The Grandmother

Colony

Chapter 3: The Grandmother

Her grandmother's name was Ruth. Ruth Hollis, born Ruth Enger, a daughter of Norwegian immigrants who had settled in the Coast Range foothills west of Dallas, Oregon, in 1923 and who had cleared twelve acres of fir and alder and planted a small orchard and built a house and a barn and had lived there for forty years raising sheep and keeping bees, the beekeeping being the grandmother's work, not the grandfather's, the bees belonging to the women of the family the way the sheep belonged to the men, the division established not by discussion but by inclination, by the fact that Ruth's mother had kept bees and Ruth's mother's mother had kept bees in Stavanger before the emigration, the craft arriving in Oregon inside the women the way the queen arrives inside the swarm, carried, essential, the center around which the new colony organizes.

Meg was eight the first time her grandmother opened a hive in front of her. Not for her -- Ruth did not arrange demonstrations, did not curate experiences, did not believe in the pedagogical scaffolding that a later generation of adults would construct around children's encounters with the world. Ruth opened the hive because Ruth was opening the hive, because it was April and the hives needed checking, and Meg was there because Meg was visiting for the weekend, because Meg's mother had driven her from Salem on Friday evening and would pick her up on Sunday afternoon, and in between was the grandmother's world, and the grandmother's world was bees.

"Come," Ruth said. She did not say "Would you like to come" or "Do you want to see the bees" or any of the conditional invitations that would have given the child the option of refusal. She said "Come" the way she said everything, as a statement of what was happening, and what was happening was that Meg was going to the apiary, and the going was not optional, and the not-optional was not cruel but was Ruth's way, was the way of women who had been raised on farms where children participated in the work because the work needed participation and because the participation was the education and the education was the life.

The apiary was behind the barn, on a south-facing slope where the grass was short and the morning sun hit the hive entrances by seven-thirty and the afternoon shade from the Douglas firs reached the hives by four, the daily arc of light and shadow that Ruth had calibrated when she placed the hives thirty years earlier, the placement being one of the thousand decisions that constituted the practice, the decisions that accumulated over a lifetime of keeping bees and that became, in their accumulation, the practitioner's knowledge, the knowledge that could not be separated from the person who held it because the knowledge was not a set of facts but was a way of seeing, a way of being in relation to the organisms you tended, and the way was learned not from books but from hands, from the hands of the person who showed you.

Ruth's hands were already changing. The arthritis had begun in her fifties -- a thickening of the knuckles, a stiffness in the morning that took an hour of work to loosen, the work being the treatment, the movement being the medicine, the grandmother's hands needing to grip the hive tool and the frame and the smoker bellows in order to remain capable of gripping the hive tool and the frame and the smoker bellows, the use preserving the function, the function preserved by use, the circular logic of the working body that Ruth understood without articulating and that Meg would understand decades later when her own hands began the same conversation with their own limitations.

Ruth handed Meg the smoker. "Hold this," she said. The smoker was already lit -- pine needles and newspaper, the fuel that Ruth used and that her mother had used and that Meg would use for the rest of her life, the continuity of fuel being a small thing and a large thing simultaneously, the small thing being the practical fact that pine needles produced cool white smoke and were free and were everywhere, the large thing being the inheritance, the passing down of the specific knowledge that this fuel, in this smoker, produces this result, the knowledge that was trivial in isolation and profound in accumulation, the accumulated trivialities being the craft.

The smoker was heavy in Meg's hands. Meg was eight and the smoker was brass and the brass was warm from the fire inside and the bellows were stiff and the smoke came from the spout in a thin white plume that smelled of pine and char and the particular burned-paper smell that would, for the rest of Meg's life, be the smell of beginning, the smell that preceded the opening of the hive, the smell that said: we are approaching.

"Squeeze the bellows," Ruth said. "Two puffs at the entrance. Wait. Then we open."

