Deadout

Colony

Chapter 1: Deadout

The first hive she opened was the one nearest the fence line, the one she had worried about since October, the one whose population had looked thin at the last inspection when the maples were still holding their leaves and the air smelled of rot and fermentation and the coming cold. She had given them a patty of pollen substitute and a gallon of two-to-one syrup and she had reduced the entrance with a wooden block and she had said, aloud, the way she always spoke to her bees, "Get through it," and she had closed the lid and walked back to the truck with the smoker still trailing a thin line of white from the spout and the light going copper through the filberts and she had not opened that hive again until now, February, the morning cold enough that her breath made shapes in front of her face and the grass in the home apiary still white with frost where the shadow of the barn lay across it like a hand.

She set down the hive tool and the smoker. She did not light the smoker. There was no need to calm bees that were not alive.

The telescoping cover came off with a crack of propolis, that resinous cement the bees make from tree sap, and beneath it the inner cover, and beneath that the top bars of the frames, and on the top bars and between the top bars and filling the spaces where in a living hive ten thousand bees would be moving in the organized chaos that looks like chaos only to people who have not learned to read it, there was stillness. There was the particular stillness of a deadout, which is different from the stillness of an empty box because it is not empty. It is full. It is full of dead bees.

They were clustered on the center frames, as they would have been in life. The winter cluster: the bees draw together as the temperature drops, forming a sphere of bodies around the queen, the outer bees interlocking their legs and vibrating their thoracic muscles to generate heat, the inner bees warm and fed, the whole structure moving slowly across the frames as they eat through their stores, a living organism that contracts in cold and expands in warmth and survives by the collective refusal to let any individual be the one who freezes. But this cluster had stopped. The bees were locked in the formation they had held when the cold overwhelmed them, their bodies dry and light, their wings folded, their legs still gripping the wax cells they had been eating from when the temperature dropped below the threshold that even collective vibration could not overcome. The cluster had shrunk too small. The population had been too thin. The queen had stopped laying too early in the fall, or the mites had been worse than Meg's September count had indicated, or the stores had not been sufficient, or all of these things, because a deadout is rarely one thing. A deadout is an accumulation.

Meg pulled a frame. The bees came with it, attached to the comb in the positions of their dying, and she held the frame in the February light and looked at them the way she had looked at dead bees for thirty years, which was carefully and without sentiment but not without feeling, because the absence of sentiment is not the absence of feeling, and Meg Hollis had feelings about her bees that she could not have articulated and did not try to articulate and would not have articulated even if she could, because articulation was not what Meg did with feeling. What Meg did with feeling was work.

She scraped the frame with the hive tool. The dead bees fell into the grass. She scraped the next frame and the next, methodical, thorough, the motion of her wrist the same motion her grandmother had taught her when she was eleven years old and her grandmother's hands were already gnarled with the arthritis that would eventually make her unable to hold a frame at all, and her grandmother had said, scraping dead bees from a frame in an apiary that no longer existed on a farm that had been sold to a developer who had built fourteen houses on the land where three hundred colonies had once sat in rows along the fence line facing southeast the way hives should face, catching the morning sun, her grandmother had said: "You clean the box. You scrape the frames. You assess the comb. And then you decide: is this equipment worth using again, or has it gone too far?" Her grandmother had been talking about beekeeping. Her grandmother had always been talking about beekeeping. It was only later, decades later, that Meg understood her grandmother had also been talking about everything else.

The comb on several frames was dark, almost black, the accumulation of years of brood-rearing, each generation of bees leaving behind a thin cocoon in the cell from which it emerged, the cells growing incrementally smaller with each cycle, the comb growing darker and heavier and eventually needing to be replaced because the cells become too small for healthy brood development. Meg set these frames aside for the wax melter. She kept the frames with lighter comb, the ones that could be reused. She stacked the boxes — two deeps, the standard Langstroth configuration — and moved to the next hive.

The second hive was alive.

