The Beekeeper's Year

Colony

Chapter 23: The Beekeeper's Year

The year began in February. Not January -- January was the month of waiting, the month when the bees were still in cluster and the beekeeper was still in the house and the valley was still in the gray, the month that belonged to the calendar but not to the practice, the month that the beekeeper endured the way the colony endured, by waiting, by consuming stored resources, by persisting through the period of nothing-to-do that was the hardest period of the beekeeper's year because the beekeeper was a person who did things and January was a month when there was nothing to do.

February was the beginning. February was when Meg drove to the home apiary in the morning cold, the temperature thirty-eight degrees, the air damp, the fog sitting in the valley the way it would sit until May, and she stood among the wrapped hives and she listened and the listening was the first act of the year, the diagnostic act that preceded the opening, the act that told her which hives to open first and which hives did not need to be opened because the listening had already told her what was inside.

The living hive hummed. In February, the hum was faint -- the cluster was small, the bees contracted to a sphere the size of a basketball at the center of the hive body, the sphere maintaining its core temperature of ninety-four degrees by the vibration of flight muscles that were not flying, the muscles flexing in place, generating heat, the metabolism fueled by the honey stores, the stores that had been capped in September and that the cluster had been consuming since November at a rate of approximately five pounds per month, the consumption steady, the stores diminishing, the colony eating its way through winter the way a person ate through a savings account during unemployment, the reserves finite, the spending unavoidable, the math being the math.

The dead hive was silent. The dead hive was the hive that did not hum, that produced no sound when Meg pressed her ear to the side of the box, the wood cold, the interior cold, the silence that was the absence of the hum that was the absence of the vibration that was the absence of the bees that had stopped vibrating because they had stopped living, the death coming sometime in the winter months when no one was watching, when the beekeeper could not intervene, the death that was the risk of the winter, the risk that every beekeeper accepted as the cost of the season.

February was the reckoning. February was when the losses were counted.

Meg counted. She moved through the home apiary and she listened at each hive and the listening sorted the living from the dead and the sorting was the inventory, the annual inventory that every beekeeper conducted in February, the tally that said: this many survived, this many did not, the percentage being the number, the number being the grade, the grade being the beekeeper's assessment of her own competence, because the winter losses were the beekeeper's responsibility -- not entirely, the weather was the weather and the mites were the mites and some colonies failed despite perfect management, but substantially, the losses reflecting the beekeeper's preparations, the beekeeper's mite treatment, the beekeeper's fall feeding, the beekeeper's winterizing, the sum of the beekeeper's acts expressed in the binary of February: alive or dead.

Fifteen percent. This was Meg's average winter loss over thirty years. Fifteen percent, which was thirty hives out of two hundred, which was thirty colonies that did not make it, thirty deadouts that she would open and scrape and clean and re-stock with new bees in April, the loss that was the cost and the cost that was the practice and the practice that continued regardless of the cost.

She opened the first living hive. She removed the moisture board, the entrance reducer, the mouse guard. She peeled back the roofing felt. She lifted the outer cover and then the inner cover and the cluster was there, the bees alive, the queen present -- she found the queen, the white-marked queen, the 2026 mark still visible on the thorax -- and the finding was the first queen check of the year, the essential act, the act that said: the colony has survived, the queen has survived, the organism persists, and the persisting is the thing.

March was the building. March was when the maples bloomed and the pollen came in and the queen's laying rate increased from the winter minimum -- a few hundred eggs a day, barely enough to replace the bees that died -- to the spring acceleration, a thousand eggs a day, then twelve hundred, then fifteen hundred, the rate climbing as the daylight lengthened and the temperature rose and the pollen arriving at the hive triggered the biological cascade that was the spring buildup, the cascade that began with the foragers bringing pollen through the entrance and the nurse bees consuming the pollen and producing the royal jelly and feeding the larvae and the larvae developing and emerging as new bees that joined the workforce that grew and the growing workforce triggering the queen to lay more because more bees meant more brood comb available and more brood comb meant more eggs and more eggs meant more bees, the positive feedback loop that drove the colony from its winter minimum of ten thousand bees to its summer maximum of sixty thousand in approximately four months.