Meg squeezed. The leather was cracked and stiff under her small hands and the squeeze produced a wheeze more than a puff, the smoke coming out thin and uncertain, and Ruth watched without correcting, without taking the smoker back, without the intervention that would have been efficient and would have been wrong, because the learning was in the doing and the doing required the fumbling and the fumbling required the patience of the teacher who understood that the first squeeze was never the right squeeze and that the hundredth squeeze would be and that the ninety-nine squeezes between were the education.

Ruth opened the hive. She lifted the cover and the inner cover and the sound came up, the sound that Meg heard for the first time in that moment and that she would hear ten thousand times and that she never forgot hearing for the first time -- the hum, the collective vibration of thirty thousand bees disturbed by the light and the air and the smoke and the presence of two humans above their home, the sound that was not one sound but was thirty thousand sounds blended into a single frequency, the frequency of the colony, the voice of the superorganism, and the voice said: we are here, we are alive, we are many, and you are in our space.

Meg did not step back. She did not flinch. She did not cry. She stood beside her grandmother and she looked into the hive and she saw the bees for the first time the way she would see them for the rest of her life -- not as insects, not as a swarm, not as the undifferentiated mass that a non-beekeeper sees when they see bees, but as a population, as a society, as a living system that was organized and purposeful and that moved across the frames with a coherence that the eight-year-old could not have named but that she recognized, the way a child recognizes music before she can read notation, the way a child recognizes language before she can diagram sentences, the recognition being prior to the analysis, the feeling being prior to the understanding.

"Put your hand here," Ruth said.

She took Meg's right hand and placed it on the top bar of a frame. Meg's hand was bare. Ruth had not given her gloves. Ruth did not wear gloves herself -- Ruth worked barehanded, always had, the bare hands being Ruth's philosophy and Ruth's pride, the philosophy that said: you cannot feel the hive through gloves, you cannot read the frame through leather, you cannot know the colony through the intermediary of a barrier, and the knowing requires the risk, and the risk is the sting, and the sting is the cost of the knowing, and the cost is acceptable because the knowing is essential.

Meg's bare hand on the top bar. The wood was warm. The wood was warm because the bees were warm, because thirty thousand metabolisms were generating heat inside the box, the collective thermogenesis that maintained the brood nest at ninety-three degrees while the April air outside was fifty-four, and the heat came through the wood and into Meg's palm and the heat was the first thing she learned about bees, before the biology and the behavior and the chemistry and the management, she learned the heat, she learned that bees were warm, that a hive was warm, that the colony's warmth was a fact you could feel with your hand on a wooden bar in April, and the feeling was the knowledge, and the knowledge was in the hand.

Ruth placed her own hands over Meg's. Ruth's hands were large and rough and the knuckles were thickened and the skin was dotted with the small white scars of a lifetime of stings, the scars that mapped Ruth's career the way the rings of a tree mapped its years, each scar a sting, each sting an encounter, each encounter a moment in the apiary when the bee's defense and the beekeeper's presence had intersected, and the intersection had left a mark, and the marks accumulated, and the accumulation was the record.

"Feel that," Ruth said. "That's the colony. That's what alive feels like."

She said it without emphasis, without the pedagogical weight that a teacher might have placed on the sentence, without the underlining that would have said: this is the lesson, pay attention. She said it the way she said everything, as a fact, as an observation, as the thing that was true, and the truth of it entered Meg through the palm of her hand and through her grandmother's hands on top of hers and through the vibration that came up through the wood and through the warm April air that smelled of pine smoke and beeswax and the particular vegetable sweetness of a hive in spring, and the truth settled somewhere inside Meg where truths settle in children, below the conscious, below the articulable, in the place where the body stores the things it knows before the mind has words for them.

Ruth pulled a frame. She held it in front of Meg, the frame alive with bees, the bees walking across the surface of the comb in their purposeful random way, the movement that looked chaotic to someone who had never watched bees and that looked organized to someone who had, and Meg had never watched bees and yet the organization was what she saw, the eight-year-old perceiving the pattern before the pattern could be named, the perception that was the gift, the gift that Ruth recognized because Ruth had the same gift, because Ruth had perceived the same pattern standing in the same apiary at approximately the same age, standing beside her own mother, her own hands on the same top bars.

