Three Seasons in a Beehive
Today’s post is an abandoned draft of a flash creative nonfiction piece I was trying to write, depicting life in a beehive from the bees’ perspectives during the year. I kept slipping into my perspective as a beekeeper, though, and this is the result. I’m looking forward to summer and getting back into the hive.
Autumn
Attempted robbery outside a beehive looks like a war. Bees tumble to the ground, pulling intruders away from the hive. Workers charge out from the entrance, plugging it with their bodies, trying to prevent the intruders from finding their way to the hard-earned reserves of honey and pollen, which will be essential to feed the colony over winter.
Humans associate bees with summer, the sweetness of nectar, and the soft buzz around a blossom. When the flowers wilt and the honey flow ends, the bees still have plenty of critical work to prepare for winter. As available resources dwindle, they may raid other hives to fill their needs. I suspect the density of hives in my rural-adjacent neighborhood contributes to this crime spree.
Winter
A warm winter poses a complicated problem for the colony. Although the many warm days provide the opportunity to come outside to relieve themselves, stretch their wings, and haul out their dead, these activities require energy, and therefore consumption of their stored honey. A sudden cold snap could also kill bees who do not cluster fast enough, or who lose contact with food.
When the air temperature outside dips, the bees form a cluster inside the hive. Bees on the outside of the cluster, flap one set of their wing to generate body heat, helping warm the others. Going into winter, beekeepers hope for a cluster about the size of a basketball, but a group as small as an orange has at least a chance at survival.
While the weather swings between warm days and deep freezes, moisture poses the most immediate risk for the cluster. As they breathe and generate heat, dew forms on the walls of the hive. They need this water, but if it drips on the cluster or makes the hive moldy, it can kill them. Ventilation helps.
The number of bees dwindles, until the winter solstice. Ralph Waldo Emerson compared the keeping of bees to directing sunbeams, but the bees take more cues from the sun than from their keeper. Attuned to the subtle lengthening of days, the workers gradually increase the temperature in the brood nest, prompting the queen to start laying more eggs and raising bees for spring.
Spring
In the spring, a small cluster remains, trapped at the top of the hive, the space beneath them a sign of how much energy they used over winter, working their way up through the honey supply. Along the way, frozen bees dangle from the comb, taken by the sudden deep freezes, like pioneers left behind on mountain passes in a storm. Some perished with their heads deep in cells, trying to generate heat. Elsewhere, patches of pupating bees died without enough nurse bees left to protect them from the chill. Somehow, during a winter that killed half of the beehives in the United States, this little colony survived.
As the queen lays hundreds of eggs each day, rebuilding the colony’s population, preparing for the honey flow, other bees work on finding fresh supplies—pollen and nectar from the sacred field of dandelions that sprouted outside—mana from heaven. Young bees secrete wax in flakes from the underside of their abdomens, building fresh comb. Still others work to clean the hive, hauling away their poor frozen sisters, cleaning up the signs of death from winter, and preparing for the burst of work in summer.
Coda: One Season in a Wasp’s Nest
The garden is suspiciously quiet. After a historically wet spring, the usually drought-stricken landscape sprouts mushrooms, a slime mold, and a relentless crop of weeds. In garden beds, seedlings emerge but grow slowly. Around the summer solstice, as my bees start to raise a new queen for their colony, I notice that I have not seen any native pollinators.
I check my notes, looking for when I usually start to see bumblebees, squash bees, leafcutter bees, and wasps. I hope that my anxiety is simply anticipation. I worry that the boom in beekeeping in my area depletes resources that these native pollinators need and am relieved to see the bees from my single hive work alongside squash bees in my pumpkin patch. The stunted vines have not yet produced the flowers they need for food.
Unlike honeybees, many native pollinators are solitary, overwintering alone. For example, wasp and yellowjacket queens hibernate over winter without a colony. In late summer and fall, their workers die off, and the queen spends the cold season someplace warm and dry, under tree bark or in crevices on buildings. Emerging in spring, the queen begins to construct a new nest, raising a small batch of wasps, who will continue building, making room for the growth of a colony.
Did the rain destroy the wasp queen’s nest? Did the late freeze kill her before her workers could hatch? Did the harsh conditions that killed so many beehives—in which thousands of insects worked together to generate heat—also kill these solitary pollinators? Unharrased by wasps, but nervous for the squash bees, I tend to the pumpkin patch, waiting for the heat to bring out the flowers.