The Apprentice

Colony

Chapter 18: The Apprentice

Meg stood ten feet from the hive and watched.

Ten feet was the distance. Ten feet was the space between observation and intervention, between watching and helping, between the teacher who was present and the teacher who was not interfering, and the distinction mattered because the distinction was the lesson — the lesson being not anything Meg could have said but the thing that Luz would learn by doing, the thing that doing taught and that saying could not, the thing that lived in the hands and the eyes and the posture and the breath and that could only be acquired by the body performing the act, the way swimming could only be learned by entering the water, the way reading could only be learned by looking at the words, the way beekeeping could only be learned by opening the hive and putting your hands inside.

Luz stood at the hive. She was suited, veiled, gloved. The smoker was lit — she had lit it herself, the pine needles and the newspaper, the pumping of the bellows, the white smoke rising from the spout, the ritual that Meg had demonstrated a hundred times and that Luz now performed with the fluency of repetition, the lighting no longer a procedure but a habit, the habit no longer a conscious sequence of steps but a single fluid action, the body knowing the order and the timing without the mind directing each component. This was the beginning of mastery. This was the conversion of instruction into instinct that every apprenticeship aimed for and that every apprenticeship achieved by the same method: repetition, repetition, repetition, the act performed so many times that the performing became the knowing, the hands becoming the textbook, the muscles becoming the memory.

Luz gave two puffs of smoke at the entrance. She waited. She lifted the telescoping cover and set it on the ground, inverted, the way Meg had taught her — inverted so that the inner cover could be placed on top of it, the equipment stacked cleanly, the workspace organized, the habit of orderliness that was not aesthetic but functional, because a cluttered workspace in an apiary was a workspace where you stepped on equipment and knocked over hive bodies and lost your hive tool in the grass, and the finding of the hive tool in the grass while wearing a veil and gloves and being orbited by agitated bees was an experience that taught the value of orderliness more effectively than any instruction.

She pried the inner cover loose with the hive tool. The cracking sound of propolis breaking, the sound that every hive inspection began with, the sound that was as familiar to Meg as the sound of her own truck's engine, the sound that said: we are entering, we are opening the sealed space, we are breaking the propolis seal that the bees built to close every gap and every seam and every joint in their home, the seal that the bees rebuilt after every inspection, the never-ending repair of the breaches the beekeeper made, the bees' faith in sealing being undeterred by the beekeeper's repeated unsealing, the repair instinct stronger than the experience of repeated violation.

Luz lifted the inner cover and gave a puff of smoke across the top bars. She set the inner cover on the inverted telescoping cover. She stood over the open hive and she looked at the frames and Meg watched her looking and the looking was different from the looking of twelve weeks ago, when Luz had arrived in her own bee suit and had stood beside Meg and had watched Meg work a hive for the first time. That looking had been the looking of a novice — wide, unfocused, taking in everything and organizing nothing, the visual equivalent of hearing a foreign language for the first time, the sounds arriving in an undifferentiated stream that the brain could not parse into words, into phrases, into meaning. This looking was different. This looking was focused. This looking moved across the frames with purpose, with the systematic scanning that Meg had taught her — left to right, frame by frame, the diagnostic sweep that assessed the colony's state before the first frame was pulled, the preliminary reading that told the experienced beekeeper what to expect, what to look for, what the colony's mood was, the assessment that Meg made in five seconds and that Luz made in fifteen and that the difference between five and fifteen was the difference between thirty years and twelve weeks.

Luz pulled the first frame. She pulled it from the right side of the box, the outside frame, which was the correct choice — you always started from the outside because the outside frame was typically a honey or pollen frame, less populated, easier to remove without rolling bees between the frames, and once the outside frame was out there was space in the box to shift the remaining frames apart, to create the working room that made the inspection possible without crushing bees between frames, because crushing bees between frames was one of the things that happened when you did not create working room and that deposited alarm pheromone on the crushed bee and that triggered the defensive cascade in the surrounding bees and that made the inspection harder, more aggressive, more stingy, the cascading consequence of a single careless frame-pull rippling through the colony's behavior for the remainder of the inspection.