Meg fed syrup in March. One-to-one, the spring ratio, the thin syrup that the bees took down quickly and that stimulated the queen, the syrup that was the beekeeper's lie -- the syrup that told the colony nectar is flowing when nectar was not flowing, the deception that accelerated the buildup, that pushed the colony to expand faster than the season's natural forage would support, the acceleration that put the colony at its peak population in time for the pollination contracts, the timing that was the beekeeper's management, the management that manipulated the colony's biology for the beekeeper's economic purposes, and the manipulation was the practice and the practice was the compromise between the pure and the practical, the compromise that every commercial beekeeper made, the compromise that Meg made without guilt because the guilt was not productive and the syrup was not harmful and the colony would thrive on the real nectar when the real nectar arrived.

April was the pollination. April was the fruit bloom -- the cherries and the pears and the plums, the orchards exploding into flower in the two weeks that the weather permitted, the bloom window narrow, the temperature needing to be above fifty-five degrees for the bees to fly and the rain needing to stop for the pollen to be dry enough to transfer, the window that in some years was ten days and in other years was four days and that in one year -- 2019, the year of the April rain -- was two days, two days of adequate weather in which the bees did the work of pollinating the orchards that produced the crop that the farmers sold, the two days that were sufficient because the bees were efficient, because fifty thousand bees working two hundred cherry trees for two days visited enough flowers to set a crop, the efficiency being the biology, the biology being the product, the product being what Meg sold to the orchardists who placed her hives among the blossoming trees.

April was also the first full inspection. April was when Meg opened every hive and pulled every frame and assessed every queen and read every brood pattern and counted every mite, the comprehensive inspection that was the baseline, the data collection that established the starting point for the season's management decisions, the decisions that would follow from the data the way the treatment followed from the mite count, the intervention following from the assessment, the action following from the observation.

May was the expansion. May was supers -- the honey supers added to the top of the brood nest, the additional boxes that gave the colony room to store the nectar that was now flowing in earnest, the clover and the blackberry beginning, the main flow approaching, and the beekeeper's job was to stay ahead of the bees, to add boxes before the bees needed them because the colony that ran out of room swarmed, the colony that filled every cell with brood and honey and pollen and had no empty space left would produce queen cells and divide, the swarm leaving with half the population and half the honey, the loss that the beekeeper could have prevented by adding a box, by giving the colony the space it needed to expand, by reading the colony's trajectory and anticipating the need the way Meg anticipated every need -- by observation, by experience, by the accumulated data of thirty years of watching bees fill boxes and needing more boxes.

May was also splitting. May was when Meg made her increases -- taking a strong colony and dividing it, pulling four frames of brood and bees and food from a colony that had too many of all three and placing them in a new box with a new queen, the division that was the beekeeper's version of the swarm, the controlled reproduction that replaced the losses of the previous winter, the thirty deadouts replaced by thirty splits, the arithmetic of the operation that kept the total at two hundred, the number that Meg maintained because two hundred was the number that one beekeeper could manage, the number that the valley's forage could support, the number that the business required, the number that was the operation.

June was the flow. June was honey. June was the weeks when the nectar came in faster than the bees could process it, the uncapped cells glistening with fresh nectar in every super, the hive gaining weight daily -- five pounds, eight pounds, ten pounds on a strong day -- the weight gain being the flow, the flow being the abundance, the abundance being the season's climax, the weeks that the entire year pointed toward, the weeks that justified the February losses and the March feeding and the April pollination and the May splitting, the weeks that were the reason, the purpose, the point.

June was when Meg worked hardest. June was when the days started at four in the morning and ended at nine at night, the hours dictated by the bees' schedule, by the bloom's schedule, by the flow's schedule, the schedule that said: now, the honey is being made now, and the beekeeper's job is to give the bees room and then more room and then more room, supers on supers, the tower of boxes growing on each hive, the hives that had been two boxes in April now four boxes, five boxes, the height of the hive being the measure of the flow's strength, the tall hives the sign of the good year.

July was the turning. July was when the flow tapered and the blackberry finished and the clover finished and the forage thinned and the hive's daily weight gain slowed from ten pounds to five pounds to two pounds to nothing, the nothing being the dearth, the period between the main flow and the fall flow when nothing much bloomed and the bees consumed what they had stored and the colony's population began its decline from the peak, the decline that was normal, that was the seasonal contraction that mirrored the seasonal expansion, the organism responding to the diminishing resources by producing fewer bees, the queen's laying rate declining, the population dropping from sixty thousand toward the forty thousand that would enter August.

