The Hive That Sings

Colony

Chapter 13: The Hive That Sings

Hive number thirty-seven was at the Morrison apiary, third row, second from the end, painted pale green, the green of the international queen-marking year ending in 4 or 9, and the color was coincidence -- Meg did not paint hives to match the queen's year -- but the coincidence pleased her in the small way that coincidences pleased people who noticed patterns, and Meg noticed patterns because noticing patterns was the work, the work of the beekeeper being the work of the pattern-reader, the person who looked at the frame and saw the tight oval brood pattern and knew the queen was good, or saw the scattered shotgun pattern and knew the queen was failing, or saw the pattern at hive thirty-seven and knew that this colony was different, was exceptional, was the colony that every other colony in the operation was measured against.

She had been measuring against thirty-seven for four years.

The queen was a 2022 queen, marked yellow, purchased from the breeder in Chico as a mated queen in a cage with a candy plug, introduced to a split in April of that year, accepted by the colony without incident -- no balling, no rejection, no violence at the cage, the colony accepting the stranger queen's pheromone through the mesh and eating through the candy plug and releasing her and the queen beginning to lay within forty-eight hours of release, the brood pattern tight from the first frame, the genetics expressing themselves immediately, the queen announcing herself through the quality of her work the way a musician announced herself through the quality of her playing, the first notes telling you everything, the first frames telling Meg everything.

The queen was prolific. This was the first thing. She laid at a rate that exceeded any queen Meg had kept -- fifteen hundred eggs a day at peak, which was not unusual for a healthy queen, but her peak lasted longer, the laying rate sustained through April and May and June and into July when other queens began to slow, her ovaries producing eggs with the consistency of a machine and the specificity of a living thing, each egg placed in its cell with the precision that the brood pattern revealed, the oval tight, the gaps few, the cells filled edge to edge, the pattern that was the queen's signature, the way handwriting was a person's signature, the laying being the queen's expression of herself, and this queen expressed herself with a fluency that Meg had seen in textbooks but had rarely seen in her own hives.

The queen was calm. This was the second thing. The genetics she carried -- Italian stock, selected for gentleness over generations by the breeder whose selection criteria included temperament alongside productivity, the breeder who tested each queen's offspring for defensive behavior and who culled the lines that stung excessively and who propagated the lines that tolerated inspection without aggression -- the genetics expressed themselves in the colony's behavior at every inspection. Meg could open hive thirty-seven without smoke. She did not open it without smoke because the smoker was part of the practice, because the practice was the practice regardless of the colony's temperament, but she could have. The bees stayed on the frames. The bees did not boil up when the cover came off. The bees did not pursue when the hive was closed. The colony operated at a frequency that was lower, steadier, calmer than any other colony in Meg's operation, the frequency that Meg had begun to call, in her own mind and only in her own mind, the hive's singing.

The singing was not literal. The singing was the hum, the specific hum of a colony whose population was large and whose queen was strong and whose pheromone was saturating the population and whose behavior was organized and whose comb was drawn and whose stores were sufficient and whose mites were managed and whose brood was healthy -- the hum of a colony in which everything was working, everything aligned, the biological equivalent of a machine running without friction, the sound of a system at its optimal state, and the sound was different from the hum of other colonies the way the sound of a well-tuned engine was different from the sound of an engine that was running but not well, the difference subtle, detectable only by the ear that had been listening long enough to distinguish the frequencies, and Meg's ear had been listening for thirty years and could hear the difference, could stand in the Morrison apiary and identify thirty-seven by its sound before she reached the hive, the hum that was the signature, the acoustic identity of a colony that was doing everything right.

Meg showed Luz.

It was a morning in late May, the cherry bloom finished, the clover beginning, the colonies at the Morrison apiary building toward their peak populations, the supers going on, the season accelerating toward the flow. Meg had been working with Luz for eight weeks. Luz had learned the basics -- the smoker, the frame handling, the queen-finding, the brood-pattern reading -- and was now in the phase of learning that Meg thought of as calibration, the phase when the apprentice began to distinguish not just the categories (good queen, bad queen, strong colony, weak colony) but the gradations within the categories, the spectrum from adequate to good to excellent that was the finer resolution of the beekeeper's diagnostic eye.

