Pollination

Colony

Chapter 7: Pollination

The truck arrived at three in the morning. Not Meg's truck — the flatbed, the rented Peterbilt that she hired from a hauling company in Woodburn for the five weeks of pollination season, a truck large enough to carry sixty hives stacked two-high on pallets, strapped down with ratchet straps, the hive entrances screened shut with wire mesh to keep the bees inside during transport, the mesh stapled to the landing boards the evening before when the foragers had returned and the full population was home. Moving bees at night. Moving bees when they are inside. Moving bees the way you move anything that would resist being moved if it were aware of the moving.

Meg had screened the home apiary hives the previous evening, after the last foragers had returned, after the entrance traffic had dwindled to the occasional guard bee walking the landing board, the sentinels that stood at the hive entrance and inspected each arriving bee by antennating her, touching her with their antennae, reading her chemical identity — colony scent, the blend of pheromones and wax and propolis that was unique to each colony, the chemical passport that said: I belong here, I am one of you, let me in. Bees without the right scent were turned away or killed. Robber bees — bees from other colonies attempting to steal honey — were fought at the entrance, the guard bees grappling with the intruders in the small violent confrontations that Meg could see at the entrance of any hive during a dearth, when nectar was scarce and the strong colonies raided the weak.

She had screened the entrances and the bees had buzzed against the mesh, confused, their exit blocked, their evening orientation disrupted, and they would buzz through the night, the colony's agitation audible as a higher-pitched hum, the sound of fifty thousand insects that could not leave and did not understand why. Meg did not feel guilt about this. Meg felt the practical concern of a beekeeper who needed her colonies calm and intact at the destination, and the screening was the method, and the method worked, and the working was the justification.

The driver's name was Tom. He had been driving the pollination truck for Meg for seven years, a quiet man in his sixties who had hauled cattle before he hauled bees and who treated the hives with the same impersonal competence he had applied to livestock — careful with the cargo not because he cared about the cargo sentimentally but because damaged cargo was bad business, and a dropped hive was sixty pounds of angry bees in the dark, which was bad for everyone. Tom backed the flatbed down the gravel drive with the skill of a man who had backed flatbeds down gravel drives for forty years, the truck's running lights casting red shadows across the apiary, the diesel idle a bass note beneath the higher hum of the screened hives.

Meg and Luz were already suited up. Suiting up at three in the morning, in the dark, by the light of the truck's headlamps, the fabric cold against the skin, the veil fogging with breath in the chill air, the gloves stiff, the whole ritual of preparation conducted in the particular silence of people who are working before dawn because the work requires it, not because they chose it, and the silence was not uncomfortable, was the silence of shared labor, the silence that Meg had known in every predawn loading she had done for twenty years, the silence of the agricultural world that operates on the schedule of biology rather than the schedule of preference.

They loaded the hives. Each hive: two deep boxes, a bottom board, an inner cover, a telescoping cover, the whole unit strapped together with a hive strap, the strap cinched tight to prevent the boxes from shifting during transport, the strap a nylon ratchet strap that Meg had bought in bulk from a trucking supply company, the same straps used to secure pallets of lumber or stacks of pipe, repurposed for bees, because beekeeping equipment was improvised as often as it was purchased, the beekeeper's world a world of adapted tools, of objects designed for one purpose and used for another, the feed-store ingenuity of people who worked with living systems and who therefore worked with the unpredictable and therefore needed tools that could be bent to fit the situation rather than tools that required the situation to fit them.

Each hive weighed between sixty and ninety pounds depending on the stores — the honey and pollen the bees had accumulated, the weight of food that would sustain them during the move and the first days at the new location before the foragers found the orchard's bloom and began working it. Meg and Luz each took an end. They lifted with the legs, the way you lift heavy things if you want to keep lifting heavy things for decades, the hive between them, the bees buzzing inside, the vibration transmitted through the wooden walls into their gloved hands, the bees' agitation palpable, physical, the feeling of holding a box that contained a living system that objected to being held.

