Why do I keep bees?

AKA why do you go near creatures that sting you?

CW: depression, abuse, cutting

I have not inspected my hives for over four weeks. But given that I need to rest after watering the garden or washing the dishes, lifting twenty to fifty-pound hive boxes full of bees is probably NOT the best idea. Not until I’m fully recovered from wretched Covid. It’s hard sitting on my hands. But the weather is still warm and will stay unusually warm through Halloween, so there will be time to do that thorough last hive inspection before winter (and temps below 55F) is here for good. That’s what I keep telling myself, all while staring at the apiary from my windows.

There are people who crave running. I’ve seen them, running in the rain, running during heat advisories, and even running in wildfire smoke. Me? I want to go into my apiary, crack open a hive, inhale the medicinal-smokey-vanilla scent of honey-beeswax-propolis, and see the bees lined up in the space between wooden frames.

This year, I have five hives. Inside each is a colony of bees. Some colonies have worker bees with lighter-colored bodies, and others have primarily ebony bees. Each colony has its unique personality. I never inspect without a veil because I’ve been stung on the face (on my forehead).

And it turned me into a creature from Avatar, thusly:

On the left: immediately after being stung on the forehead, with a paste of baking soda plastered to my forehead. On the right: 3 days later, face swollen (and sore and itchy).

Even so, I am not deterred. The joy of beekeeping outweighs the agony of the sting. The comfort of beekeeping, too, outweighs the agony of the sting.

The sting, too, is part of the desire. But we’ll get to that, later.

The death

The day my father died, I ended up opening my hives.

An online friend—let’s call her “J”— was coming over to visit my apiary that day. Months earlier, she said that looking inside a bee hive was on her life bucket list.

“Oh, I told her, we can take care of that bucket list item, no problem.” And so we arranged for her to visit when she was in town. I had no idea that the day we chose in mid August to meet would be the day he’d die.

When the day came, she asked if I needed space once she heard the news.

“Please come,” I told her. “Let’s visit the bees. It’s what I need today.”

I was in a state of shock. My mom had died a year earlier. And then my dad that morning. For an entire two years, the stench of dread was on everything. And now I officially had no living parents remaining. There were so many feelings, it was hard to feel them all, whether at once or one by one. I felt distant in the same way I felt when I was raped. Something bad was happening, and I did not want to feel anything at all.

Beekeeping is a dream deferred, which was why I so immediately offered my apiary up to J. I did not get bees until I was over forty years old, even though I had dreamt of keeping bees since the age of eight. I had to become a grownup before I could have bees. Then I was married to a man who did not want bees. Then that man left me. And then when Trump was elected, I decided I needed to do something rebellious, something significant for myself. So I ordered bees.

No one should have to wait for bees.

When I brought home my first nucleus “starter” colony (we beekeepers call such a thing a “nuc” for short), the entrances were closed to contain the bees for transport. I remember holding my ear to the box and hearing the low hum and buzz of the bees inside. I remember holding my hand to the box and feeling thousands of bees shaking the box.

It was full of literal energy; the bees were vibrating their bodies to generate heat to incubate their brood. And when later I stuck my hand into a box of creatures that had the ability to sting me and while doing so saw the exact spacing of the frames and the bees busy doing their assigned jobs, I was filled with a calm hope. Whatever is happening in the world, the bees were hard at work with their mission. I stood there, breathing in the woodsmoke from the smoker, but also the honey and beeswax and bitter propolis. A smell that I associate with this diligent and dangerous energy.

When J arrived later that morning, I readied the extra bee suit and gloves for her to don and lit the smoker.

I told her that I probably didn’t want to talk about my dad beforehand, via text. And I needed a distraction. All truth. I wanted to pretend my parents weren’t dead for as long as I could get away with it. She kindly obliged.

J and I never before met in person. But I’ve made friends “on the internet” since 1995. I trust people I’ve built relationships via the written word. Some folks wonder how I have such trust, in the same way people suddenly blink when I tell them how much I love bees despite the sting. As a writer and reader, I acknowledge the nuance of word choice and social grace that writing demands in order to make complete communication. So much is revealed when someone says, “I want to offer my support in person, but can also appreciate if you prefer space," versus “Should I still come over?” versus “We still on?”

Bees live in darkness and they know their hive fambam not by sight but by smell. They too, figure out what and who to trust in their own way.

I gave J a hug after she navigated the zippers of the bee suit.

