Fall Feeding

Colony

Chapter 24: Fall Feeding

The syrup was two parts sugar to one part water. Two-to-one. The fall ratio, heavier than the one-to-one spring syrup that stimulated the queen's laying, the two-to-one thick and dense and closer to the consistency of honey because the purpose was different — the spring syrup was a signal, a chemical cue that said "nectar is flowing, begin laying," and the fall syrup was a supplement, a store, a food source that the bees would process and cap and hold for winter the way they held honey, the syrup converting in the hive from sugar water to something approaching honey in its chemical profile, the invertase in the bees' hypopharyngeal glands breaking down the sucrose into glucose and fructose, the same enzymatic process that converted nectar, the bees treating the syrup as they treated nectar because to the bees the syrup was nectar, was food coming in, was the signal that the environment was providing, and the bees responded to the signal by taking it down and storing it and preparing for the winter that was coming.

Meg mixed the syrup in five-gallon buckets. She heated the water on the stove — tap water, not boiling, just warm enough to dissolve the sugar — and she poured the sugar in and stirred with a wooden paddle, the paddle stained with the residue of a decade of syrup-making, the wood sugared and smooth, and the sugar dissolved and the syrup was clear and heavy and she carried the buckets to the truck, two buckets at a time, the weight of a full bucket approximately forty pounds, the weight familiar, the weight of the bucket being approximately the weight of a full honey super, the beekeeping year measured in forty-pound units, the lifting and the carrying being the constant, the physical act that connected the spring feeding to the fall feeding, the pollination loading to the honey pulling, the year a sequence of forty-pound lifts separated by inspections and treatments and the observation that was the beekeeper's primary labor.

She drove to the home apiary first. September. The light was different. September light in the Willamette Valley was the light of angle and diminishment, the sun lower in the sky, the shadows longer earlier in the day, the gold of summer becoming the amber of fall, the color deepening the way honey deepened when the blackberry component increased, the light thickening with the approach of the equinox, the day and the night approaching the balance point that they would reach on the twenty-second and that they would pass through without pausing, the balance being a moment rather than a state, the moment of equal light and equal dark that the calendar noted and that the bees noted in their own way — the queen's laying rate declining, the brood nest contracting, the colony reducing its population in response to the shortening days, the photoperiod being one of the signals that triggered the fall contraction, the colony beginning to become less so that it could survive the winter by needing less.

She opened the feeder on the first hive. The feeder was a hive-top feeder, a plastic tray that sat on top of the frames, inside the hive, with a reservoir for the syrup and a screened opening that allowed the bees to access the syrup without drowning in it, the drowning being the hazard of any feeder that brought bees into proximity with liquid, the bees' inability to swim being one of the few physical limitations of an organism that could fly and navigate and communicate and thermoregulate and build architectural structures of mathematical precision but that could not float, and a bee that fell into syrup was a dead bee, and a dead bee in the feeder was a bee that the feeding had killed rather than sustained, and Meg used the screened feeders because the screened feeders prevented this, the screen allowing the bees to stand on the mesh and extend their proboscises into the syrup below without falling in.

She poured the syrup. The thick liquid ran from the bucket into the feeder tray, the syrup settling around the screen, the bees immediately appearing at the screen's edge, their antennae detecting the sugar, their proboscises extending, the feeding beginning within seconds of the pouring, the colony's response to incoming food as immediate and as urgent as the colony's response to any signal — the response of an organism tuned by evolution to exploit every resource as quickly as possible, to take what was offered, to store what could be stored, to convert the present abundance into the future's insurance.

The feeding was the covenant's second half.

Meg had taken the surplus. She had pulled the supers. She had extracted the honey. She had bottled it and sold it and counted the revenue. And now she was giving back. She was pouring the syrup into the feeders because the honey she had taken needed to be replaced, because the colonies needed stores to survive the winter, because the covenant said: you take the surplus, you leave the need, and if the taking exceeded the leaving then the feeding corrected the imbalance, the syrup being the correction, the beekeeper's repayment, the obligation fulfilled.

She did not resent the feeding. She did not think of the syrup as a cost, though it was a cost — the sugar, purchased in fifty-pound bags from the restaurant supply store in Salem, four bags per feeding round, three feeding rounds in September and October, six hundred pounds of sugar total, the sugar costing roughly four hundred dollars, the four hundred dollars being part of the operating expenses that the honey revenue covered. She did not think of it as a cost because the feeding was part of the cycle, was part of the year, was part of the practice, and the practice did not separate the giving from the taking, the practice did not put the taking on one ledger and the giving on another, the practice was both, was the whole cycle, was the covenant entire, and the covenant was the relationship, and the relationship was the thing.

She fed the home apiary. She drove to the Johansson apiary, the Morrison apiary, the Kowalski apiary. She carried the buckets across the fields and along the fence lines to the hives that sat in their rows facing southeast, the hives that had been strong in July and that were now contracting, the populations declining as the queen's laying slowed, the brood nest shrinking from the ten frames of June to the six frames of September to the four frames of October, the colony drawing down, pulling in, the organism preparing for winter by becoming smaller.

