The Flow

Colony

Chapter 10: The Flow

The clover opened on the third of June. Not all at once — clover does not open all at once — but in the way that clover opens, which is gradually, field by field, the white heads appearing in the grass seed fields and the pastures and the road shoulders and the lawns of the houses along the county road, the small white globes that were not one flower but many flowers, each head a cluster of individual florets arranged in a sphere, each floret producing a droplet of nectar at its base, and the bees found the nectar and the bees came and the flow began.

The flow was the season's pivot. Everything before the flow — the winter checks, the spring inspections, the queen assessments, the pollination moves, the swarm management, the feeding, the treating, the mending of equipment and the ordering of supplies and the hundred small tasks of preparation — everything before the flow was prologue. The flow was the text. The flow was the thing the colonies had been building toward since February, the event that all the population growth and comb construction and pollen storage had anticipated, the peak of the beekeeping year, the weeks when the nectar was abundant and the bees were numerous and the supers filled with honey and the beekeeper's job shifted from management to accommodation — making room, adding boxes, giving the bees space to do the thing they did when the environment provided, which was produce, which was convert nectar into honey with an efficiency and a single-mindedness that Meg had admired for thirty years and that she still admired, because the admiration was not diminished by familiarity, was deepened by it, the way a musician's admiration for a piece of music deepens with each performance, the complexity revealing itself incrementally, the beauty growing more specific with each exposure.

Meg walked the home apiary in the morning. The sound was different. The sound of a hive during the flow was different from any other time — a deeper hum, a busier frequency, the sound of a colony at full employment, every bee doing something, the foragers leaving and returning in the continuous stream that was visible at the entrance, the house bees inside receiving the nectar from the foragers' mouths and processing it, passing it from bee to bee, each pass reducing the moisture content, the enzymes in the bees' hypopharyngeal glands — invertase, diastase, glucose oxidase — breaking down the sucrose into glucose and fructose, the simple sugars that would not ferment, that would remain stable, that would last, because honey lasted, honey was the only food that did not spoil, that archaeologists had found in Egyptian tombs still edible after three thousand years, and the lasting was the point, the lasting was the function, the honey was the colony's insurance against the dearth, against the winter, against the months when nothing bloomed and the colony lived on what it had stored, and the storing was happening now, in June, in the flow, the bees converting the valley's nectar into the amber liquid that Meg would harvest in August and bottle and sell and that the colony needed to survive and that Meg's livelihood depended on, the covenant of the beekeeper and the colony, the shared interest in the surplus.

She added supers. A honey super was a box — a medium-depth box, six and five-eighths inches tall, holding ten frames of comb — that Meg placed on top of the brood boxes, separated by a queen excluder, a flat grid of metal wires spaced precisely so that workers could pass through but the queen could not, her larger thorax unable to squeeze between the wires, the excluder confining the queen to the lower boxes where she laid her eggs and keeping the honey supers free of brood, because honey with brood in it was not marketable, was not the clean amber product that the jars in Meg's market booth contained, was not what the customer expected when they bought a jar of Hollis Apiaries Willamette Valley Wildflower Honey.

Each super, when full, would weigh approximately forty pounds — the weight of the honey plus the weight of the wax comb plus the weight of the wooden box and frames, and a strong colony during a good flow could fill a super in a week, and Meg would add a second super on top of the first and a third on top of the second, the hive growing taller as the season progressed, the tower of boxes a visible indicator of the colony's productivity, and Meg read the towers the way a farmer read the height of the corn, as a measure of the season's generosity, of the rainfall and the temperature and the bloom and the mysterious convergence of conditions that produced a good year or a poor year, the convergence that the beekeeper could observe but could not control, the weather being the one variable that no amount of skill or preparation could manage.

She suited up and worked through the home apiary, lifting the lids of each hive, assessing the progress of the supers she had added the previous week. The first hive: the super was half-drawn, the bees building comb on the foundation, the white wax fresh and fragrant, the cells beginning to receive nectar, the nectar glistening in the cells like liquid light, the surface tension of the nectar holding it in the hexagonal cups, and the bees would fan it, standing at the cell's edge and vibrating their wings to move air across the surface, evaporating the moisture, reducing the nectar's water content from approximately seventy percent to approximately eighteen percent, and at eighteen percent the nectar was honey, was chemically stable, was ready to be capped, and the bees would cap it, building a thin lid of wax over each full cell, sealing the honey in, and the capped frame was the beekeeper's goal, the frame of capped honey being the unit of harvest, the thing Meg would pull from the hive in August and carry to the honey house and extract and bottle.