Luz did not crush bees. Luz pulled the frame smoothly, lifting it straight up, the frame clearing the box without scraping the adjacent frame, without rolling the bees that walked the top bars, and she held the frame up to the light and she looked at it and Meg watched her look at it and the looking was the reading, the reading of the frame that was the beekeeper's primary literacy, the skill that everything else depended on, the ability to look at a frame of comb and see not just wax and bees but information — the brood pattern, the stores of honey and pollen, the age of the comb, the presence or absence of disease, the mood of the colony expressed in the behavior of the bees on the frame, the hundred data points that a frame contained and that the experienced eye extracted without conscious effort, the way a literate person extracted meaning from a page of text without consciously identifying each letter.

Luz was becoming literate. Meg could see it. Meg could see the reading happening, the information being extracted, the frame being decoded, and the decoding was not yet fluent, was not yet the instantaneous extraction that Meg achieved, but was functional, was working, was the reading of a person who was past the letter-by-letter stage and was entering the word-by-word stage and who would, with years of practice, enter the sentence stage and then the paragraph stage and then the stage at which the reading was not reading at all but was comprehension, was the direct apprehension of meaning without the intermediary of analysis.

Luz set the first frame in the frame holder — the metal bracket that hung on the side of the hive body and held a frame outside the box, creating room — and she pulled the second frame. More brood on this one. She held it up and she turned it, rotating the frame to see the other side, and the rotation was smooth, was the two-handed rotation that Meg had demonstrated, the frame tilted toward the body to prevent the queen from falling, the rotation a single continuous motion rather than the jerky flip of a novice, and the smoothness was the muscle memory, was the twelve weeks of practice expressing themselves in the body's mechanics.

"Good pattern," Luz said, quietly, to herself or to the bees or to Meg ten feet away, the word traveling the distance between them, and Meg heard it and Meg agreed — the brood pattern was good, she could see it from ten feet, the tight oval of capped brood, the consistent color, the absence of gaps — and the agreeing was silent, was the nod that Luz could not see because Meg was behind her, was the teacher's private acknowledgment that the student was reading correctly.

Luz moved through the frames. Third, fourth, fifth. She was looking for the queen. Meg knew this because the looking had changed — the scanning had become more focused, more intent, the eyes moving in the quadrant pattern that Meg had taught, the systematic search for the shape that was different, the elongated abdomen, the different gait, the retinue of attendants that marked the queen's position on the comb. Luz was hunting. Luz was doing the thing that every beekeeper did at every inspection, the thing that was the essential act, the finding of the queen, the confirmation that the colony's center was present and functional.

She did not find the queen on the fifth frame. She did not find her on the sixth. Meg watched Luz's body language — the slight tension in the shoulders, the more careful scanning, the double-checking of each frame before setting it aside, the body's expression of the anxiety that accompanied the not-finding, the anxiety that said: the queen should be here, I should have found her by now, the anxiety that every beekeeper felt and that every beekeeper managed, because the queen was sometimes elusive, sometimes on the bottom of a frame you had already inspected, sometimes on the wall of the box, sometimes running from the light, the queen's photophobia sending her deeper into the hive, away from the inspection, away from the beekeeper's eyes.

Seventh frame. Luz pulled it. She held it up. She turned it.

She stopped.

The stopping was the finding. The body stopped because the eyes had found and the brain was processing the finding and the processing required stillness, required the cessation of all other activity so that the full attention could be directed at the thing the eyes had found, the queen, the white-marked queen walking across the comb in the lower right quadrant of the frame, the retinue around her, the attendants feeding and grooming and spreading the pheromone, and the queen was laying, was backing into a cell as Luz watched, the abdomen curving downward, the egg deposited, and the depositing was visible, was the thing Luz was watching, was the moment of the queen's function made visible, and Luz held the frame and she did not move and she watched.

"There she is," Luz said.

Two words. The two most important words in beekeeping. The words that meant: I found the center, I found the thing that tells me this colony is viable, I found the queen, she is here, she is present, she is laying, the colony has a future. The words that Meg had said ten thousand times and that never lost their weight, their significance, the small satisfaction of the finding, the confirmation that the organism was intact.

Meg nodded. The nod was the teacher's nod — the acknowledgment that the student had seen what the teacher sees, and the seeing was the beginning of the knowledge, and the knowledge would take thirty years to complete, and Luz had just begun, and the beginning was the thing.

Luz held the frame a moment longer. She was looking at the queen the way Meg remembered looking at queens in the early years, with the sustained attention of a person who had not yet seen enough queens to take the seeing for granted, the attention that was a form of reverence, though neither Meg nor Luz would have used that word, the word too religious for the context, too weighted with implication, but the looking was reverential — the looking of a person in the presence of the thing that mattered, the thing that made the colony possible, the thing that was the center around which everything else organized, and the being in the presence of the center was a specific feeling, was the feeling of proximity to function, to purpose, to the thing that did the thing it was supposed to do with an unselfconsciousness that was, in its own way, beautiful.