"Listen," Meg said.

They were standing ten feet from hive thirty-seven. They had not suited up yet. They had not lit the smoker. They were standing in the apiary in the morning light, the blueberry field visible beyond the fence, the Coast Range blue on the horizon, and Meg said "listen" and Luz listened.

"Hear it?"

"I hear all of them."

"Listen to this one. Thirty-seven. Listen to the pitch. Listen to the steadiness."

Luz listened. Meg watched Luz listen -- the tilt of the head, the focus, the effort of a person trying to hear a distinction she had not been trained to hear, the ear searching for the frequency that Meg's ear had found years ago and that Meg could not describe because the description was inadequate, the words not having the resolution that the ear had, the ear being able to distinguish what the words could not articulate.

"It's lower," Luz said. "Steadier. The others have -- fluctuations. This one is constant."

"This is what a strong colony sounds like when everything is right. This is the standard. This is what you measure the others against."

They suited up. They opened thirty-seven. The bees received them with the equanimity that the genetics provided, the workers continuing their work as Meg lifted the frames, the bees walking across the comb surface without the nervous running that agitated colonies displayed, the behavior of a population that was secure in its queen, secure in its stores, secure in its strength, the security being the pheromone, the queen's signal strong enough to saturate a population of fifty thousand, the signal saying with chemical authority: I am here, I am laying, the colony is whole, there is no reason to be afraid.

Meg pulled the fourth frame. The brood pattern. She held it up for Luz and the holding was the showing and the showing was the lesson and the lesson was: look at this. Remember this. This is what it looks like when the queen is doing everything right.

The oval of capped brood was solid. Not tight -- tight implied compression, constraint. Solid. The cells filled edge to edge across the frame's center, the cappings uniform in color and texture, the slight convexity of each cap identical to the next, the uniformity that said: every egg was fertilized, every larva developed normally, every pupa is healthy, the queen's genetics and the colony's care producing the result that the brood pattern displayed, the result that was the colony's report card, the colony's self-assessment, the visual output of a biological process that was, in this colony, operating at its highest level.

"Count the empty cells," Meg said.

Luz scanned the brood oval. She counted. "Three," she said. "In the whole pattern. Three empty cells."

"Three. In a frame that holds approximately six thousand cells. Three cells where the queen did not lay, or where the larva did not develop, or where the workers detected a problem and removed the developing bee. Three out of six thousand. That's this queen. That's what this queen does."

The frame contained more than the brood. Above the brood oval, the arc of pollen -- cells packed with the compacted pollen that the foragers had brought in and that the house bees had tamped into the cells with their heads, the pollen in bands of color, the yellow of the dandelion beside the gray-white of the fruit bloom beside the orange of the maple, the colors of the valley's spring laid into the comb like strata in a rock face, each band a record of what had been blooming when the pollen was collected, the comb a history of the season written in color and protein. Above the pollen, the crescent of capped honey, the golden caps lighter than the brood caps, the honey that the colony stored in the upper portion of every brood frame, the immediate reserve, the emergency supply that was always within reach of the cluster, always available, the colony's pantry stocked against the contingency of rain, of cold, of the dearth that could arrive without warning.

Brood, pollen, honey. The concentric arrangement. The natural architecture that the colony built on every frame, the arrangement that optimized the nurse bees' access to both the larvae they tended and the food they needed to tend them, the arrangement that no bee designed and no bee planned and that emerged from the individual behaviors of thousands of bees each doing the thing that made sense in their immediate vicinity, the local decisions producing the global pattern, the pattern that Meg showed Luz and that Luz saw and that the seeing was the calibration, the setting of the standard.

"This is the benchmark," Meg said. "When you inspect a colony and you're not sure if the queen is good enough, you think about this frame. You compare. Is the pattern this solid? Are the gaps this few? Is the arrangement this clean? If yes, the queen is good. If no, the queen may be adequate, may be acceptable, may be sufficient for now, but the queen is not this."