"What do you see," Ruth said.

The question that Meg would ask Luz thirty years later, the question that was the teacher's prompt, the invitation to observe rather than to recite, and the question had come from Ruth, had originated in this moment, in this apiary, in the April afternoon with the smoke drifting and the bees humming and the eight-year-old looking at a frame of comb for the first time.

"Babies," Meg said.

She pointed at the capped brood. The cells with their tan convex caps, the cells that contained the developing pupae, the bees-in-progress, the not-yet-bees that were transforming inside their wax chambers from the soft white larvae they had been into the winged insects they would become, and Meg had called them babies because she was eight and because the word was the word she had for things that were young and growing and enclosed and waiting to emerge, and the word was not wrong, was not the word a beekeeper would use but was not wrong, because the brood was the colony's young, the colony's next generation, the colony's future enclosed in wax, and "babies" was as accurate as any other word for the thing that the cells contained.

Ruth did not correct her. Ruth did not say "brood" or "pupae" or any of the terms that the correction would have required. Ruth said, "Yes. Babies. And the babies need their mother. Can you find her?"

The queen hunt. The first queen hunt. Meg looked at the frame the way she would look at ten thousand frames in the decades that followed, scanning the surface for the shape that was different, the bee that was larger, the bee that moved differently, and she did not find her, could not find her, because finding the queen was a skill that required hundreds of hours of looking and Meg had been looking for thirty seconds, and the not-finding was the beginning of the skill, the not-finding being the first lesson, which was: the queen is there, the queen is always there, and you cannot see her yet, and the not-yet is the apprenticeship, and the apprenticeship is the years you will spend learning to see what is there.

"I can't find her," Meg said.

"You will," Ruth said. "Next time, or the time after that. You'll find her."

Ruth found her. Ruth pointed with the hive tool, the flat blade hovering above the queen without touching her, and Meg looked and there she was, the queen, the longer body, the tapered abdomen, walking across the comb with her retinue of attendants, and Meg saw her and the seeing was the revelation, was the moment when the pattern resolved, when the figure emerged from the ground, and Meg felt the feeling that she would feel every time she found a queen for the rest of her life -- the small satisfaction of the finding, the click of the recognition, the yes that the body produced when the eyes found what the eyes were looking for.

"There she is," Meg said.

The first time she said it. The first of ten thousand times. The words that were the beekeeper's essential declaration, the finding of the center, the confirmation that the colony was whole.

Ruth closed the hive. They walked back to the house, the grandmother and the granddaughter, the smoker in Ruth's hand still trailing a thin line of white, the smoke dissipating in the April air, and they walked on the path between the apiary and the barn that Ruth had walked every day for thirty years, the path worn into the grass by the passage of boots, the path that was the commute, the daily route between the domestic and the professional, between the kitchen where Ruth made her coffee and the apiary where Ruth did her work, and the path was as much a part of the practice as the smoker or the hive tool, was the approach, was the physical transition from one world to the other.

In the kitchen, Ruth made tea. She made it in the pot she always used, the brown ceramic pot with the chipped lid, and she poured two cups and gave one to Meg, the tea weak and sweetened with honey, the honey from the hives they had just visited, the honey that was the product of the bees that Meg had just seen for the first time, and the drinking of the tea was the closing of the circle, the consumption of the thing the bees had made, the beekeeper and the granddaughter sitting at the kitchen table in the farmhouse in the Coast Range foothills drinking the thing the bees had produced from the flowers of the fields and the orchards and the wild places of the valley, the honey traveling from the flower to the bee to the comb to the jar to the pot to the cup to the mouth of the child who would grow up to keep bees herself, the chain unbroken, the transmission complete in its most literal form: the craft enters through the hands and through the mouth.