Luz put the frame back. She continued the inspection. She checked the remaining frames — the pollen stores, the honey stores, the orientation of the brood nest, the population density, the condition of the comb. She closed the hive. She placed the inner cover. She placed the telescoping cover. She stepped back.

She turned to Meg. Behind the veil, Luz's face was flushed from the heat and the concentration and the adrenaline that still accompanied the opening of a hive, the physiological response to proximity to stinging insects that diminished with experience but never fully disappeared, the adrenal spike that was the body's acknowledgment that what you were doing was, by any objective standard, dangerous, that putting your hands into a box containing fifty thousand stinging insects was an act that the body's threat-detection system could not fully normalize, and the not-normalizing was fine, was adaptive, was the trace of appropriate caution that kept the beekeeper alert, kept the hands moving carefully, kept the attention focused.

Luz smiled.

The smile was not a small smile. The smile was the smile of a person who had just done the thing — the thing she had been learning to do, the thing she had watched Meg do a hundred times, the thing she had done alongside Meg fifty times, the thing she had now done alone, entirely alone, the ten feet between her and Meg being the symbolic distance that made the doing hers, that made the inspection her inspection, that made the queen-finding her finding, and the doing and the finding were the accomplishment, and the smile was the body's expression of the accomplishment, and the expression was not pride exactly but was the thing adjacent to pride, the thing that pride comes from, which is competence, which is the knowledge that you can do the thing, the knowledge that your hands know the thing, the knowledge that the thing is yours now, is in your body now, is the beginning of the practitioner's knowledge that will grow and deepen for the rest of the career, however long the career is, however many hives the career includes.

"There she is," Luz said again, and this time the words were not about the queen. This time the words were about the beekeeper. There she is — the beekeeper, the person who finds the queen, the person who reads the frame, the person who opens the hive and looks inside and understands what she sees. There she is. The beekeeper. Present. Functional. Laying the foundation of a practice that will take decades to mature.

Meg did not say what she felt. Meg did not say that watching Luz work the hive alone had produced in her a feeling she had not expected, a feeling that was not the satisfaction of a good hire or the relief of having help in the apiary but was something else, something she did not have a name for, something that lived in the same region where the feeling of watching the queen lay lived, the region of purpose confirmed, of function witnessed, of the thing being done the way it was supposed to be done.

The feeling was the feeling of transmission. The knowledge passing from one person to another. The skill transferring. The practice continuing. Her grandmother had given it to her — the smoker, the hive tool, the way of moving through the frames, the bee eyes, the bee time, the thirty years of accumulated knowledge that had started as instruction and had become instinct. And Meg was giving it to Luz. Not all of it, not yet, the twelve weeks being the first layer of the first coat of the paint that would take years to apply and that would never be complete because the knowledge was never complete, but the first layer was down, the first coat was on, and the color was Luz's own color, the knowledge already being modified by Luz's biology training and Luz's network metaphors and Luz's way of seeing that was different from Meg's way of seeing and that would produce a beekeeper who was different from Meg and who would keep bees differently from Meg and whose beekeeping would be her own, influenced by Meg but not identical to Meg, the way the new queen's genetics were influenced by the old queen's genetics but were not identical, the mating with the drones introducing new material, the recombination producing something new from something old, the evolution of the practice.

Diane had said: apprentices learn and leave. Apprentices become the thing they were apprenticing for and then they go do the thing somewhere else. And this was true and Meg knew it was true and the knowing did not diminish the feeling, did not reduce the satisfaction of watching Luz find the queen and say "There she is" and smile the smile of a person who had found the center, because the leaving, if it came, would be the swarming, would be the colony reproducing, would be the propagation of the knowledge, and the propagation was not loss but was multiplication, was the strong colony dividing into two strong colonies, was the way the thing persisted by sending itself into the world.

They worked through the rest of the apiary together. The together was different now — not the teacher-and-student together of the early weeks, not the one-demonstrating-while-the-other-watched together, but the closer-to-equal together, the two-people-doing-the-same-work-at-the-same-level together, or nearly the same level, the gap between them still large but narrowing, the narrowing visible in the way they moved through the hives with a shared rhythm, the rhythm of two people who had been working together long enough to anticipate each other's movements, Luz holding the frame while Meg scraped the propolis, Meg holding the smoker while Luz pulled the frames, the choreography of partnership that was the thing Meg had not had in the apiary since ever, because Gavin had never been in the apiary, because the apiary had been Meg's alone, and the aloneness had been the condition, and the condition was changing.