Luz held the frame. She held it the way she held everything in the apiary now -- with the two-handed grip, the frame tilted toward her body, the hold that was secure without being tight, the hold that said: I know how to hold this, I have held this before, the holding is in my hands. She looked at the brood pattern. She looked at it the way Meg had taught her to look -- not at the individual cells but at the whole, the pattern, the oval, the gestalt of the brood nest that told you in a single glance what a cell-by-cell inspection would confirm.

"She's beautiful," Luz said.

She said it about the queen, who was visible on the adjacent frame, walking with her retinue, the yellow dot on her thorax bright against the dark chitin, the queen's body elongated with the eggs she was producing, the abdomen heavy, the gait deliberate, the walk of a queen at her peak, at the height of her productivity, at the moment in her reign when the laying was maximum and the pheromone was strong and the colony was at its largest and the season was at its richest and everything was aligned, everything converging on this moment, this frame, this queen, this colony that was the standard.

"She is," Meg said. And the saying was not sentimental, was not the attribution of aesthetic value to an insect, was the beekeeper's assessment stated in the beekeeper's vocabulary, the vocabulary that used "beautiful" for a queen the way a mechanic used "beautiful" for an engine, the word meaning: this works, this functions at the highest level, this is the thing doing the thing it was built to do with a perfection that transcends the merely functional and becomes something that the observer can only call beautiful because no other word captures the specific pleasure of witnessing excellence in operation.

Hive thirty-seven was the standard.

The standard was the thing Meg used when she assessed her other colonies, the thing she compared against, the colony whose brood pattern she carried in her memory the way she carried her grandmother's sayings, as reference, as calibration, as the image of what was possible against which the actual was measured. Every queen check at every apiary began with the implicit question: is this colony as good as thirty-seven? The answer was almost always no. The answer was: this colony is adequate, this colony is acceptable, this colony will produce, but this colony is not thirty-seven, this colony does not sing.

The singing was the thing Meg could not teach. She could teach Luz to light the smoker and hold the frame and find the queen and read the brood pattern and count the mites and assess the stores. She could teach the mechanics, the procedures, the protocols of the practice. But the singing was not a protocol. The singing was the recognition of the exceptional, the ear's identification of the frequency that meant: this colony is beyond adequate, this colony is operating at a level that the beekeeper cannot produce by management alone, this colony is the result of genetics and environment and queen quality and colony dynamics and the mysterious convergence of factors that occasionally produced a colony that was not just functional but was extraordinary, and the extraordinary was not something the beekeeper could engineer, could only recognize when it appeared, could only protect and maintain and appreciate with the particular appreciation of a person who knew how rare it was.

Meg appreciated thirty-seven. She appreciated the colony with the appreciation that she applied to nothing else in her life, the appreciation that was attention, that was the daily observation of an organism that rewarded observation, that revealed its excellence incrementally, each inspection showing Meg something new about what a colony could be when everything was right, each frame pulled from thirty-seven being the frame against which every other frame was judged, the benchmark, the gold standard, the queen whose reign was the reign that Meg carried in her mind as the image of what a reign could be.

She had carried another image of what a reign could be. She had carried the image of her marriage, the image of the partnership that she and Gavin had built, the partnership that had looked, from the outside, like thirty-seven -- functional, productive, the two of them operating in their separate domains, the beekeeper and the landscape architect, the colony and the design studio, the two enterprises coexisting in the same house the way the brood and the honey coexisted on the same frame, adjacent, related, each sustaining the other in the way that adjacent things sustained each other, by proximity, by shared infrastructure, by the mutual benefit of two organisms occupying the same space.

But the marriage had not been thirty-seven. The marriage had been a colony with an adequate queen, a colony that produced but did not sing, a colony whose brood pattern had gaps, whose pheromone was dilute, whose hum was not the steady low frequency of the optimal but was the uneven hum of the sufficient, and the sufficient had been sufficient for years, for the sixteen years that Meg and Gavin had occupied the same house and eaten the same meals and slept in the same bed, the sufficient sustaining the partnership the way an adequate honey store sustained a colony through a mild winter -- barely, with nothing to spare, the reserves depleted by March, the colony alive but weakened, alive but not thriving, alive but not singing.