The second hive: the super was nearly full. This colony was strong, its population dense, its foraging force enormous, and the bees had been drawing comb and filling cells and capping honey at a rate that told Meg this colony was working a rich source — probably the clover in the McKenzie field half a mile south, the twelve-acre field of white Dutch clover that was one of Meg's best honey sources, the field that the McKenzies planted as a cover crop and that they allowed to bloom through June and July before mowing it, and the clover honey from that field was light, clear, mild, the honey that sold first at the farmer's market, the honey that people tasted and bought, the honey that tasted the way people expected honey to taste, sweet and floral and uncomplicated, the honey of postcards and memory and the idea of honey as a thing from a simpler time, though there was nothing simple about it, nothing simple about the process that converted a clover floret's nectar into a jar of honey, the process that involved the flower's nectary glands and the bee's proboscis and the bee's honey stomach and the house bee's mouth and the hypopharyngeal gland's enzymes and the wing-fanning evaporation and the wax-capping and the beekeeper's extraction, the chain of biological and mechanical events that linked the field to the jar, the flower to the table, the clover to the toast.

Meg added a second super to this hive. She lifted the full super to check its weight — heavy, thirty-five pounds at least, nearly ready — and set it back and placed the new super on top, the frames of foundation ready for the bees to draw, the empty cells ready for the nectar that the foragers were bringing in at a rate that would fill this super too, would fill it and require a third, the colony's productivity outpacing Meg's ability to add space, the classic problem of the flow: the bees worked faster than the beekeeper could accommodate.

She moved through the apiary, hive by hive. The work was repetitive, physical, satisfying in the way that repetitive physical work was satisfying — the satisfaction of the body being used, the satisfaction of the task being completed, the satisfaction of the visible result, the supers growing heavier, the comb being drawn, the honey accumulating, the season expressing itself in the weight of the boxes and the color of the wax and the smell of the apiary, which during the flow was the smell of honey being made, the warm sweet smell of nectar being processed, the smell that drifted from the hives in the afternoon heat and that Meg could detect from the driveway, from the kitchen, from the bed at night with the windows open, the smell of the flow, the smell of the valley converting sunlight and water and soil into sugar and the bees converting sugar into honey and the honey being the currency of the relationship between the flower and the bee, the payment for pollination, the wage of the work.

Luz arrived at eight. She had been working with Meg for six weeks now, and the six weeks had changed her — not changed her personality, not changed who she was, but changed her body, her hands, her movement in the apiary. She moved differently. She moved with less hesitation, less caution, less of the careful deliberateness of a person thinking about each action before performing it and more of the fluid efficiency of a person whose body had begun to absorb the routine, whose hands had begun to know where the hive tool should go and how the frame should be held and when the smoker should be pumped without the mind having to direct the decision. She was not yet at Meg's level — not yet at the level where the body and the hive were in the same rhythm, the level where the beekeeper's movements were so calibrated to the colony's tolerance that the inspection felt like a conversation rather than an intrusion — but she was getting there, and the getting-there was visible, was the thing Meg watched with the same attention she watched the brood pattern, the same diagnostic eye, the assessment of progress, the reading of development.

"The flow is on," Meg said, when Luz walked up to the first hive and saw the traffic at the entrance, the thick stream of foragers coming and going, the landing board crowded with bees, the air above the hive dense with flight paths.

"I can hear it," Luz said. "It's louder."

"It's louder because there are more bees flying. More foragers means more wing beats means more sound. But it's also louder because the house bees are fanning harder. They're evaporating the nectar. The fanning creates airflow through the hive and the airflow is audible."

"So the sound of the flow is literally the sound of honey being made."

"Yes."

They worked the apiaries. Meg drove and Luz drove and they leapfrogged between sites, meeting at each apiary, working the hives together, adding supers, assessing populations, checking queens. The valley was in bloom. The roadsides were white with clover and yellow with wild mustard and purple with vetch, the color layered into the landscape like paint on a palette, and the bees were in all of it, the foragers from Meg's two hundred hives — and from the feral colonies in the old barns and the hollow trees and the wall cavities of the houses where bees lived unseen and unmanaged, the wild population that supplemented the managed population and that shared the forage and the genetics and the diseases, the viral and parasitic load that moved between managed and feral colonies through the shared resource of the flowers, the drones from feral colonies mating with Meg's virgin queens, the genetics of the valley's bees a blend of managed and wild, of selected and unselected, of the commercial stock Meg purchased and the unknown stock that lived in the walls and the trees and that had been living there for decades, adapted, surviving, doing the thing that bees did without a beekeeper.

At the Johansson apiary, the grass seed farm, the colonies were booming. The grass seed fields did not produce nectar — grass was wind-pollinated, did not need bees — but the field margins were rich with clover and blackberry and the wild plants that grew in the fence rows and the drainage ditches and the edges of the landscape that industrial agriculture had not reached, the marginal land that was the best land for bees, the uncultivated, unsprayed, unfertilized land where the wildflowers grew according to their own preference and bloomed according to their own schedule and produced nectar that the bees found and harvested and turned into the honey that Meg labeled "wildflower" because it was, because it came from wild flowers, from the unmanaged flora of the valley's edges.