July was when Meg assessed the mites again. The mid-season mite check, the sugar roll or the alcohol wash that counted the mites per hundred bees, the number that told her whether the spring treatment had held or whether the mites had rebounded, the mites that were always rebounding because the mites reproduced in the brood cells and the brood cells were always being produced and the mites' reproductive rate exceeded the bees' grooming rate and the only question was how fast, how soon the mite population would reach the threshold that triggered treatment, the threshold that Meg set at three percent -- three mites per hundred bees -- the threshold above which she treated and below which she waited, the threshold being the line, the line being the management.

August was the harvest. August was pulling honey. August was the hot work of removing the supers from the hives and loading them on the truck and driving them to the honey house and uncapping the frames and spinning them in the extractor and draining the honey into the bottling tank and filling the jars. August was the culmination, the taking, the harvesting that was the covenant's fulfillment -- I tended you, I treated you, I fed you, I gave you room, and now I take the surplus, the honey beyond what you need, the honey that is mine because the agreement says it is mine and the agreement is the practice and the practice is the thing.

September was the feeding-back. September was the syrup again, the two-to-one fall ratio, the thick syrup that supplemented the stores that remained after the harvest, the stores that the beekeeper had estimated and that the estimation said were not enough, the estimation being the judgment, the judgment being the experience, the thirty years of looking at frames in September and knowing -- by the weight, by the visual assessment, by the feel of the frame in the hand -- whether the colony had enough honey to survive the winter and whether the colony needed supplemental feeding, the judgment that was the second half of the covenant, the giving-back that followed the taking, the beekeeper's obligation to return what the colony needed.

September was also the fall mite treatment. The critical treatment, the treatment that determined whether the mites would be controlled through the winter months when no treatment was possible, the treatment that had to be effective because the winter bees -- the bees that would live five months rather than the summer bees' six weeks, the bees whose physiology was different, whose fat bodies were larger, whose vitellogenin levels were higher, the bees that were built for endurance rather than productivity -- the winter bees were being produced in September and October, and the mites parasitizing those bees would weaken them, would reduce their fat bodies, would transmit the viruses that shortened their lives, and the shortened lives meant the colony would die in January or February, would run out of bees before the spring came, the colony dying not of cold but of mites, the mites being the thing that killed more colonies than any other thing, the mites being the beekeeper's constant, the beekeeper's permanent companion, the thing that was always there and that was always managed and that was never eliminated.

October was the winterizing. October was the wrapping and the insulating and the reducing and the guarding and the closing-down that was not closing-down but was preparation, was the final act of the beekeeper's year, the act that said: I have done what I can, and what I have done will either be enough or will not be enough, and the enough or the not-enough will be revealed in February, and the February revelation will be the beginning of the next year, the beginning that was always the same beginning, the beginning of the opening and the looking and the finding or the not-finding.

November, December, January: the waiting. The three months that belonged to the calendar but not to the practice, the months when the bees were inside and the beekeeper was outside, the months when the beekeeper could not help, could not intervene, could not do the thing the beekeeper was built to do, which was manage, which was tend, which was act. The waiting months were the months that tested the beekeeper's other capacities -- the capacity for patience, the capacity for trust, the capacity for the particular faith that was the beekeeper's faith, the faith that the preparations were sufficient and the biology was resilient and the winter was survivable and the spring was coming.

This was the year. This was the cycle. February to October was the active season and November to January was the dormant season and the two seasons constituted the year and the year repeated, the cycle turning, the wheel revolving, the same sequence in the same order with the same tasks and the same concerns and the same satisfactions and the same losses, the cycle that had repeated for thirty years of Meg's life, thirty revolutions of the wheel, thirty Februaries and thirty Octobers, thirty spring buildups and thirty fall contractions, thirty harvests and thirty winterizings, the repetition that was not monotony but was rhythm, was the rhythm that gave the year its shape the way the comb gave the honey its shape, the structure that held the substance, the pattern that organized the work.

The year's shape was the colony's shape. The year expanded in spring and peaked in summer and contracted in fall and rested in winter, the arc of the year matching the arc of the colony's population, the beekeeper's activity mirroring the bees' activity, the human and the insect synchronized by the same forces -- the photoperiod, the temperature, the bloom -- the forces that neither the beekeeper nor the bees controlled but that both responded to, the response being the year, the year being the response.