Thirty-seven sang. The marriage had not.

The recognition of this was not new. The recognition had been arriving for years, arriving the way understanding arrived -- in pieces, in fragments, in the small moments of comparison that the mind made without authorization, the moments when Meg opened a hive and heard the singing and felt the contrast with the silence of the kitchen, the moments when she saw the tight brood pattern and felt the contrast with the scattered pattern of her domestic life, the moments when the bees' excellence illuminated, by contrast, the adequacy of everything else.

She did not blame Gavin. She did not blame herself. She did not assign fault because fault was a human concept and the comparison she was making was not human but biological, was the comparison between a colony that was exceptional and a partnership that was not, and the not-exceptional was not a failure, was not a moral deficiency, was simply the condition that most colonies existed in, the condition of adequacy, of sufficient, of good-enough, and good-enough was good enough for most purposes, good-enough sustained the population and produced the honey and survived the winter, and good-enough was what most beekeepers had and what most marriages had and what most lives had, and the having of good-enough was not a tragedy but was the norm.

But Meg had thirty-seven. And thirty-seven was not good-enough. Thirty-seven was the thing that good-enough was not, the thing that made good-enough visible by comparison, the thing that said: this is what it sounds like when everything is aligned, and the alignment is real, and the real is available, and the available is here, in this hive, in this colony, in this queen whose genetics and whose pheromone and whose laying and whose calm produced the hum that Meg heard and that Meg called singing because the word was the closest word she had for the sound of a living system operating at the level the system was designed for.

She closed the hive. She and Luz moved to the next colony. The next colony was adequate. The brood pattern was acceptable. The queen was present and laying. The colony would produce. The colony was fine.

Fine was the word. Fine was the word that Diane used about Meg and that Meg used about herself and that the colony used about itself by the fact of its existence, by the fact of its continuity, by the humming that was the hum of fine, and fine was fine, and fine was the condition, and the condition was livable, and the livable was the thing.

But thirty-seven sang.

And Meg, standing in the Morrison apiary in the May morning with Luz beside her and the valley green below them and the Coast Range blue on the horizon, Meg heard the singing and the singing was the knowledge, was the knowledge that fine was not the only frequency, that adequate was not the only pattern, that the tight oval brood pattern of the exceptional queen existed and could be seen and could be heard and could be felt in the vibration that came through the hive body and into the hands and through the hands and into the body of the beekeeper who had been listening for thirty years and who knew, who had always known, who could not un-know, that the singing was possible, that the singing was real, that the singing was the sound of a colony doing the thing it was designed to do at the level it was designed to do it, and the sound was the standard, and the standard was the thing she measured against, and the measuring was the practice, and the practice was the life.

She would check thirty-seven again in two weeks. She would open the hive and pull the frames and find the yellow-marked queen and assess the brood pattern and listen to the hum and the checking would be the confirmation, the biweekly confirmation that the standard held, that the singing continued, that the colony was still the colony, still exceptional, still the thing against which everything else was measured.

And the measuring was not cruel. The measuring was not the judgment that found everything else wanting. The measuring was the knowledge of what was possible, the knowledge that informed the practice, that told the beekeeper what to select for, what to breed toward, what to hope for in the queens she purchased and the colonies she built and the operation she maintained. The standard was the aspiration. The standard was the direction. The standard was thirty-seven, green box, third row, Morrison apiary, the hive that sang.

And the singing continued. And the season continued. And Meg drove home in the afternoon with the windows down and the valley air coming through the cab and the sound of the valley in her ears -- the birds and the wind and the distant machinery of the farms and the nearer machinery of the truck -- and beneath all of it, in the place where the ear stored the sounds it had heard and would hear again, the singing, the low steady hum of the colony that was doing everything right, the sound that Meg carried with her the way she carried the smoker and the hive tool and her grandmother's sayings, as equipment, as the thing she needed to do the work, the work of tending and comparing and knowing and continuing, the work that was the practice, and the practice was the thing, and the thing was bees.