Young adulthood and germaphobia

A couple decades ago, hugging someone would have been unfathomable. When the pandemic began, it was odd to watch the world revert back to my old, unhealthy germaphobic habits. And to have the behavior of my disfunction, normalized.

My germaphobia is tied to rituals, which is tied to OCD. I have an essay to write about my OCD someday—about why I think it started and what made it worse and how I carried gloves with me to school in my MFA program so I could wear them when I had to use the computer lab (and communal keyboards) to print a manuscript before workshop and how my postpartum depression manifested in an uncontrollable OCD and germaphobia (I even wrote a damn article about how I tried to Marie Kondo my toddler)—and beekeeping indulges me my OCD and germaphobia.

When I open up a hive, I can see a creature out there that organizes its world a certain way, secretes materials that keep bacteria at bay. Honey bees make propolis—bee glue—from tree sap to seal cracks and gaps in the hive. This bee glue has antibacterial qualities—the quality of which spurred the Greeks and Romans to use propolis as an oral disinfectant (their version of Listerine!) and for wound treatment (an ancient Neosporin).

Honey bees are also obsessive-compulsive.* They maintain something called “bee space,” which is to say that they keep everything inside their hive about 5/16 inches apart. If something is too far apart, they’ll fill the space with beeswax or propolis until it is 5/16 inches apart. If something is closer than 5/16th of an inch, they will close that space with wax or propolis. They’re fastidious about this and so much more.

* yes, I know I am projecting human constructs onto an insect, which isn’t cool. Aristotle once projected his own social constructs onto bees by calling the mother bee a “king bee,” just because he couldn’t fathom bees caring for and grooming anything other than a male bee. He continued to call the mother bee a “king bee,” even after evidence that that “king bee” was laying eggs. Society didn’t start calling her a “queen bee” until Queen Elizabeth I came into power.

This sense of order is a relief for me.

I’ve worked hard on my germaphobia. I did self-talk and told myself it is connected to purity culture; why are some things perceived as “dirtier” than others? I conducted fermentation experiments so I could learn how there were beneficial microbes. I left my antibacterial solutions at home. I willed myself to let others touch my cellphone. To allow another to type on my keyboard. This took years, and then the pandemic hit. I backslid. It’s still hard for me to go out. I’m a few precarious steps from hikkomori, honestly, but it’s getting better.

Childhood

My father was abusive. “Abusive” is an adjective that is within social bounds. Like, he was sometimes harsh but overall good. But. I’ve also accepted that he was my abuser. Which is the truth. Abuser is a noun, a constant state. It is what he was. Not what he sometimes was. He was a complicated person, someone who boasted that noone could fully understand him. He was always harsh, despite the best of intentions. He did not want to be a philanderer. He did not want to choke and hit his wife. He did not want to tell me I was worthless unless I did everything his way. He did not want to tell me no one would love me. He did not want to hit me. He did not want to tell me I should kill myself. But he did all these things. With frequency and regularity.

I was the child whose personality was most like his. I am not an abuser. But we have the same sense of humor, the same boldness, the same joie de vivre and DGAF energy. When he was not abusive, he was incredibly fun to be around. He had a ton of friends, because he was also charismatic. He was generous, too; his friends gave me so many anecdotes about how he helped them in their time of greatest need.

My twenties

This is to say that when I was in my late twenties he did tell me, “You are the only one who understands me.”

If I could make a joke, if I could make him laugh, I learned that the dark smoke of rage would dissipate and all was forgiven.

So I teased, “I thought no one could understand you.”

“Oh,” he said, “You understand me.”

But other times, he contradicted himself.

I told him, “I think you always scream at me when I cry, because you can’t handle the pain of seeing me helpless. Because it makes you feel helpless. And you hate feeling helpless. So you scream at me, because I am the cause of unwelcome feelings.”

He blinked. And then flew into a rage. “You don’t know me!” he said, followed by a relentless attack of my character.

As always, I met his anger with anger. I had my own philosophy of making sure that whatever pain he inflicted on me, he would feel an equal amount in turn. I was determined to make any victory of his, pyrrhic in nature. I told him that it was clear I had hit on the truth, because the truth hurts. I asked him if he hurt. And hoped he did.

Beyond middle age

In his old age, he softened. He was felled by heart attacks. And a stroke, like one felled me years ago. His meekness in old age made me feel like I’d imagined the last few decades. How could this man have been my terror?

But before my mom died, he rose again. He told me I killed my mom. She was dying because I was killing her.