She could tell before she opened it. The sound. A living hive in February makes a sound that is audible if you put your ear to the side of the box, a low collective vibration, not quite a hum, more fundamental than a hum, the sound of thousands of metabolisms working in concert to maintain a temperature of approximately ninety-three degrees at the center of the cluster while the outside air is thirty-one degrees, which is a feat of thermoregulation that no individual bee could accomplish and that the colony accomplishes without discussion, without planning, without any mechanism that could be called decision-making in the way humans use that term, but rather through the emergent behavior of individuals following simple rules: if you are cold, move toward the center; if you are warm, move toward the outside; vibrate your muscles; eat honey; keep the queen alive.

Meg put her ear to the box. She heard them. She moved on.

The third hive was dead. Another deadout. This one had starved — she could tell by the position of the cluster, high in the box, pressed against the inner cover, the bees headfirst in the cells in the final posture of a bee that has eaten the last of the honey within reach and has frozen before it could move the cluster to a new section of comb. There was honey in the hive, three frames of capped honey on the far side of the box, but the cluster had been unable to reach it. The cold had been too severe for the cluster to break apart and reform around the distant frames. They had starved with food six inches away. This was common. This was one of the particular cruelties of bee biology that Meg had learned not to think of as cruel because cruelty requires intent and biology does not have intent, biology has mechanics, and the mechanic here was simple: a cluster of bees in winter cannot move through cold air. The air between the cluster and the honey might as well have been a wall. They ate what was beside them. When it was gone, they died.

Meg scraped the frames. She noted it in the log she kept in a composition notebook, the same brand of notebook she had used for fifteen years, the marbled black-and-white cover, the stitched binding, the ruled pages filled with her handwriting, which was small and precise and would have been called neat if neatness were the right word, but it was not neatness, it was economy — Meg wrote the way she worked, using exactly as much as was needed and no more.

Hive 3: deadout, starvation. Cluster too small to bridge to stores. Three frames capped honey remaining. Equipment salvageable. Feb 14.

She moved through the home apiary. Twelve hives here, on the property behind the house, the property she and Gavin had bought eighteen years ago when they moved from Portland because Gavin wanted space for his landscape architecture practice and Meg wanted space for bees and they had both wanted space, period, though they had not said it that way, had not said "we need space from each other," had said "we need space," and the elision was the thing, the unspoken object of the preposition, and the elision had lasted sixteen years until Gavin made it explicit by leaving.

Nine hives alive. Three dead.

Twenty-five percent winter loss. The national average was around forty percent. Meg's losses were typically lower — she was careful, she monitored mites, she fed adequately, she selected for hygienic behavior in her queens. But twenty-five percent was not nothing. Three colonies gone. Three boxes to clean, three sets of frames to scrape or melt, three populations to replace if she wanted to maintain her numbers, and she needed to maintain her numbers because her pollination contracts were based on colony count and she had committed two hundred hives to the season's pollination schedule and she had started the winter with two hundred and twelve and if the other apiaries had similar losses she would be short and being short meant either purchasing package bees from California or splitting her strongest colonies early and hoping the splits built up in time for the almond and cherry and hazelnut and blueberry pollination that began in earnest in late March and did not end until the blackberries finished in July.

She carried the scraped frames to the truck. Her truck was a 2012 Ford F-250, white, the bed permanently sticky with propolis and wax and the faint sweetness of spilled syrup. It smelled like a truck that had been used for bees for twelve years. It smelled like work.

The house was visible from the home apiary, across the gravel drive and the patch of lawn that Gavin had maintained with the precision of a man who designed landscapes for a living and that Meg had let go to clover and dandelion because clover and dandelion were bee forage and because she did not care about lawns and because there was no one to care about lawns for. The house was a craftsman bungalow, 1927, three bedrooms, one bathroom, a kitchen that had been remodeled in 2014 with money from a good honey year, the cabinets that Gavin had designed and that a carpenter in Sheridan had built and that were the only thing Gavin had made that Meg looked at every day without feeling the complicated absence that she felt when she looked at the garden he had designed, which she had also let go, or the bookshelves he had built in the living room, which still held his books on landscape architecture and Japanese garden design and Pacific Northwest native plants, books he had not taken when he left, books whose presence on the shelves was a particular kind of haunting, the haunting of objects that belong to someone who is not dead but is not here, objects that cannot be grieved because the person is alive, objects that exist in the liminal state between possession and abandonment, and Meg had not moved them, had not boxed them, had not touched them, because touching them would be a decision and she had not yet made the decision and the not-making was itself a decision but it did not feel like one, it felt like waiting, it felt like the held breath before the season turns.