In the truck, driving to the next apiary, Meg thought about what she had seen. Not the frames, not the queen, not the brood pattern — these were data, these were the professional observations that she processed and stored and that informed her management decisions. What she had seen was Luz becoming the thing. Becoming the beekeeper. The becoming was visible the way the becoming of the queen was visible in the supersedure cell — the larva floating in royal jelly, the transformation occurring in the sealed cell, the organism changing from one thing into another thing, the worker becoming the queen through the alchemy of diet and time.

Luz was being fed the royal jelly of practice. Luz was being transformed by the daily immersion in the craft, by the repetition and the instruction and the exposure to the thing itself, the bees, the living system that was the text and the teacher and the test simultaneously, and the transformation was producing a beekeeper, was producing the thing that Meg was, and the producing was the contribution, was the thing Meg was giving to the world, the thing that would outlast her, the thing that would continue after she stopped keeping bees, after her hands were too stiff to hold a frame, after her back was too tired to lift a super, after the arthritis that had taken her grandmother's hands took hers, and the taking was coming, was inevitable, was the biology of aging that no beekeeper could treat the way she treated mites, and the knowing of the taking was the reason the giving mattered, was the reason the teaching mattered, was the reason that watching Luz find the queen and say "There she is" had produced the feeling that Meg did not name.

The feeling was hope. Not the hope of expectation, not the hope that something specific would happen, but the hope that was the biological conviction that the thing would continue, the practice would persist, the knowledge would not die when the knower died, the hope that was the queen cell, the hope that was the supersedure, the hope that was the colony's way of ensuring that its own ending was not an ending but was a transition, a passing-on, a handing-off of the genetic material and the chemical identity and the accumulated comb and the stored honey to the next queen, the next generation, the next iteration of the thing.

Meg drove. Luz followed in the Subaru. The valley was green and gold in the afternoon light. The apiaries waited. The bees worked. The season moved. And the knowledge was in two people now instead of one, and the two was better than the one, and the better was the thing, and the thing was enough.

At the end of the day, at the last apiary, the sun low and the air cooling and the bees finishing their flights, Luz stood beside Meg at the truck and they cleaned the hive tools and stacked the supers and loaded the equipment, the end-of-day routine that they had developed over twelve weeks and that they performed in the efficient silence of people who knew the steps and did not need to discuss the steps, the silence that was not the silence of strangers or the silence of people who had nothing to say but the silence of people whose communication had moved beyond the verbal into the physical, into the shared labor, into the knowing-what-the-other-person-needs-before-they-say-it that was the hallmark of any partnership, any real partnership, the partnership of doing, the partnership of the work.

"Thank you," Luz said.

She said it simply, standing at the tailgate, the hive tool in her hand, the veil pushed back, her face in the evening light. She said it and the "thank you" was not for the day's work or for the wages or for the teaching of a specific skill but was for the thing, the larger thing, the thing that included the skill and the wages and the day's work but that was not limited to them, the thing that was the opportunity, the chance, the open door that Meg had provided when she pinned the index card to the corkboard at the feed store and that Luz had walked through when she called on a Tuesday and that they had both been walking through since, the door that led to the apiary and to the bees and to the knowledge and to whatever it was that was being built between them, the whatever-it-was that was not yet named and might never be named and that did not require naming to be real.

"You earned it," Meg said.

And the said was the said. And the evening was the evening. And Luz drove away in the green Subaru and Meg drove home in the white truck and the valley darkened and the bees settled and the day ended and the day had been the day, had been the day when Luz worked a hive alone for the first time, the day when the apprentice became something more than an apprentice, something not yet the full thing, not yet the master, not yet the thirty-year practitioner whose hands knew the hive the way the hive knew the season, but something in between, something becoming, and the becoming was the thing, and the thing was happening, and the happening was the season, and the season continued.

And outside, in the apiaries across the valley, two hundred colonies settled into the dark, and the queens laid in the dark, and the bees tended the brood in the dark, and the honey cured in the cells in the dark, and the pheromone circulated in the dark, and the colony was the colony, in the dark, doing the thing the colony did, and the doing was the thing, and the thing was the thing, and the thing was bees.