoon, though. There are few lovelier sounds than their soft constant hymn to the sun.

Revery alone?

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To make a prairie it takes a clover and one bee,—
One clover, and a bee,
And revery.
The revery alone will do
If bees are few.

~Emily Dickinson

Okay, I know what she means, but this is one poem I can’t separate from my own historical moment. Revery can and does create not just prairies but entire worlds, it’s true. And yet…

And yet. Bees are fewer now than they’ve ever been. I’ve lost hives–entire colonies, abandoned, leaving only a few mute bodies behind, tiny corpses that clutch their secrets so close that I cannot read in them the sad stories of their deaths. My small losses are mere symptoms of a larger problem, a story that may or may not end well.

If we’re not more careful of this wide, small, terribly beautiful, beautifully terrible world we’ve been granted, revery alone will have to do. And it will be found wanting every time.

“Homesick for steadfast honey”

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THE NEAREST dream recedes, unrealized. The heaven we chase
Like the June bee
Before the school-boy
Invites the race;
Stoops to an easy clover—
Dips—evades—teases—deploys;
Then to the royal clouds
Lifts his light pinnace
Heedless of the boy
Staring, bewildered, at the mocking sky.

Homesick for steadfast honey,
Ah! the bee flies not
That brews that rare variety.

~Emily Dickinson

I’ve been without bees for a couple of years now, and I do not like it. Homesick for honey, yes, but even more, viscerally, for the companionship of bees, their presence, their energy humming out through the warm soft heaviness of summer air.

It’s difficult to explain–I think there are people who are entranced by bees on some very instinctive level, and people who are not. There are people who are allergic to bees, of course.

I was talking recently with a friend about the kinds of strange preferences people often discover themselves to have, and we were wondering if there was something deeply ingrained in human nature, in DNA, in something, that is inherited. Why do we love the cuisines of certain places? Why does some music stir our souls? Is this baked into us somehow? I wonder this about beekeeping. Is this somehow embedded in me?

I am an anxious person, a twitchy kind of soul, the kind of person who annoys other people inadvertently by frenetically tapping my feet without realizing I’m doing it. I was diagnosed with an anxiety disorder years ago. There are very few things I can do that completely take my mind off the fretful minutiae of daily life. Beekeeping is one of those things.

The first time I installed bees in a hive, shaking them from their box into the waiting hive body, they swarmed up in a golden cloud around me, filling the air. It would have made sense if I’d been terrified–but instead, a soul-deep peace settled over me, and for a moment, I was entirely caught up in that shimmering haze of wings. I knew in that instant that I wanted that feeling, needed it, always, forever, as much and as long as possible. Bees heal something deep within me.

I have been homesick for them these past couple of years. But they are coming! Soon I’ll be picking up my new hives. I will drive them home to their spot in the little orchard. I will sing to them–I always sing to them. Songs about bees, about honey and stings, life and death and sweetness–the things bees understand. And then, at long last, we will all be home.

“Oh, for a bee’s experience”

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Like trains of cars on tracks of plush
I hear the level bee:
A jar across the flowers goes,
Their velvet masonry

Withstands until the sweet assault
Their chivalry consumes,
While he, victorious, tilts away
To vanquish other blooms.

His feet are shod with gauze,
His helmet is of gold;
His breast, a single onyx
With chrysoprase, inlaid.

His labor is a chant,
His idleness a tune;
Oh, for a bee’s experience
Of clovers and of noon!

~Emily Dickinson

The bee is a train. The bee is a knight! Despite Dickinson’s lamentable misunderstanding of the basic fact that these valiant bees-errant are all lady knights, this poem is completely charming. And it makes me wonder–what is the world like to a bee? What does she see, smell, experience? What would it bee like to be bound to hive and home yet free to ride the warm currents of summer air? To dance the map to sweetness?

But why “chrysoprase”? It’s a lovely word–but it means apple-green chalcedony. I have never seen any part of a bee I’d consider apple-green. Gold, gauze, onyx–yes, but “apple-green”? What kind of bees did they have in Amherst, Massachusetts back then??

Weird color description aside, this is one of those poems that brings Emily Dickinson vividly to life for me. She was watching those bees as closely as I do, tracing their flights through the air, noting where they landed and dallied. She wondered, as I do, about the mysteries of their comings and goings, the magic of their labor. She understood that in the smallest things, great wonders wait.

BEES!!!

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The bee is not afraid of me,
I know the butterfly;
The pretty people in the woods
Receive me cordially.

The brooks laugh louder when I come, The breezes madder play.
Wherefore, mine eyes, thy silver mists? Wherefore, O summer’s day?

~Emily Dickinson

Aside from the lovely magic of “the pretty people in the woods” (faeries? elves?? certainly something magical!), I love this poem because it is one of Emily’s many, many bee-related ones. She must have adored bees. She writes about them often.

For several years, I kept honeybees–until they all died off one recent awful winter. I have been beeless for a couple of years now, and the orchard looks desolate without their hives, the clovers abandoned without their small ceaseless thrumming.

But!

Bees are coming!

I am getting bees again!

So if you are not a bee fan, you might want to avoid this space for a while, because Emily and I are all about the bees.

The pedigree of honey and the history of beekeeping

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The pedigree of honey
Does not concern the bee;
A clover, any time, to him
Is aristocracy.

~Emily Dickinson

We should all be more like bees. That is my takeaway from this poem.

As a beekeeper, though, I’ve just emerged from an internet rabbit hole where I’ve been attempting to figure out whether Emily Dickinson should have known that worker bees are female. Apparently, while some beekeeping scientists did discover this fact as early as the early 1800s, it was not widely accepted for about a hundred years. So I guess I can forgive Emily her ignorance on this particular topic. I wonder if knowing this bit of information would have changed any of her poetry–or her imagining–in any way. She wrote so many poems about or including bees–I wonder what might have shifted if she had known that the bees she was describing were almost entirely female.