They placed each hive on the truck. Tom strapped them down. The work was physical and rhythmic, the loading a choreography — walk to hive, lift, carry, place, strap, walk to the next hive — and the rhythm was the work, and the work was the thing, and by four-thirty the truck held all eight hives that were going to Diane's orchard, the first drop of the pollination season, and Tom climbed into the cab and Meg climbed into her truck and Luz climbed into the Subaru and they drove in convoy through the dark valley, the headlights cutting the fog that had settled in the bottomland along Panther Creek, the fog that was a Willamette Valley signature, the advection fog that formed when warm moist air from the coast moved over the cold valley floor and condensed into the white blanket that filled the valley like milk in a bowl, and the driving through fog was the driving of every early morning in the valley, the slow careful navigation of a landscape made invisible by its own climate.

Diane's hazelnut orchard was twelve miles south, on a rise above the valley floor where the fog was thinner, the trees visible in the predawn gray, the rows of hazelnuts — Yamhill variety, the cultivar developed at Oregon State for the Willamette Valley's climate and soils, resistant to Eastern filbert blight, the fungal disease that had devastated the older Barcelona variety and that had remade the hazelnut industry in the valley, the old orchards pulled out, the new varieties planted, the landscape changed by biology the way landscapes are always changed by biology, by disease and adaptation and the human response to both.

Diane was waiting at the gate. She was a tall woman, fifty-five, her hair gray and cut short, wearing the uniform of the Willamette Valley farmer — Carhartt jacket, mud boots, a cap from the seed company that supplied her cover crop seed. She opened the gate and waved the truck through and walked alongside it as Tom backed down the orchard lane to the spot Meg had chosen for the hives, a level area at the end of a row, south-facing, protected from the prevailing west wind by a line of Douglas firs that bordered the property, the placement deliberate, the orientation considered, because the placement of hives in a pollination orchard was not arbitrary but was the product of experience — how far would the bees fly? (Up to two miles, but most foraging occurred within half a mile.) Which direction would they work? (They would fan out from the hives in all directions but would concentrate on the nearest bloom.) Where was the water source? (Diane had a stock tank for her cattle, three hundred yards south, and the bees would find it and use it, the water necessary for brood rearing, for cooling the hive, for the dilution of honey into the liquid food the nurse bees fed the larvae.)

They unloaded the hives. Each one lifted from the truck, carried to its position, set on the concrete blocks Meg had placed the week before, the blocks leveling the hive on the sloping ground, the entrance facing southeast, away from the prevailing wind, toward the morning sun that would warm the hive entrance and stimulate the bees to begin foraging early, the early foraging increasing the pollination efficiency, the efficiency being the thing the farmer paid for, the thing the contract specified, the thing that Meg's livelihood depended on.

The contract was simple. Meg provided eight hives for six weeks — the duration of the hazelnut bloom and the early spring period when the bees would also be available for the blueberry and cherry and other crops in the area. Diane paid eighty dollars per hive per week. The math: eight hives times eighty dollars times six weeks, thirty-eight hundred and forty dollars. Multiply that by the twelve pollination contracts Meg held across the valley — different crops, different farmers, different hive counts, different durations — and the pollination income was the foundation of her business, the reliable revenue that came before the honey harvest, the income that paid the truck rental, the fuel, the equipment costs, the queen purchases, the sugar for fall feeding, the operating expenses of a two-hundred-hive operation that was profitable but not wealthy, that sustained one person's life and one person's truck and one person's mortgage and the apprentice's wages, which Meg paid at eighteen dollars an hour, which was what she could afford, which was less than Luz had earned as a teacher but which Luz had accepted without negotiation because the work was what Luz wanted and the wanting was a form of compensation that did not appear on a pay stub.