Ruth had sayings. Not many -- Ruth was not a woman of many words, was a woman of few words and specific words, the words chosen the way the hive placement was chosen, with attention to orientation and exposure and the practical requirements of the thing the words were meant to do. The sayings were the curriculum compressed, the thirty years of practice reduced to sentences that Ruth spoke in the apiary the way other people spoke proverbs at dinner, the sentences arriving not as lessons but as observations, as things Ruth said while working, the way she said everything, as accompaniment to the work rather than as substitute for it.

"The bees don't need you. You need the bees." She said this while scraping propolis from a frame, the hive tool working the waxy resin from the wood, the physical labor and the philosophical statement occurring simultaneously, the saying being the work's commentary on itself, and the meaning being: do not mistake your role. You are not essential to the colony. The colony existed for twenty million years before you arrived. The colony will exist after you are gone. Your role is not to be needed but to be useful, and usefulness is a different thing from necessity, is a humbler thing, is the position of the servant rather than the master, and the position of the servant is the correct position for the beekeeper.

"You clean the box. You scrape the frames. You assess the comb. And then you decide: is this equipment worth using again, or has it gone too far?" She said this while cleaning a deadout, the dead bees falling from the frames into the grass, the sound of them like dry seeds, and the saying was about beekeeping and was about everything else, was about the assessment that a person made of the things in her life -- the tools, the relationships, the habits, the structures -- the assessment that asked: is this still functional, is this still serving its purpose, or has it deteriorated beyond the point of repair, and if it has, can you set it down, can you replace it, can you move on to the next frame with the next comb and the next colony and the next season, or will you hold on to the thing that is no longer working because the holding is easier than the releasing and the easier is the trap.

"A hive is honest the way most people aren't." She said this often, said it the way other people said "good morning," as a greeting, as a daily acknowledgment of the fundamental truth of her practice, the truth that the hive could not deceive and did not evade and that the information the hive contained was available to anyone who knew how to read it, and the reading was the skill, and the skill was the life, and the life was honest because the life was spent among honest organisms.

"Use your bee eyes, Margaret. Don't look at one thing. See everything." She said this in the apiary, standing behind Meg, watching Meg inspect a frame, and the saying was the instruction in the way of seeing that beekeeping required, the peripheral vision, the wide-focus gaze that took in the whole frame and the whole hive and the whole apiary simultaneously, the seeing that was not looking-at but looking-with, the seeing that was the beekeeper's primary tool, more essential than the smoker or the hive tool, the tool that could not be purchased or built but only developed, slowly, over years of practice, the eyes learning to see the way the hands learned to hold, by doing, by repetition, by the accumulation of the ten thousand frames that each taught the eyes something about what was there and what was missing and what the difference meant.

Meg visited Ruth every month through her childhood and into her teens. She drove herself when she got her license at sixteen, the twenty-minute drive from Salem to the farm in the foothills, the drive that became the commute, the regular pilgrimage to the apiary where she learned to light the smoker and hold a frame and find the queen and read the brood pattern and assess the stores and treat the mites and harvest the honey and winterize the hives, the curriculum delivered not in lessons but in seasons, each visit a chapter, each season a semester, the education structured by the biological calendar rather than the academic calendar, the bees teaching according to their own schedule, the swarm in May, the flow in June, the harvest in August, the winterizing in October, the deadout check in February, the cycle that was the syllabus, and the syllabus repeated every year, and every year Meg learned the same things at a deeper level, the knowledge spiraling inward like the hexagonal cells of the comb, each layer building on the one beneath it.

Ruth gave Meg the smoker in 2004. Ruth was eighty-one. The arthritis had taken her hands -- not suddenly, not dramatically, but with the slow accumulation that arthritis practiced, the incremental theft of grip and flexibility, the knuckles swelling, the fingers curving, the hands that had held ten thousand frames becoming hands that could not hold a coffee cup without pain, and the not-holding was the ending, was the moment when the body said: you are done, the work is over, and the overness was not negotiable, was not something that determination could override, was the biology of aging applied to the specific biology of the beekeeper's hands.