There is no truth to this statement. He made it up to avoid his pain, like why he didn’t abide my tears. Just like when I was fifteen and he told me I’d killed my own dog. That was how I learned my dog had died. He shouted it through the car window, me on the sidewalk.

He told me he’d been waiting for me, but because he’d waited, it was too late to save the dog. And then he drove off, leaving me alone.

The dog had died of kidney failure, I learned. She would have died anyway, no matter when we took her to the hospital.

The sting

Honey bees sting in self defense, even knowing that they will die as a consequence.

Maybe I go into a box full of stingers, because the pain is familiar. When I was in high school, I cut myself. Not accidentally, but on purpose. Before it had a name. Because that pain was a kind of bloodletting of feeling, a bloodfeeling. The physical pain was a proxy for emotional pain.

Like all folks with germaphobia and OCD, I am someone who likes to be in control. But if there is someone else who wants to be in charge and who also happens to be competent, I cede that control happily and immediately relax. I have a number of friends like this, around whom I have zero worries.

In the presence of consistent, competent, and superior organization, I relax. I am soothed.

In the absence of competent and consistent leadership and environs, I become the bee, working myself to death, maintaining order. So that I can be good enough for the screaming in my childhood home to stop. And in turn, the screaming in my own head can stop. Being ordered makes me lovable. Being clean and unsullied will make me acceptable. Maybe my father will tell me I’m good enough. Maybe no one will think I am less than they, even though there was not a single day that went by where I wasn’t called a “Chink” in a town becoming increasingly racist.

But the bees? They make me relax.

I show J the order of the hive. The top box is mostly honey, with the least amount of bees. It is a consistent box, with few guard bees. It has the least amount of aggression, too. These are the frames I casually hand J to observe without much worry.

But as you go lower, you get to the center of the hive, and this core is the warmest part of the hive where they keep their brood—the eggs, the larvae, and under the wax caps, the pupa—and where the bulk of the bees hang out. This area and the bottom box is where the guard bees gather, too.

I remove the outermost frames first, because the first frames pulled are the roughest, the most likely to squish a bee, requiring me to pry it loose of sticky propolis with my hive tool. I pull the outermost frames, too, because they are also the ones least likely to hold the queen, who prefers the center frames for egg-laying. Those too, I hand casually to J for observation.

The next frame or two might be honey or it might be pollen.

But the middle frames in the middle box of the hive contain brood. The baby bees. These brood frames are the reason I don’t inspect on cold days, so as not to chill and kill the brood. The queen bee is usually on a brood frame as well; the last bee you want to accidentally squish is queen.

These are the frames I scan for a queen before handing them to J. One frame does have a queen, and I am even more careful with that frame than the other brood frames. I tell J where to look for the queen. Tell her to be careful with it. There is only one queen bee, after all. We’re both delighted to see her. I don’t always find the queen when I inspect. And the queen bee spends most of her life in darkness, within a hive; she’s not something you see outside an apiary. It feels special.

The boxes with brood are more populated. And the stakes are higher. There are more possibilities to squish a bee. And when a bee is squished, it emits an alarm pheromone that then alerts the other bees to a threat. If a hive is already stressed, it will become very defensive. Even if a hive isn’t stressed, an alarm will trigger other bees.

The low level danger is soothing. It feels counterintuitive that this is the case, but if you think about vaccines and exposure therapy and even homeopathy, then you might understand it a bit. Sometimes you fight fire with fire.

You read about people addicted to war. People addicted to danger. It’s taken me decades to admit that yes, I was abused as a child. It’s a reluctant yet obvious conclusion. It was such a shameful secret, one we couldn’t admit to ourselves. We couldn’t tell ourselves that were “that kind of family.” We were smart and educated and accomplished. We were better than what the racist folks in our town called us. We had something to prove. We couldn’t afford to reveal any vulnerability to criticism. We couldn’t besmirch our own family. We couldn’t besmirch our own people.

My father told us that we go out into the world each day and we put our game faces on. We have our armor on. And then we come home to our island where we are our true selves. And what happens at home isn’t for the world to consume.

But what happened at home was being told to die. Being unpredictably punished for perceived infractions. There was apologizing in both directions. And then abuse again.

But when I open a hive with its low level hum of danger, it’s like a game of operation that tells me not to hit the edges and rattle the colony. Don’t rattle my father. Be calm in the face of danger and agitation. It is a familiar act, and that familiarity is a comfort. It’s loving the thing that stings.