At the Morrison apiary, the blueberry farm, the blueberry bloom was over and the colonies were shifting to the surrounding forage — the clover in the adjacent pastures, the blackberry in the hedgerows, the second bloom of the wild radish that grew in the disturbed soil of the farm roads. The colonies were strong, seven or eight frames of bees in each lower box, the supers drawing out, the honey light-colored, the characteristic color of clover honey, almost clear, the color of white wine, the color that customers associated with premium honey and that Meg associated with clover, with June, with the flow, with the particular three or four weeks when the clover was at its peak and the bees were at their peak and the two peaks coincided and the honey poured in and the supers filled and the towers grew and the work was the work she loved most, the work of the flow, the work of abundance.

She loved the flow. She did not say this. She did not think the word "love" in connection with her work because the word seemed insufficient, seemed to belong to a register of emotion that did not match the thing she felt, which was not the love of pleasure but the love of alignment, the feeling of a person whose purpose and whose practice and whose daily labor were all the same thing, the feeling of being the organism doing the thing the organism was built to do, and the feeling was rare, she knew — most people did not feel it, most people worked because work was required and the requirement was economic and the economy was indifferent to whether the worker loved the work or merely performed it, and Meg was aware that her love for the work was a privilege, a form of wealth that did not show up on a balance sheet, that could not be deposited in a bank, that was hers in the way that the queen's laying was the queen's — specific, biological, the expression of a nature that could not be separated from the organism that possessed it.

The flow continued through June. The days grew long — sixteen hours of light at the solstice, sixteen hours in which the bees could fly, though they did not fly all sixteen, did not fly in the cool of early morning or the fading of late evening, but flew in the ten or twelve hours of warmth and light that the day's center provided, and in those hours they brought in nectar at a rate that Meg measured not by weighing but by lifting, the daily lift of the super that told her how much weight had been added since yesterday, the two or three or five pounds that indicated a good day or a great day or a day of extraordinary production, the days when the weather and the bloom and the colony's strength aligned and the honey came in faster than Meg could process the information, the abundance overwhelming the record-keeping, the flow exceeding the capacity of the beekeeper's attention, and Meg let it exceed her, let the flow be the flow, let the bees do the thing they did without trying to measure every gram, because the measurement would come later, at harvest, when the supers were pulled and the honey was extracted and the yield was weighed and the number was the number, and the number would tell her whether the season was good.

The evenings were long. The light lasted until nine, the summer light of the Willamette Valley, the golden light that came through the trees and fell across the apiary and the house and the garden that Meg had not planted and the lawn that was clover and the driveway that was gravel and the truck that was sticky with propolis, and in this light Meg sat on the porch with a beer and watched the hives and listened to the hum and felt the tiredness that was the good tiredness, the earned tiredness, and the evening was not lonely.

This was new.

The evening was not lonely because Luz had been there all day, because Luz's presence had filled the day with the particular quality that another person's presence provides, the quality of being witnessed, of being not alone in the work, of having someone to hand a frame to, to say "Look at this brood pattern" to, to eat lunch beside on the tailgate of the truck, to drive behind on the county road, to see in the rearview mirror, and the quality lingered into the evening the way the smell of smoke lingered in the hair after a day in the apiary, the presence persisting after the person had gone.

Meg sat on the porch and she held her beer and she felt the lingering and she did not name it and she did not examine it and she let it be what it was, which was warmth, which was the internal equivalent of the flow, the nectar of something coming in, something being deposited, something beginning to accumulate in the cells of whatever organ held the thing that Meg did not name, and the accumulation was slow, was incremental, was the daily addition of a few pounds that would not be measured until the harvest, whenever the harvest was, and the harvest was not now, and the now was the flow, and the flow was enough.

The blackberry bloomed in the last week of June. The Himalayan blackberry, Rubus armeniacus, the invasive species that had conquered the Willamette Valley's disturbed land, the thorny impenetrable thickets that grew along every road and every creek and every fence line and every abandoned lot, the plant that farmers cursed and beekeepers blessed because the blackberry bloom was the second major nectar source of the season, coming after the clover and overlapping with it, the two sources together producing the wildflower honey that was Meg's product, the blend of clover sweetness and blackberry depth, the honey that was lighter when the clover dominated and darker when the blackberry dominated and that varied from year to year and from apiary to apiary because the forage varied, because the landscape varied, because the bees visited what was available and what was available depended on where they were and what had bloomed and what had rained and what had been mowed and what had been sprayed, and the variation was the terroir, was the honey's expression of the specific landscape from which it came, the way wine expressed its vineyard and cheese expressed its pasture.

The supers filled. The towers grew. The honey house waited. The season was at its peak. The flow was the thing. And Meg was in it, was part of it, was the beekeeper in the flow the way the forager was in the flow, carrying the nectar, doing the work, converting the season into something that would last, something that would remain after the flowers were gone and the bees were clustered and the valley was brown and the rain had come and the year was over, the honey in the jar on the shelf, the season preserved, the flow made permanent, the abundance held.