Meg's year had no other shape. This was the thing she had understood gradually, over decades, the understanding arriving the way the spring arrived -- incrementally, day by day, each day a fraction warmer, a fraction brighter, until the cumulative fractions constituted the change and the change was the understanding: the bees gave her year its shape. Not the marriage, not the house, not the social calendar, not the holidays, not the birthdays, not the anniversaries, not the human markers that other people organized their years around. The bees. February was February because February was the deadout check. June was June because June was the flow. October was October because October was the winterizing. The months had their identities because the bees gave them identities, the bees assigning meaning to the calendar by the demands they made, the demands that Meg met because meeting the demands was the practice.

Gavin had lived in the year with her but had not lived in the year's shape. Gavin's year had been shaped by different forces -- the design calendar, the client calendar, the project calendar, the rhythm of commissions and consultations and installations that organized his professional life the way the pollen calendar organized Meg's. His February was not her February. His June was not her June. They had shared the months but not the shape, had occupied the same house in the same valley but had been oriented by different calendars toward different purposes, the two of them coexisting the way the honey and the pollen coexisted on the brood frame -- adjacent, proximate, serving different functions, stored in different cells.

The coexistence had been the marriage. The marriage had been the frame that held the different substances in proximity, the wax foundation that gave them structure, the shared surface on which they were deposited by different processes for different purposes. And when the frame was pulled -- when Gavin left, when the marriage ended -- the substances remained but the structure that had held them together was gone, and Meg was left with her substance, her year, her shape, and the shape was the bees' shape, had always been the bees' shape, the marriage not having altered the shape but having existed alongside it, adjacent, and the adjacency had ended and the shape had not.

The shape continued. The cycle continued. February came and Meg drove to the apiaries and listened at the hives and counted the living and counted the dead. March came and the maples bloomed and the queens accelerated and the spring buildup began. April came and the orchards flowered and the pollination contracts were fulfilled. May, June, July, August, September, October -- the months came in their order and the work came in its order and Meg did the work in its order and the order was the year and the year was the shape and the shape was the thing that held her, the thing that gave her days their meaning and her weeks their purpose and her months their identity, the thing that was not a substitute for the marriage or a replacement for the marriage but was the thing that had been there before the marriage and during the marriage and after the marriage, the thing that was more fundamental than the marriage because the thing was the practice and the practice was the life.

Thirty years. Thirty cycles. Each year the same and each year different, the way each colony was the same and each colony was different -- the same species, the same behaviors, the same biology, but the specific conditions varying, the specific weather and the specific forage and the specific mite pressure and the specific queen producing the specific season that was this year's version of the year, the vintage, and the vintage was unrepeatable, was the unique product of the specific conditions, and the specific conditions were gone the moment the season ended, replaced by the next year's conditions, the next year's vintage, the cycle turning and the year changing and the change being the sameness, the sameness being the rhythm, the rhythm being the shape.

Meg was fifty-three. She had been keeping bees since she was twenty-three. She had been keeping bees for more than half her life. The years before bees -- the childhood, the adolescence, the college years, the early years in Portland -- those years had a different shape, a shape she could barely remember, a shape that had been defined by other things, by school and by jobs and by the social calendar and by the ambient structure of a life lived among non-beekeepers, a life whose year was shaped by the human calendar rather than the biological one, by Christmas and Thanksgiving and summer vacation rather than by the flow and the dearth and the winterizing.

She could not go back to that shape. She could not imagine her year without the bees' shape. The bees had colonized her calendar the way they colonized an empty hive body -- systematically, completely, filling every space with comb, filling every cell with purpose, the empty box becoming the populated hive, the empty year becoming the populated year, the bees giving the year its structure and its meaning and its rhythm, the bees being the year the way the queen was the colony, the central fact, the organizing principle, the thing without which the thing could not be the thing.

The year was turning. It was September, and the fall feeding had begun, and the mite treatment was going in, and the winter bees were being raised, and October was coming and the winterizing was coming and the waiting was coming and the February was coming, the February that would begin the next cycle, the thirty-first cycle, the next revolution of the wheel that Meg rode and that the bees rode and that the valley rode, the wheel that turned regardless, that turned whether the beekeeper watched or not, that turned by the forces that turned it -- the sun's angle, the earth's tilt, the chemistry of the bloom and the biology of the bee and the physics of the light -- the forces that were the year's engine, the engine that drove the cycle, the cycle that was the shape, the shape that was the year, the year that was the practice, the practice that was the life.

And the life continued. And the cycle continued. And the year that the bees gave her was the year she lived. And the living was the thing.