Inside the house, the kitchen. One plate on the counter, rinsed, not yet put away. One mug. One fork, one knife. The mathematics of a single life, which are the most economical mathematics, which are the mathematics of a hive that has lost its queen and has not yet raised a new one, which is to say the mathematics of decline, of a population that is shrinking rather than growing, of a system that is consuming its stores without replenishing them. Meg did not think in these terms. Meg did not compare her life to her hives. The comparison existed without her thinking it, the way the hum of a hive exists without any individual bee deciding to hum.

She made coffee. She sat at the kitchen table, which was a farmhouse table that she had bought at an estate sale in Amity twelve years ago and that bore the marks of twelve years of hive tool sharpening and frame assembly and wax rendering and honey bottling and the general accumulation of a life lived in close proximity to bees, which is to say a life lived with the residue of bees on every surface, propolis on the doorknobs, wax on the countertops, the faint persistent sweetness of honey in the air of every room, a sweetness that visitors noticed and commented on and that Meg no longer smelled because it was the smell of her life and you do not smell your own life, you live in it.

The coffee was black. She drank it looking out the window at the apiary, at the twelve boxes — nine alive, three dead — arranged in two rows along the fence line, each box painted a different color, not for aesthetics but for navigation. Bees orient by color and position. Identical boxes in a row cause drift — bees returning from foraging enter the wrong hive. Different colors reduce drift. Meg's hives were blue, green, yellow, white, pale purple, a rotation that repeated, and the dead hives were blue, yellow, and white, the first, the fourth, the seventh, which meant nothing, which was not a pattern, but which Meg noted because she noted everything about her bees and the noting was part of the practice and the practice was the thing that held her days together, the scaffolding of routine that structured a life that might otherwise have no structure, because Gavin had been a kind of structure, not the structure of a hive — purposeful, efficient, organized around a biological imperative — but the structure of habit, of another person's rhythms layered onto your own, of breakfast for two and dinner for two and the evening conversation that is not really conversation but is the vocalized version of proximity, the sounds two people make to confirm that they are both still here, and when one person stops being here the sounds stop and the silence is not peaceful, the silence is structural, the silence is the absence of a load-bearing wall, and you do not know a wall is load-bearing until it is gone and the ceiling sags and you realize that what you thought was decorative was functional, what you thought was optional was essential, what you thought you could live without was the thing that was holding the roof up.

Meg finished her coffee. She rinsed the mug and set it beside the plate. She put on her jacket and her boots and went back outside.

She had eleven more apiaries to check. Two hundred hives across the valley, placed on farms and orchards and along field edges where the forage was good and the landowners were agreeable and the access roads were passable even in the mud of February. She would drive to each apiary and open each hive and find the living and the dead and she would note them in the composition notebook and she would scrape the dead and assess the living and she would do this alone because she had always done this alone, even when Gavin was here, because Gavin did not work the bees. Gavin had been allergic. Not severely — a localized reaction, the swelling and heat of a normal sting magnified into something that made his hand or arm balloon for days — but enough that he had stayed away from the hives, had been a beekeeper's husband without being a beekeeper, had lived in a house that smelled of honey without ever opening a hive. This had not been a problem. This had been a fact. It had become a problem only in retrospect, only when Meg looked back and saw that the distance between Gavin and the bees had been a template for the distance between Gavin and everything else that mattered to her, that his allergy had been convenient, that it had given him a reason to stand at the edge of her life's work and observe it without participating in it, and she had let him stand there, had not asked him to come closer, had not wanted him closer, and the not-wanting was the thing, the admission she had not yet made to herself, the deadout she had not yet opened.

