The Smoker

Colony

Chapter 2: The Smoker

The smoker was a Bingham, brass, made in Farwell, Michigan, by a company that had been making smokers since 1879 and that still stamped the name on the side of the firebox in raised letters that Meg could feel with her thumb when she held it, the letters worn smooth by decades of handling but still legible the way the name on a gravestone remains legible long after the person it names has become a fact rather than a presence. The bellows were leather, cracked along the fold line, patched twice with shoe-repair adhesive and a piece of leather cut from an old work glove, the patches applied by her grandmother in the 1990s and by Meg herself in 2018, and the bellows still worked, still drew air and pushed it through the firebox and out the spout in a plume of cool white smoke that smelled of whatever Meg had packed into the firebox that morning, which was always pine needles and newspaper, because that was what her grandmother had used, and the using of the same fuel was not tradition in the ceremonial sense but tradition in the practical sense, the sense in which a thing works and continues to work and the working is reason enough to continue.

She kept the smoker on a shelf in the bee shed, which was a ten-by-twelve structure beside the house that she had built herself in 2011 from plans she found in a beekeeping supply catalog, a simple shed with a workbench and shelves and hooks for her bee suit and veil and gloves and the hive tools that accumulated over the years the way tools accumulate in any trade, each one slightly different from the others, each one suited to a particular task that could theoretically be accomplished with any of them but that was best accomplished with this one, the one with the bent tip for prying frames, the one with the flat blade for scraping propolis, the one with the hooked end for lifting frames from below. The shed smelled of beeswax and cedar and the faint chemical tang of oxalic acid, which she used for mite treatment, and the smoke smell that never entirely left the smoker, that had been building in the brass for decades, a cumulative ghost of every fire that had ever burned in it.

Meg picked up the smoker. She opened the hinged lid. She crumpled a sheet of newspaper — the News-Register, the McMinnville paper, which arrived on Wednesdays and Saturdays and which she read for the agricultural news and the police blotter and the obituaries of people she had known or known of in the valley for twenty years — and she pushed the crumpled paper into the firebox and lit it with a match from the box of kitchen matches she kept on the shelf beside the smoker, Diamond brand, the red-and-white box, and the paper caught and she let it burn for a moment, the flame visible through the spout, and then she packed a handful of dry pine needles on top of the burning paper and pumped the bellows twice, three times, and the pine needles caught and the smoke rose and she packed more pine needles on top and pumped again and the smoke was thick now, white, cool enough to put her hand through, which was important because hot smoke agitates bees rather than calming them and the whole point of the smoker is calm, the whole point is approach.

The biology of smoke and bees is well understood. When bees detect smoke, they respond as if to fire — their ancestral enemy, the one thing that can destroy the colony in minutes. The response is to gorge on honey, to fill their honey stomachs in preparation for evacuating the hive, for abandoning the cavity and flying to safety carrying as much of the colony's stores as their bodies can hold. A bee with a full honey stomach is less inclined to sting. The gorging occupies them. The smoke masks the alarm pheromone — isopentyl acetate, the banana-scented compound that guard bees release when they sting, the chemical signal that says: threat, sting, defend — and without the alarm pheromone spreading through the hive, the defensive cascade does not build, and the beekeeper can open the box and pull the frames and do the work of inspection without being stung more than once or twice, which is to say without being stung more than is normal, because some stinging is always normal, because bees are defensive organisms and some percentage of the colony will always respond to intrusion with the only defense they have, which is to drive the barbed stinger into the intruder's skin and eviscerate themselves in the act of pulling away, which is to say that every sting is a suicide, that every bee that stings Meg dies for having stung her, and Meg knows this, has always known this, and the knowing does not make her avoid stings but it makes her respect them, makes her handle each frame with the deliberateness of a person who understands that carelessness has a cost measured in lives, small lives, insect lives, lives that do not register on most people's moral accounting but that register on Meg's because she is the one who opened the box, she is the one who created the conditions for the defensive response, and the responsibility of the beekeeper is to minimize what her presence costs.

She carried the smoker to the home apiary. March now, the second week, the mornings still cold but the afternoons reaching into the fifties and the bees flying on warm days, short orientation flights from the hive entrance, the bees circling the front of the hive in the characteristic pattern of bees who are recalibrating their navigation after weeks of confinement, learning the landmarks again, the position of the sun, the angle of the hive relative to north, all the information they will need when the first forage appears and they begin flying for nectar and pollen in earnest. Meg watched them from ten feet away, the distance she always kept when she was observing rather than inspecting, the distance that was close enough to read the traffic pattern at the entrance but far enough that her presence did not register as threat.

She suited up. The bee suit was a full-body coverall, white — bees are less defensive toward light colors, an adaptation related to their natural predators being dark-furred mammals, bears, skunks, raccoons — with an attached hood and a zip-on veil, the veil a mesh of fine black netting through which Meg saw the world of bees with the slight softening that the mesh imposed, a softening she had long stopped noticing. The suit was stained with propolis, grass, the crushed bodies of bees that had been caught in a fold or a zipper, stains that no amount of washing removed and that she had stopped trying to remove because the suit was a work garment and work garments carry the evidence of work, that is their function, and a clean bee suit is the suit of a person who does not work bees.