Meg unscreened the hive entrances. She pulled the mesh from each landing board and the bees emerged immediately, the first foragers spilling out of the entrance into the dawn light, orienting, circling the front of the hive in the widening spirals that bees flew when they were learning a new location, imprinting the landmarks, the position of the sun, the angle of the trees, the visual and olfactory map that they would carry in their brains for the rest of their lives, the map that would bring them back to this exact spot from a flower two miles away, the navigation system that operated on principles — sun compass, polarized light, landmark memory, odor gradient — that scientists understood individually but that no one had fully integrated into a model of how a brain the size of a sesame seed processed and stored and retrieved the information necessary to fly a complex route through a three-dimensional landscape and return to a six-inch-wide entrance on a wooden box.

The bees found the hazelnut trees within an hour.

The hazelnut bloom was not a showy bloom. Hazelnuts did not produce the extravagant petals of a cherry or apple blossom. Hazelnuts produced catkins — the male flowers, long drooping cylinders of pollen that hung from the branches like earrings, the pollen released in clouds when the wind shook the trees, the yellow dust drifting through the orchard on the slightest breeze. The female flowers were nearly invisible — tiny red tufts emerging from the buds, each tuft a stigma waiting for pollen, and the pollen that landed on the stigma fertilized the ovule and the ovule became the nut, the hazelnut, the kernel in the shell that would be harvested in September and sold to the processors who turned it into the hazelnut butter and hazelnut flour and chocolate-hazelnut spread that the world consumed without knowing that the nut existed because a bee had visited the tree, or because the wind had carried the pollen, or because both — because hazelnuts were wind-pollinated primarily but insect-pollinated secondarily, the bees increasing the yield by ten to fifteen percent, the percentage that made the difference between a profitable year and a marginal year, the percentage that Diane paid Meg for, the percentage that justified the contract, the truck, the predawn loading, the whole apparatus of commercial pollination.

Meg watched the bees in the trees. This was the sound. This was the sound of pollination, which was the sound of ten thousand bees in hazelnut catkins, the sound of wings and bodies moving through the pollen-laden flowers, the sound of the agricultural economy made audible, the hum that underwrote the food supply, the hum that most people had never heard and would never hear because most people did not stand in hazelnut orchards at seven in the morning in April watching bees work, most people bought hazelnuts in a bag at the grocery store and did not think about the catkins or the stigmas or the bees or the beekeeper who had loaded the hives at three in the morning and driven them through the fog and placed them at the end of the row facing southeast and unscreened the entrances and watched the first foragers spiral into the dawn.

Diane brought coffee. She walked down the orchard row with two mugs, the coffee black, the mugs ceramic, not paper, because Diane did not use paper cups, did not buy paper cups, considered paper cups an unnecessary expense and an unnecessary waste, the frugality of a farmer whose margins were measured in percentages and whose expenses were scrutinized with the attention that margins require. She handed Meg a mug and stood beside her and they watched the bees in the trees and drank their coffee and did not speak for a while because the not-speaking was comfortable, was the register of a friendship that had been built over a decade of living on adjacent properties and seeing each other at the feed store and the farmer's market and the county fair and the agricultural extension meetings and the slow accumulation of shared experience that constituted rural friendship, the friendship of proximity and shared labor and the mutual understanding that came from being women who worked the land in a valley where working the land was still the primary enterprise and where women who worked the land were not unusual but were not the default, were still noticed, were still remarked upon in the particular way that the valley's older generation remarked upon things that were different from how things used to be.

"How many this year," Diane said.

"Eight, same as last year."

"They look good."

"They're building. The spring is warm. They should be strong by the time the catkins are fully out."

"The catkins are early this year. Two weeks early. Everything is early."

"Everything is early every year now."

This was true. The bloom times had shifted. Meg had records going back twenty years — her notebooks, her spreadsheets, the cumulative data of a beekeeper who noted the date of first dandelion, first maple pollen, first cherry bloom, first blackberry, the phenological calendar that tracked the valley's seasons by what was blooming rather than by the arbitrary dates of the human calendar, and the phenological calendar was shifting, the blooms coming earlier, the seasons starting sooner, the gap between winter and spring narrowing, the whole seasonal clock advancing by increments that were small in any individual year and significant across a decade, the warming that was not debatable, was not political, was botanical, was recorded in the bloom dates in Meg's notebooks, was written in the language of flowers rather than the language of policy.