Ruth had sold her hives the previous fall. Forty colonies, sold to a beekeeper in Monmouth, the hives loaded on a truck and driven away, the apiary emptied, the south-facing slope behind the barn bare for the first time in forty years, the ground marked by the rectangles of compressed grass where the hive stands had sat, the rectangles visible from the kitchen window like the footprints of small buildings that had been removed, the evidence of the absent.

She gave Meg the smoker on a Saturday afternoon in September. They were sitting at the kitchen table, the table where they had drunk tea after Meg's first hive opening, and Ruth had set the smoker on the table between them, the Bingham brass smoker with the patched bellows, the smoker that Ruth had ordered from the Sears catalog in 1974 and that had been lit every working day of every beekeeping season for thirty years, the smoker whose brass was darkened and dented and whose bellows were cracked and patched and whose interior was coated with the carbon residue of three decades of pine needle and newspaper fires.

"This is yours now," Ruth said.

She did not say more. She did not make a speech. She did not attach conditions or expectations or the sentimental freight that another person might have attached to the passing of a tool from one generation to the next. She said "This is yours now" and the saying was the giving and the giving was complete.

Meg took the smoker. She held it. The brass was cool -- no fire inside, no smoke, the smoker dormant, the tool waiting for the next hand that would light it and pump the bellows and send the smoke into a hive, the next hand being Meg's hand, the hand that had first held this smoker at age eight and that would hold it for the next twenty-two years and counting, the hand that would light this smoker in the home apiary and the Morrison apiary and the Johansson apiary and the Kowalski apiary and the Williams apiary and every other apiary where Meg would place hives and tend bees and practice the craft that her grandmother had given her, the craft that had passed through women's hands like the queen's pheromone passed through the colony, hand to hand, body to body, the knowledge transferred by contact, by proximity, by the physical fact of one person standing beside another person and doing the thing and the other person watching and learning and doing and the doing becoming the knowing and the knowing becoming the self.

Ruth died in 2009. She died in the farmhouse, in the bedroom she had slept in for sixty years, in the bed where she had slept beside her husband until his death in 1997 and alone after, the alone of a farm woman whose husband had died and whose bees had been sold and whose hands could not hold the things they had held and whose life had contracted to the house and the kitchen and the chair by the window where she sat in the mornings and looked at the slope behind the barn where the hives had been and where the compressed grass rectangles had long since grown over and the evidence of the absent was gone.

Meg was at the funeral. Meg stood in the cemetery in Dallas, Oregon, in November rain, and she did not cry, because Ruth would not have cried, because crying was not what the Hollis women did, and the not-crying was Ruth's inheritance as much as the smoker was, the inheritance of the exoskeleton, the hard exterior that bore the load and did not show the weight, and Meg carried both inheritances, the smoker and the not-crying, the tool and the stoicism, the thing that let you approach and the thing that kept you from being approached, and the two inheritances were the two halves of the practice, the openness to the bees and the closedness to the world, and Meg carried them both and would carry them both and the carrying was the practice and the practice was the life.

The smoker sits on the shelf in the bee shed. Meg takes it down in February and lights it with pine needles and newspaper and pumps the bellows and the smoke rises and she approaches. She approaches the way Ruth approached, slowly, deliberately, with the tool of approach in one hand and the hive tool in the other, the two tools that Ruth had used and that Ruth's mother had used, the tools that were the beekeeper's hands extended, the hands reaching into the hive through the mediation of smoke and steel, the hands doing what hands had done in this family for four generations, the opening of the box, the looking inside, the finding of the queen, the saying of the words: there she is.

The smoker is brass. The smoker is patched. The smoker smells of a thousand fires. And the smoker is Ruth's, and is Meg's, and will be the next person's, whoever the next person is, the person whose hands will hold it after Meg's hands can no longer hold it, and the holding will be the inheritance, and the inheritance will be the craft, and the craft will be the thing that the women pass to each other, hand to hand, the pheromone of practice, the signal that says: the queen is here, the queen is present, the colony continues.