She pulled on the gloves. Nitrile, not leather. She had switched from leather gloves to nitrile a decade ago because leather holds the alarm pheromone — every sting deposits the chemical into the leather and the leather carries it from hive to hive and each new hive smells the accumulated stings of every previous hive and responds defensively, which means that leather-gloved beekeepers get stung more, which deposits more pheromone, which makes the next inspection worse, a feedback loop of aggression and defense that nitrile eliminates because nitrile can be washed, can be replaced, does not carry history. Meg had liked learning this. Meg had liked the idea that you could choose a material that did not carry the past into the present, that you could put on gloves that had no memory of previous encounters, that you could approach each hive as if approaching for the first time, without the accumulated residue of every sting that came before.

She could not do this with people. With people, the gloves were always leather.

She walked to the first hive and gave two puffs of smoke at the entrance. She waited. She lifted the outer cover and gave a puff across the top bars. She waited again. The waiting was essential. The smoke needed time to work, time for the bees to detect it and begin gorging, time for the alarm pheromone to be masked, time for the hive to shift from its ordinary state of organized industry to the particular altered state that smoke induces, a state that was not calm exactly but was distracted, redirected, a population suddenly concerned with an ancient threat and therefore less concerned with the immediate one, the beekeeper, the large warm-blooded creature that was about to put its hands into the most intimate space the colony possessed.

Meg pulled the first frame.

The bees were on it, moving in the way that bees move on a frame when the smoker has been used well — purposeful but not frantic, walking across the comb surface in their constant redistribution of labor, the nurse bees in the brood area tending larvae, inserting their heads into cells to inspect or feed, the house bees processing nectar, the queen's retinue — the small group of workers that attend the queen at all times, feeding her, grooming her, spreading her pheromone through the colony by contact, bee to bee, the way information moves in any system that operates by proximity rather than broadcast. Meg looked for the queen. She scanned the frame the way her grandmother had taught her, not searching the whole surface at once but dividing the frame into quadrants, moving her eyes methodically, looking for the shape that was different from all the other shapes — the queen is longer than a worker, her abdomen tapered, her movements different, deliberate, the walk of a bee that is not foraging or building or cleaning but is looking for the next cell to lay in, the next empty, polished cell that the workers have prepared, and when she finds it she backs in and deposits an egg, a single egg, a white cylinder the size of a grain of rice, standing upright on the bottom of the cell, and then she moves to the next cell, and the next, and in a productive queen's peak laying season she will lay fifteen hundred eggs a day, which is more than her body weight in eggs, which is an act of biological productivity that has no analogue in any other creature Meg had ever heard of, and the laying is the function, the laying is the queen's single purpose, and when the laying stops the colony replaces her, and the replacement is not cruel, is not personal, is the response of a superorganism to a component that has ceased to function, the way a body replaces cells that no longer divide.

She found the queen on the third frame. She was marked — a dot of blue paint on her thorax, last year's color, the international queen-marking system that assigns a color to each year in a five-year rotation: white, yellow, red, green, blue, the cycle repeating. This queen was a 2025 queen, marked blue, and she was laying. Meg could see the brood pattern: a solid oval of capped brood in the center of the frame, the wax cappings slightly convex, tan, uniform, the sign of a healthy queen laying fertilized eggs in a tight pattern without gaps, without the scattered, shotgun pattern that indicates a failing queen or a queen with poor genetics or a queen who has been injured. The brood pattern was the queen's report card. This queen was passing.

Meg put the frame back. She moved to the next frame, and the next, assessing the colony's strength: the number of frames covered with bees, the amount of brood, the stores of honey and pollen. She noted it all. She gave another puff of smoke when the bees began to build on the tops of the frames, which was their way of expressing agitation — building up, rising, the prelude to the defensive posture that would result in stinging if Meg did not manage it with smoke and with the particular quality of movement that bees respond to, which is slowness, which is steadiness, which is the absence of sudden gestures, the absence of the quick hand, the slap, the jerk, all the movements that trigger the sting reflex. Meg's hands moved through the hive the way her hands had always moved through hives, slowly, precisely, with the confidence of repetition, the confidence that is not bravery but familiarity, the confidence of a person who has done this ten thousand times and whose hands know what to do before her mind tells them.

Her grandmother had called this "bee time." "When you're in the hive, you're on bee time," she had said. "Bee time is slower than your time. Bee time is the speed of wax being drawn, the speed of pollen being packed, the speed of honey being cured. If you move at your speed, you're wrong. If you move at their speed, you're right. Learn their speed. It's better than yours."

Meg had learned their speed. Meg had spent thirty years learning their speed, and she had learned it, and the speed was the thing she carried out of the apiary and into her life, or tried to carry, or wanted to carry, because bee time was honest time, was time measured by the work that needed to be done rather than by the clock that said it should be done faster, and Meg's life outside the apiary was not honest time, was not bee time, was the time of a woman who moved through her house and her errands and her evening with the efficiency of a person who has nothing to be efficient for, who is efficient because efficiency is habit and habit is structure and structure is the thing that replaces the thing that used to be there, the thing that was a marriage, the thing that was another person in the room.