"How are the trees," Meg said.

"Good. The blight is managed. The new varieties are holding up. I've got forty acres of Yamhill and ten of Jefferson and I'm planting five more of Dorris this fall."

"Expanding."

"Expanding." Diane drank her coffee. "The market is good. The processors want Oregon hazelnuts. The Turkish crop was short last year. Prices are up. So I'm planting."

Meg nodded. Expansion was the sign of a healthy operation — the agricultural equivalent of the colony building comb, adding population, filling supers with honey. A farm that was expanding was a farm that was responding to the signal: conditions are good, resources are available, grow.

"You should expand too," Diane said.

"I'm at two hundred."

"You could go to three hundred. You've got the pollination contracts. The demand is there. The almond growers in California are paying two hundred a hive now. You could send fifty hives south in February and make ten thousand dollars in three weeks."

"I don't send bees to California."

"I know you don't."

"The almond operation kills bees. The stress, the travel, the pesticide exposure, the mixing of colonies from all over the country in the same orchards — it's a disease incubator. I'd send fifty hives south and get back thirty, and the thirty would bring Varroa and nosema and whatever new virus is circulating in the Central Valley. I'd contaminate my whole operation."

"I know," Diane said. "I'm just saying the money is there."

"The money is always there. The money is not the question."

Diane looked at her. Diane had the look that Diane had when she was about to say something that was not about farming, the look that preceded the observations that Diane made about Meg's life with the carefully calibrated directness of a woman who understood exactly how much directness Meg could tolerate, which was not much, which was the directness of a glancing blow rather than a frontal assault, and Diane had learned this calibration over a decade of friendship and had learned it the way Meg had learned to read the hive entrance — by observation, by the accumulation of experience, by the long attention to another person's signals.

"You're working yourself too hard," Diane said. "Two hundred hives alone."

"I have Luz now."

"For how long? An apprentice is temporary. Apprentices learn and leave."

"Maybe."

"Definitely. That's what apprentices do. They apprentice. And then they become the thing they were apprenticing for. And then they go do the thing somewhere else."

Meg drank her coffee. The bees hummed in the trees above them. A forager landed on the rim of Meg's mug, attracted by the heat or the color or some olfactory cue that Meg could not identify, and Meg watched the bee walk the rim, the antennae testing the surface, the proboscis extending briefly to taste the ceramic — no sugar, no nectar, nothing — and the bee flew off, returned to the trees, resumed the work, the brief detour already forgotten, already overwritten by the navigational urgency of the foraging flight, the single-minded purpose of an organism that was built to find food and bring it home and communicate its location to others and nothing else, no distraction, no ambiguity, no lingering on the rim of a coffee mug wondering what the mug meant.

"I'm fine," Meg said.

"I know you're fine. Fine is your whole thing. You are the finest person I know. You are fine the way a fence post is fine. Standing there. Holding up the wire. Not complaining. Not moving. Just fine."

"That's a lot of metaphor for seven in the morning."

"I'm a farmer. We get up early. The metaphors come with the sunrise."

They finished their coffee. Diane went back to her work — she was pruning the young trees in the new planting, the five-acre block of Jefferson variety that she had planted two years ago and that would not produce a commercial crop for another three years, the long timeline of tree crops, the patience of a farmer who planted for a harvest she would not see for five years and who maintained the trees in the interim with the faith that the harvest would come if the work was done, and the faith was not spiritual, was agricultural, was the faith of a person who had planted trees before and had harvested them before and who knew from experience that the sequence — plant, tend, wait, harvest — worked, had always worked, would work again if the climate cooperated and the blight stayed managed and the price held and the bees came.