The second apiary was on the Johansson property, a grass seed farm four miles south, and she drove there on the county road that followed Panther Creek, the road lined with oaks that were bare and gray and would not leaf out until April, and the fields on either side were winter wheat, green and flat, the Willamette Valley in February looking like what it was, which was one of the most productive agricultural valleys in the world, a place where the climate and the soil conspired to grow anything — grass seed, hazelnuts, wine grapes, berries, hops, nursery stock, Christmas trees, and the crops that grew only because bees pollinated them, which was most of the crops, which was the fact that sustained Meg's livelihood, the simple biological dependency: without bees, the food does not grow. Without pollination, the seed does not set. Without the transfer of pollen from anther to stigma, the flower is decorative, the orchard is ornamental, the field is a garden that produces nothing.

At the Johansson apiary she found two more deadouts in twenty hives. She scraped them. She noted them. She checked the living hives by feel — the weight of the box when she tipped it told her about their stores, and a light box was a box that needed feeding, and she would come back with syrup, one-to-one in February to stimulate the queen's laying, because the queen responds to incoming food by increasing her egg production, and the colony needs a growing population to be ready for the first pollination contracts in March.

She drove to the next apiary, and the next.

By the end of the day she had checked sixty hives across four apiaries. Eleven deadouts. Forty-nine alive. An eighteen percent loss so far, which was better than the average, which was good, which was the result of thirty years of practice and attention and the particular form of care that beekeeping requires, which is not the care of affection — you do not pet a bee, you do not name a bee, you do not bond with a bee — but the care of stewardship, the care of a person who has been entrusted with organisms whose survival depends on her decisions and whose decisions she cannot override, because bees do what bees do and the beekeeper's job is not to control the colony but to provide the conditions in which the colony can do what it does, which is survive, which is produce, which is reproduce, which is persist.

Meg drove home in the late afternoon. The light was thin and blue, the sun already behind the coast range, the valley in shadow. She parked the truck. She walked past the home apiary. She did not stop. She went inside. She turned on the kitchen light. She made dinner — rice, black beans, the hot sauce Gavin had liked and that she had continued to buy because it was the hot sauce in the cupboard and changing hot sauces was not a thing she had the energy to do, and the not-changing was not loyalty, was not sentiment, was not the preservation of a habit for the sake of memory, was just inertia, was just the particular gravity of objects that remain in the places where someone put them and that no one has moved because no one has had a reason to move them that is stronger than the reason to leave them where they are.

She ate standing at the counter. She rinsed the plate. She went to bed.

The house was quiet. The house had been quiet for two years. The quiet of the house was not the quiet of the deadout — it was not the quiet of failure, not the quiet of a system that had collapsed. It was the quiet of reduction. The quiet of a space that had held two people and now held one, and the space did not know the difference, the walls did not know, the rooms did not know, but the person knew, and the knowing was the hum, the low vibration that was always present, the sound of a single metabolism in a space designed for two, and Meg heard it the way she heard her bees, not with attention but with the constant background awareness of a sound that has become the sound of your life.

She slept. Outside, in the apiary, nine colonies clustered in the dark, vibrating, eating, keeping their queens alive, doing the work that would continue through the night and into the morning and into the spring and into the season that was coming, the season of queens and smoke and the careful opening of boxes to see what had survived and what had not, to assess, to note, to scrape the dead and tend the living and begin again, because beginning again was what beekeeping was, and what February was, and what the morning would be, and what Meg would do when she woke, because Meg always woke, because Meg was alive, and the living get up and the living do the work and the work is the thing, the work has always been the thing, and the work would be there in the morning the way the bees would be there in the morning, waiting for her, needing her, not with the need of affection but with the need of biology, the impersonal essential need of organisms whose survival depended on a woman who rose in the dark and lit a smoker and opened a box and looked inside to see what was there.