on the bees of summer
The summer I first dipped my toe into beekeeping was the same summer our lives started to unravel. Slowly. Imperceptible at first in the chaos of the every day. At that time, we lived a good 12-hour drive from my parents on the Eastern coast of Canada and their two, then four, then eight hives. The first time I helped out, I had taken our son, Ollie, home for a long weekend to visit. His first flight and my first time traveling alone with a toddler.
We were staying with my parents on their country property, a breeze to keep the heat at bay and room to run around. Ollie lugged a bunny my aunt sewed for him around their yard. Clad only in his diaper and a long-sleeved shirt, he walks bunny around the gardens, stopping to give bunny a sniff of the flowers. “Peony down here” he totters along, stopping at every bloom, “Dat reach hard!” he says, pulling back from a peony that is further back in the bed. “Okay, I will help you!” I offer the peony bloom to him, pulling it down and forward, its bright yellow centre hovering just in front of bunny’s pink triangular nose. He has a deep love for flowers for someone so little. I dream of the gardens we can build together, fleshing out our yard of so little life, bringing blooms and pollinators into our space. “Bring a bunny,” he says suddenly, in his raspy toddler voice, turning away from a pale pink peony he had just brought bunny’s face to and walking back to me, he holds it out towards me. “Ollie bring a bunny” he then says, pulling it back to his chest in a quick change of heart, turning away again. “Ollie’s bunny! It’s Ollie’s bunny!” rubbing its chest in that gentle, but disjoint way children do. In the video I took of Ollie and his bunny in my parent’s garden, he then turns back towards me, stretches out his free arm and says, “A hold me.” And of course, I do.
We didn’t get much time together, the bees and I or my parents and I, but that visit left a lasting effect. Like any love affair, it was the little things at first. The first whiff of honey floating on the wind that I caught while walking along my mother’s gardens, the last of the peonies in bloom, the roses budding, and red bee balm growing erratically around the other plants, a true smell of summer. Walking along the gardens with my mother as she points out the different flowers as we walk, paying extra attention to point out those that have special meaning to her – the red peony I got her from the market in Ottawa one summer, the climbing rose bush I had ordered for my dad, the lilies she got from her friend, and the purple irises that smell like the cool-aid drinks we used to make by the pitcher-full during summers long now passed.
My mother brings this same wistfulness to her beekeeping. She takes her time, moving unhurriedly as she works. Over the symphony of their wings beating together, she hands me a frame of capped honey. It is shockingly heavy. Nearly every one of the hexagon shaped cells has been covered over with a thin coating of wax to seal it off. This frame is ready to be harvested. Standing in the heat of the day, the sun high above us as we work, handing things back and forth, chatting and laughing, our mutual appreciation of the bees, I get the distinct sensation that we are echoes of all those women beekeepers who came before us. Those who stood together over their colonies, who agonized over whether or not they were doing the right things, worried about how long it has been since the last rain, how much food were the bees storing for winter, were they healthy? And I loved them. Opening the hives with my mother, making our way slowly, methodically, through the frames, looking for tiny eggs to provide evidence of the queen’s health. Watching them coming and going, the pollen—yellows and oranges, some nearly red—fastidiously packed for travel into balls attached to the tops of their legs. The patience with which my mother works as she pries each frame loose with her hive tool, lifting the frames one by one, pointing out interesting things for me to note, like the difference in size between the numerous female bees and their larger male counterparts. “You can even tell just by the eyes,” she says, gesturing with a white gloved finger, “the males have very round eyes at the top of their heads, and you can see they’re bigger. The females, regardless of their job, have longer eyes.”
my friend B calls this picture my “beekeeper, but make it fashion” picture. i’m on a ladder to catch a swarm.
And there are so many of them. Climbing over each other, working next to each other, ducking their heads into cells to deposit honey, fanning it with their wings to dehydrate it so they can cap the cells with wax to safely contain it. We watch them fly out of the hive and back in, jockeying for a position to land. Those that cannot find a safe spot backtrack into an upward loop and come at the entrance again. On and on it goes as they forage and store, working to provide for their colony—their family—to ensure their survival through the long winter season. I could relate to that deep desire to care for their colony. To work at caring for others every day, no matter how hard things were. Because each bee works to protect their colony. Family first. Always.
I work with my mother, moving rhythmically from frame to frame, box to box, and hive to hive. It is meditational. It is joyful. It is addictive. I have wholeheartedly caught the bug. And the honey isn’t so bad either.
n xx