My father is a beekeeper. It’s a late-life hobby that he treats like religion. The bees are a weird thing to have in Minneapolis, domestically, in a concrete backyard that is thinly fenced from other concrete backyards.
As a beekeeper, he has one regret. It is a fact of nature: in its lifetime, a bee makes only one teaspoon of honey, an amount we suck down in a second. This small fact taints his entire pursuit. On a monthly basis, he puts on his bee suit and smokes the hive. The bees go into self-defense mode, sealing themselves into small pockets of the comb.
When this happens, he sometimes cries. This practice is necessary to ensure there is no new queen seeded in the hive. Her presence would be the mark of a plan to swarm – to split into two new hives and, in some instances, leave the site of the original. So he fakes a fire. He makes them fear. He cannot sufficiently explain that it is only because he needs them to stay.
Still, they swarmed. It was my mother’s birthday and they made a tornado up in the oak that crosses from our yard into the next. Even after the initial spectacle had cooled – innumerable bees covering the tree like living armor – my father stayed alone beneath the tree, looking up, looking after them amidst his grief. Without knowing any bee by name, I inferred that the ones that stayed became more precious.
I asked him about why he loved them so much. He told me that they had a magical, secret way, and he wanted part of it. Secret. So that was the appeal. As he probed for the bees’ knowledge, he was continuously rejected. Not maliciously. Not punitively. But he was stung seven times in a single year. A stinger is precise, like a fact. Nothing personal. Each time he’d yowl, come inside, wash and mend, and go out again for more secrets.
It was no coincidence the bees swarmed when they did: on a day in the later months of the summer, the city paper reported that local herbicides were taking out bee populations, and the killer could not be traced. Suddenly, it was true: my family was walking over carcasses to get to the door.
Plucking wings from the sole of his shoe, my father made an addendum. He said much of what he had learned had to do with turnover. Their lives were fast pieces. No part was existential – a bee’s time was so short! Humans could spend eighty years wondering what their part was. Bees knew theirs, and never questioned them.
In a jobless time for my dad, hobbies were important. He needed things to occupy his mind and give him work when he could not get any. Last spring, after the dual devastation of the partial swarm and the pesticides, he took the bees that remained to a farm in Anoka. They were becoming not just mean, but spiteful, stinging him every time he stepped outside. That was a funeral-like day.
Now, he drives forty minutes to visit them. He’ll miss dinner, he’ll miss a day. Any time he wonders how they are. They’ve repopulated, and he reports that they’re strong. But there’s something else there: why worry for a healthy patient?
I understand part of why he visits is love. I would miss watching them, had I been their keeper. But I wonder if these visits satiate him. I wonder if he is happy by the time he comes home too late for dinner, or if he could watch forever, watch for something in particular, one more secret to be revealed. I now think that he envied the bees.
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