She worked through the nine living colonies in the home apiary. Each one: smoke, open, inspect, assess, note, close. Each one: find the queen or note the absence of the queen. Each one: read the brood pattern, estimate the population, check the stores, look for signs of disease — American foulbrood, the ropy brown residue of dead larvae in the cells, the smell of it, the sour rotting smell that Meg had encountered three times in thirty years and that she could identify from ten feet away; chalkbrood, the white mummified larvae that the bees drag out of the cells and discard at the entrance; nosema, the dysentery of the bee world, the brown streaking on the front of the hive that indicated digestive infection. She found none of these. The nine colonies were healthy, building, beginning the slow spring expansion that would take them from the contracted winter population of ten or fifteen thousand bees to the peak summer population of fifty or sixty thousand, the expansion driven by the queen's increasing lay rate as the days lengthened and the temperature rose and the first pollen sources appeared — the willows along the creek, the earliest crocuses in the gardens of the houses along the county road, the red maples whose pollen was not nutritionally ideal but was pollen, was protein, was the signal to the colony that the season of growth had begun.

She closed the last hive. She set the smoker on the ground, the spout pointed up, the fire still burning inside, the smoke still rising in a thin column that would continue for another twenty minutes before the fuel was consumed and the firebox cooled and the brass contracted in the way that brass contracts, the metal shrinking imperceptibly with each cooling cycle, and Meg thought about this sometimes, about the thousand cycles of heating and cooling the smoker had been through, her grandmother's cycles and her own, and whether the brass remembered them the way the leather gloves remembered the stings, whether the metal held the history of every fire in its structure the way wood holds the history of its growing in its rings, and she knew the answer was no, brass does not remember, metal does not hold history, only people hold history, and the smoker was the same smoker it had been when her grandmother bought it in 1974 from the Sears catalog, or nearly the same, the patches and the wear and the dents being the cosmetic changes that did not alter the fundamental function, which was to hold fire and produce smoke and enable approach.

The tool of approach.

She had thought about this phrase for years, since the first time she had articulated it to herself while lighting the smoker in the parking lot of a cherry orchard in the Eola Hills where she had placed thirty hives for pollination, the smoke rising as she pumped the bellows and the phrase arriving unbidden the way phrases sometimes arrive, not as a thought but as a recognition, a naming of something that had existed without a name: the smoker is the tool of approach. It is the thing that lets you enter the space of another creature without being attacked. It is the mediating object, the thing between you and the sting. Without it, the hive is defended. Without it, your hands are targets. Without it, the colony treats you as what you are — an intruder, a threat, a large mammal reaching into their home to take their children and their food. The smoker changes the terms. The smoker says: I am here, but I am not the threat you think I am. The smoker does not eliminate the threat. The smoker redirects the attention. The bees still know you are there. The bees still guard. But the smoke gives them something else to do with their fear, gives them the gorging response, gives them the ancient protocol for fire, and in the space that the protocol creates — the space between the smoke and the sting — the beekeeper works.

Meg had looked for the human equivalent. She had looked for it in conversation, in the ways people approach each other, in the mediating objects and rituals that allow one person to enter the space of another without being attacked — because people attack too, not with stingers but with silence, with deflection, with the raised wall of the person who has been approached too many times by people who were not carrying a smoker, who were not offering the mediating gesture, who just reached in. Meg knew this because she was this. She was the hive without the smoker. She was the colony that stung first and assessed later. She had been this before Gavin left, and Gavin's leaving had not changed it but had confirmed it, had proved what she had suspected, which was that the sting worked — that the defense was effective — that if you stung often enough and consistently enough, the intruder would stop intruding, would step back, would eventually leave, and the colony would be alone, which was what the colony wanted, which was what the stinging was for, and the aloneness was the proof that the defense had succeeded and the success was the thing she could not reconcile with the feeling, the feeling that she had defended herself into an empty hive, that the stinging had worked too well, that the intruder she had driven off was not an intruder but a partner, and the distinction mattered, and she had not made the distinction, and the not-making was the sting, the final sting, the one that was not directed at Gavin but at herself, and it was the one that had killed something, the way every sting kills the bee that delivers it.

She picked up the smoker. She carried it to the bee shed. She placed it on the shelf. She removed her suit and hung it on the hook and pulled off the nitrile gloves and dropped them in the trash and stood in the bee shed for a moment, in the quiet, in the smell of wax and smoke and the particular cedar-and-chemical atmosphere of a space dedicated to a single purpose, and she felt what she always felt after working the bees, which was the settling, the coming-down, the return from bee time to her own time, from the concentration of the hive to the diffusion of the rest of her life, and the settling was not pleasant and was not unpleasant, it was necessary, it was the transition, and she made it, and she walked to the house, and the smoker sat on the shelf and cooled and the brass contracted and the smoke smell lingered and the tool of approach waited for the next time it would be needed, which was tomorrow, because tomorrow she would drive to the next apiary and the next, and she would light the smoker with pine needles and newspaper, and she would pump the bellows, and the smoke would rise, and she would approach.