The bees came. That was Meg's part of the equation. The bees came because Meg brought them, and Meg brought them because Diane paid her, and Diane paid her because the bees increased the yield, and the yield was the point, and the point was the economy, the agricultural economy that operated on the exchange of services between organisms and between people, the exchange that had no sentiment but had structure, the structure of contracts and payments and delivery dates and hive counts, the structure that organized the relationship between the beekeeper and the farmer the way the pheromone organized the relationship between the queen and the colony — chemically, functionally, without ambiguity.

Meg spent the rest of the day moving hives to other pollination sites. The cherry orchard on the Eola Hills: fifteen hives, positioned at the end of alternating rows, the cherry bloom imminent, the buds swelling, the pink showing at the tips, the bloom that would open in a week and that would be the most important two weeks of the cherry grower's year, the two weeks when the bees would work the blossoms and the pollination would occur and the cherries would set and the crop would be made. The blueberry farm south of Amity: twelve hives, placed among the blueberry rows, the blueberry bloom later than the cherry but overlapping, the bees working both crops if the flight distance was manageable, the foragers choosing the most rewarding source by the quality of the nectar and the distance from the hive, the economic calculation that every forager made on every flight — is this trip worth the energy? Is the nectar concentrated enough, the distance short enough, the reward sufficient to justify the expenditure of the flight? — the calculation that determined which crops got pollinated well and which got pollinated poorly, the free market of the bee economy operating within the planned economy of the beekeeper's placements.

By evening the pollination drops were done. Sixty hives moved to five locations. Meg drove home in the long light, the valley gold and green, the orchards in early bloom, the fields greening with the cover crops that would be plowed under in May, the landscape at its most hopeful, the landscape of potential, the landscape that said: the season is beginning, the work is ahead, the harvest is possible.

She pulled into the driveway. She parked the truck. She sat in the cab for a moment, the engine off, the truck ticking as the metal cooled, the quiet of the home property settling around her, and she was tired, the tiredness of a day that had begun at two-thirty in the morning and that had involved lifting several thousand pounds of hive boxes and driving a hundred miles of valley roads and standing in orchards watching bees and negotiating the logistical details of commercial pollination — which hives go where, when do they arrive, when do they leave, how many are needed, who is responsible if a bear gets into the apiary (the farmer), who is responsible if the farmer's pesticide spray kills the bees (the farmer, in theory, but the theory was tested by reality more often than Meg liked to think about), the details of the business that was not just beekeeping but was business, was contracts and logistics and customer relations and the management of a seasonal operation that compressed most of its revenue into five months and required the other seven months of preparation and maintenance and the holding on that winter required, the metabolic holding on that was the beekeeper's winter the way the cluster was the colony's winter.

She went inside. She ate. She sat at the table with the notebook and the laptop and she updated the pollination spreadsheet: hives placed, locations, dates, contract amounts, estimated removal dates. The spreadsheet was the business in numbers. The numbers were good. The contracts were filled. The colonies were strong. The season was beginning.

She closed the laptop. She looked out the window. The home apiary — the hives that had not been moved to pollination, the hives that stayed on the property because they were the honey-production colonies, the colonies that would stay in the home apiary and the other permanent sites and work the valley's wildflowers through the summer and produce the honey that was the other half of Meg's income, the half that came not from pollination but from harvest, not from the service of the bees but from the product of the bees, the honey, the surplus, the thing that the colony made and that the beekeeper took and that the farmer's market sold and that the label said was Willamette Valley Wildflower Honey and that was, in the most literal sense, the valley made edible, the landscape converted to food by the work of organisms too small to name individually and too numerous to count.

The hives were quiet in the evening. The bees were inside. The pheromone was circulating. The queens were laying. The season was starting.

And Meg was tired, and the tiredness was good, was the tiredness of work, was the tiredness of a body that had been used for its purpose, and the tiredness said: you did the thing, you moved the bees, you placed them in the orchards, you fulfilled the contract, you did your part of the exchange, and now you can rest, and the resting is earned, and the earned rest is the rest that lets you sleep, and Meg slept.