The becoming-smaller was intentional. The becoming-smaller was the colony's strategy for winter survival. A smaller colony consumed less food. A smaller colony needed fewer stores. A smaller colony could maintain the cluster's core temperature with less metabolic effort. The contraction was not decline. The contraction was preparation. The contraction was the colony choosing to be less so that it could continue to be.

The drones were being expelled. Meg saw them at the entrances of the hives — the drones, the males, the large-bodied, large-eyed bees whose sole function was reproductive, whose sole purpose was to fly to the drone congregation area and mate with a virgin queen, and the mating season was over, and the drones' function was complete, and the colony no longer needed them, and the colony could not afford to feed them through the winter, and so the workers expelled them. The workers grabbed the drones by the legs and the wings and dragged them to the entrance and pushed them off the landing board, the drones falling to the ground, unable to feed themselves — drones could not forage, had never foraged, did not have the pollen baskets or the wax glands or the stinger that workers had, the drones being the colony's reproductive investment rather than its productive workforce — and the expelled drones wandered in the grass in front of the hive for a day or two, attempting to re-enter, being repelled, being expelled again, and eventually dying, the dying being the end of the drone's purpose, the purpose having been reproduction and the reproduction being over and the organism that existed only for reproduction having no further reason to exist.

Meg watched the expulsion. She watched the workers dragging the drones across the landing board, the struggle at the entrance, the small violence of the eviction, and she did not anthropomorphize it, did not see in it the metaphor of the husband expelled from the house, did not draw the line between the drone pushed from the landing board and the man who had walked through the door with a suitcase. The parallel was there. The parallel was obvious. But the parallel was wrong, because Gavin had not been a drone, had not been a reproductive specialist whose function was complete, had been a partner, a person, a man who had contributed to the household in ways that were not biological and that could not be reduced to function, and the leaving had not been an expulsion but a departure, not the colony's judgment but the man's choice, and the choice and the judgment were different things, and the difference mattered, and Meg maintained the difference in her mind the way she maintained the distinction between the bees' behavior and human behavior, the distinction that kept her honest, that kept her from the easy slide into metaphor that would have made the bees' lives into parables for her own.

The bees were not parables. The bees were bees. The bees did what bees did. And Meg did what Meg did. And the doing was separate even when it rhymed.

Luz helped with the feeding. They drove together now, the two trucks no longer necessary, Luz riding in the passenger seat of Meg's truck, the Subaru left at the house, the riding-together being one of the small changes of the season's second half, the change from the two-vehicle parallel of the early months to the single-vehicle proximity of the later months, the change that Meg had not decided upon but that had occurred naturally, the way the colony's changes occurred naturally, the contraction from the expanded summer configuration to the tighter fall configuration happening without a decision, without a conversation, without the explicit negotiation that humans theoretically required, just the gradual drawing-closer that the season's rhythm produced.

They talked in the truck. They talked about the feeding — how much syrup per colony, how many rounds of feeding before the temperature dropped below fifty and the bees would no longer take the syrup down, the logistics of the fall schedule. They talked about the mite treatment — the oxalic acid vaporization that Meg would do in October when the brood nest was smallest, when the most mites would be on the bees rather than in the cells, when the treatment would be most effective. They talked about the winterizing — the insulation, the mouse guards, the moisture management, the preparations that would occupy October and that would be the last work of the beekeeping year.

And they talked about after. After the season. The conversation that Meg had been deferring, the conversation that Luz had opened at the honey house when she said "I want to do this" and that Meg had deflected with "After the season," and the season was ending now, was September, was the fall feeding and the mite treatment and the winterizing, and the "after" was approaching the way the winter approached — gradually, inevitably, the shortening days marking its advance, the season's clock running down.

"What does 'this' look like," Meg said. She said it in the truck, driving to the Kowalski apiary, the fields on either side of the road brown with the stubble of the harvested grass seed, the valley in its September state, post-harvest, the productive frenzy of summer replaced by the quieter work of fall, the work of cleaning up and putting away and preparing for the next year.

"A partnership," Luz said. "Not just an apprentice. A partner. Someone who shares the work and shares the business and shares the — " She paused. The pause was the space where the sentence could have gone in several directions, the space where the word that came next would define the sentence's meaning, and the word that came next was important and Luz chose it carefully. "Shares the practice."

"The practice," Meg said.

"The practice. The beekeeping. The daily thing. The thing you do every day that is the thing you are."

Meg drove. The road curved along the creek, the creek low in September, the water reduced to a trickle in the gravel bed, the creek's annual contraction matching the colony's annual contraction, the landscape drawing down, pulling in, becoming less.

"I've been alone a long time," Meg said.

"I know."

"The alone is — it's a thing. It's a structure. You build the alone and you live in it and the living in it becomes the thing, and the thing becomes the structure, and the structure holds you up. And if you take the structure away — "

"You don't have to take the structure away. You can add to it. You can add a room. The alone stays. The alone is the house. But the house can have more rooms."

