A Language Older Than Words - Derrick Jensen [120]
I bought more hives, and loved to lie on my back to watch the bees—not scores now, but hundreds or thousands—flying crisscrosses through the morning or afternoon sky. I'd watch one circle and rise, then orient herself and fly away, her body growing smaller against the light blue of the summer sky. When she blinked out in the distance, I would pick another to watch, perhaps this one coming home, her body growing larger and taking form as she returned with a stomach full of nectar or saddlebags full of pollen.
But all was not contemplation. Beekeeping is some of the hardest work I have ever done. That first year I arranged the hives aesthetically, scattering them about a large marshy pasture. I learned never to do that again: at up to a hundred pounds each, boxes of honey are heavy enough when the truck is parked right there. After the first twenty yards, the boxes seem to gain about a pound a yard for the rest of the haul. By a quarter mile, I was cursing bees, cursing the July sun, cursing aesthetics, and wishing I would have taken up needlepoint. Of course that year was the best harvest I ever recorded, at well over two hundred pounds per hive. I had about fifteen hives by that time. You do the math. Even at this remove, I'm not sure I'm up to it.
When hives are arranged to fulfill more pragmatic considerations, the work is still hard: there is much lifting, obviously, and you also, at least at first, have to worry about stings. When I was a beginner, I suited up each time I worked bees, wearing the hat, veil, and zipped overalls familiar to most anyone who has evere seen a public television program on the honeybee. As I became more familiar with them, and used to the stings, I began wearing far less protective attire, usually just cutoffs and no shirt, base ball cap atop my head to keep bees out of my hair (they don't like brunettes: brown hair reminds them of bears and skunks), and sometimes leather gloves if the bees were particularly feisty. I switched to this outfit because I had learned several important lessons. The first is that in June, July, and August, the sun can be hot, especially when you're covered head to foot in canvas overalls, and most especially when you're carrying hundred pound boxes over an aesthetic quarter mile. The second is that stings really aren't so bad: they hurt less than a pinch (unless you get stung inside your nose or on your anus, each of which happened once, which is once more than I would prefer to remember), and by now they cause me to swell far less than a mosquito bite. Stung on the wrist, five minutes later I would be hard-pressed to tell you which wrist it was.
The third lesson ties into everything I've been writing about in this book. It was the bees who—along with high jumping— provided me my first real somatic understanding of cooperation and compliance: work against bees and they sting; work with them as they work with themselves and they reward you with honey, joy, and sore muscles.
Watching them, listening to them, feeling their stings when they're angry or the delicate touch of their feet (their pretarsi, in entomology-speak) when they contentedly walk across the back of your hand, seeing the queen—long and slender—move slowly from cell to cell of the honeycomb as she lays more than her own weight in eggs every day, hearing the drones bumble from hive to hive, looking closely at the excited tail wagging and circular dances of scouts who've found new food and want to share these secrets with their sisters, you learn in time that beehives have their own rhythms and personalities. If you