The Eternally Fascinating Honeybee

In the temple of Artemis, one of the seven wonders of the ancient world, she was the symbol of the goddess representing fertility and healing.  In Egypt, she was said to be the tears of Ra, the sun god, giver of life and resurrection.  Kung Bushmen in the Kalahari believe she carries with her supernatural powers.  And legend has it that she landed on the lips of Plato as a baby, foretelling his future brilliance.  She — is the honeybee.

This tiny winged sorceress has captivated many a great mind.  Famous beekeepers include Aristotle, Napoleon, Leo Tolstoy, George Washington, and Thomas Jefferson.  Sylvia Plath was at her most free and happy while caring for the busy occupants of a beehive, leading to her writing a series of five “bee poems”.   The question is:  What is it that captured all of these remarkable imaginations?  Why, beyond the honey collection, do humans go to such great lengths to touch this world?

My entry into beekeeping was swift and not entirely consensual.  A lovely woman who worked with my husband had decided, despite having never met me, that I was just the person to inherit her custom-made beehive.  My husband said he would speak to me and somehow that very weekend we were picking up the hive along with a three-pound package of some ten thousand bees.  The woman who bestowed upon me this wild responsibility spoke of the bees’ deep connection to feminine energy and the power of sacred geometry.  I drove home feeling that I had somehow been initiated into something I did not quite understand.  I have photos of me pouring the ten thousand bees into my hive with absolutely no protective gear and dressed in a big fuzzy brown sweater that made me look exactly like a hive robbing bear; it is a wonder I survived.  But I did, and so did the bees despite my ineptitude.  Somehow, we all got along and I was slowly drawn in.  The more I watched them, the more I became fascinated by the intricacies of their life.  They are at once beautiful and brutal, mystical and, of course, staggeringly pragmatic.

A case study in utilitarianism, the beehive is the quintessential eusocial community.  As always with systems of utility, efficiency comes with a price.  In the hive there is one queen, worker bees (who are all female) and drones (larger male bees who cannot sting).  There are approximately one hundred workers for every one drone.  The sole purpose of drones is to mate with a queen, but never the queen from their own hive.  Therefore, drones do not directly contribute to their own hive.  As winter approaches and resources grow slim the worker bees literally evict the drones.  They round them up and push them out the hive entrance where they perish from either cold or starvation. 

The queen herself is perhaps the least immune to the cruelty and efficiency of the hive.  While she controls the hive, she is entirely dependent on attendant bees to feed her and clean her.  She is, at once omnipotent and helpless.  The workers monitor the queen closely.  If she shows signs of poor egg production (as in less than two thousand eggs per day - the weight of eggs exceeding her own body weight), they will begin to grow a new queen.  In this “requeening” the workers create larger wax cells which they feed an enriched food called “royal jelly” to grow the new queens.  Once the first queen reaches maturity and exits her cell, she seeks out the other queen cells, opens them, and kills the other queen pupae; there can only be one queen.  This victorious new queen will then embark on her mating flight (where she leaves the hive to find a drone congregation site where she will mate with enough drones to store enough sperm to last her entire life).  She then returns to the hive and begins laying.  If the workers determine that she is viable, they will proceed to “ball” the old queen, literally surrounding her and creating so much heat that she dies.

In addition to the dramatic events of the hive, of which there are many, there is splendid order.  In a worker bee’s thirty-five to forty-five day life, she will cycle through each of the following jobs: undertaker (removing dead bees from the hive), drone feeding (when they are babies drones are unable to feed themselves), attending to the queen (feeding, grooming, and spreading her hormones throughout the hive so that the other bees know that she is still healthy and laying), pollen packing (this is stored and will eventually be used to feed the brood), sealing honey (using a special gland which produces wax), building honeycomb, fanning (air conditioning for the hive in the hotter months), carrying water, guarding the hive entrance, and finally foraging.  The bee will know exactly when it is time to change jobs and exactly what job is next.  I often spend time watching the entrance to my hive trying to determine which bee has which job.

As riveting as beekeeping is however, it is not for the faint of heart.  I attended my first beekeepers meeting and was surprised to find that it sounded more like a support group.  Beekeepers sharing story after story of how they had diligently done everything they were supposed to and still the bees had become infected/ swarmed/ been attacked by yellow jackets/ or just plain died.  But still they keep at it.  Joe Gaglione of Crystal Bee Supply, a thirty-year-old-family-owned business in Peabody, explains that he believes people keep bees as a way to connect to nature.  His experience is that for most of the people he interacts with, beekeeping is a hobby that they feel good about.  He finds that beekeepers enjoy supporting the bees and at the same time learning about a complex and delicate system.  He notes that beekeepers also develop very individual ways of handling their hives.  I have heard over and over that if you ask five beekeepers a question, you will get five different answers, which keeps things interesting.

Speaking to local beekeepers about thriving bee colonies led me to Maggie Brown, the Land Conservation Project Manager at Cox Reservation, the 31-acre Greenbelt property in Essex.  Greenbelt is an Essex County land trust dedicated to conserving the farmland, wildlife habitats, and scenic landscapes of the region and currently protects and maintains six thousand acres in Essex County.  Maggie maintains three bee colonies on the property which is open to the public.  She explains that having the beehives at Cox creates a strong connection to Greenbelt.  In conjunction with the Essex County Bee Association, Greenbelt hosts “Pollinator Day”, an annual event at Cox where the public is invited to visit and learn more about pollinators, especially bees. “Pollinators need open space and we need pollinators,” Maggie succinctly states.  She goes on to explain that this day along with the hives at Cox is a great way to engage the public with something tangible, always hoping to illuminate the critical connection between pollinators and open space, a point made beautifully by Jim Behnke in The Cricket in his Part I article on August 14.

Earlier this month, for this article, Jim Behnke, local photographer Carl Jappe, and I joined Maggie for a hive check.  When we arrived, gear was distributed, and protocol was discussed.  Maggie lit her smoker and began opening the hives.  She is perfectly suited for this moment — not in terms of her bee suit, but her general demeanor.  With total calm and ease she thoughtfully and delicately worked her way through box after box.  It was a completely relaxing and somewhat meditative process.  The bees were easy and docile.  You simply cannot watch something like this and not see that there is more to it than just honey collection.  I listened as this began to occur to both Jim and Carl.  Both noting how serene the process was.  This is it.  This is the draw — we were entering the bee’s world, gorgeous and cruel, but always purposeful.  While I was turning this thought over in my mind, my eyes looked beyond Maggie to see the expansive wild fields and then just beyond, the stunning Essex marsh.  I felt enormous gratitude to the wise and mystical honeybee.  For allowing us to touch her world and, most importantly, reminding us of the significance of this land and how we, as stewards, must always work to protect it — to let it be.

If you are interested in learning more about the Greenbelt and their bees, keep an eye out for Pollinator Day at Cox Reservation: www.ecga.org.  There is also an excellent documentary film entitled “Pollinators”.  Best of all, support local organizations, like Greenbelt, who are protecting open space.