Meg drove. She thought about rooms. She thought about the hive, the standard Langstroth hive, the modular construction, the boxes that stacked, the supers that were added and removed, the hive that was designed to expand and contract, to grow in summer and shrink in winter, the architecture that accommodated change because the architecture was built for change, the boxes removable, the frames interchangeable, the system flexible, the system designed by a man in 1851 who had understood that the hive needed to be adjustable because the colony was adjustable, the colony expanding and contracting in response to the season, and the equipment needed to expand and contract with it.

The alone was a box. The alone was a single deep. You could add a super to a single deep. You could add two supers. The colony would fill the space if the space was there. The colony would not fill the space if the space was not there. The providing of the space was the beekeeper's job. The filling of the space was the colony's job. The beekeeper provided. The colony filled. The exchange was the practice. The practice was the thing.

"Okay," Meg said.

"Okay meaning — "

"Okay meaning let's talk about it. After the winterizing. When the season is done. Let's sit down and figure out what a partnership looks like. What the finances look like. What the responsibilities look like. What the — structure looks like."

"Okay," Luz said.

They drove to the Kowalski apiary. They carried the buckets to the hives. They poured the syrup. The bees took it down with the urgency of organisms that knew the winter was coming, that had been preparing for winter since July, that were in the phase of preparation that was the phase of urgency, the urgency not panicked but purposeful, the colony doing every task with the intensity of an organism that was running out of time, the days shortening, the temperature dropping, the forage diminishing, the window for preparation closing.

At the last hive, Meg poured the last bucket of syrup. She stood by the hive and she watched the bees at the feeder, the proboscises extending into the syrup, the bees' bodies still, their mouths working, the feeding happening in the silence of the apiary, the silence of September, the silence of the world pulling in.

She felt the season ending. She felt it the way the bees felt it — not as a thought, not as a knowledge, but as a physical sensation, a change in the body's response to the light and the air and the temperature, the body knowing what the mind had not yet articulated, the body preparing for the contraction that the winter required, the drawing-in that was not retreat but was strategy, the becoming-less that was the prerequisite for the enduring, the colony's wisdom that said: you cannot survive the winter at your summer size. You must become smaller. You must need less. You must let go of the drones and the excess workers and the expanded brood nest and the surplus stores, and the letting-go is the saving, and the saving is the surviving, and the surviving is the thing.

Meg had been at her summer size for too long. Meg had been expanded — not in the way of the thriving colony, not in the way of the productive hive at the peak of the flow, but in the way of the depleted colony, the colony that was large because it had not yet contracted, the colony whose size was the vestige of the previous season rather than the expression of the current one. She had been carrying the summer's weight into the fall — the weight of the alone, the weight of the house, the weight of the marriage's residue, the weight of the unsigned papers and the unanswered phone calls and the books on the shelf and the garden going to seed — and the weight was the weight, and the fall was the time to set the weight down, and the setting-down was the contraction, and the contraction was the preparation, and the preparation was the thing that let you survive.

The feeding would continue through September. Three rounds, two weeks apart, the syrup poured into the feeders, the feeders emptied by the bees, the stores building in the hive, the weight increasing, the colony banking its winter provisions, the provisions that would sustain the cluster through the months when nothing bloomed and the bees did not fly and the queen did not lay and the colony existed in its minimal state, the state of pure survival, the state of less.

Meg drove home. The sun was low. The valley was amber. The season was amber. Everything was the color of honey, the color of the thing the season produced, the color that was the visible wavelength of the year's work, and the year's work was ending, and the ending was not sad, was not the sadness that Meg had felt in the first fall after Gavin left, the fall that had felt like the falling, the fall that had been the season and the state simultaneously, the internal and the external collapse coinciding. This fall was different. This fall was the fall of the colony that was contracting on purpose, that was choosing to become less because less was the survival strategy, the fall that was preparation rather than decline, the fall that was the intentional drawing-in rather than the helpless diminishing.

She parked the truck. She went inside. She stood in the kitchen. The divorce papers were on the table. The queen-marking pen was beside them. The kitchen was quiet. The kitchen was September quiet, which was different from February quiet, different from the dead quiet of the winter house, the September quiet being the quiet of the world between seasons, the quiet of the pause, the quiet that was not empty but was waiting, was the held-breath quiet of the organism between the exhale of summer and the inhale of winter.

Meg looked at the papers. She looked at the pen. She sat down.

She would sign them soon. The signing was part of the contraction. The signing was the letting-go, the setting-down of the weight, the becoming-less that was the preparation for the enduring. The signing would not be an ending. The signing would be what the colony's fall contraction was — the reduction to the essential, the stripping-away of what was no longer needed, the honest accounting of what remained and what could be carried into the next season and what could not.

She sat at the table. She did not sign. But she sat, and the sitting was the proximity, the approach, the beekeeper near the hive, the smoker lit, the veil on, the hands ready.

Soon.

Outside, the bees fed. The syrup ran into the cells. The stores built. The colony prepared. The winter was coming. And the colony would be ready, because the colony was always ready, because readiness was what the colony did, because the colony did not wait for readiness to feel like readiness, the colony simply prepared, simply contracted, simply became less, and the becoming was the readiness, and the readiness was the thing, and the thing was happening, in the hives and in the house and in the woman at the table who was preparing, who was contracting, who was becoming less so that she could endure.