The Valley

Colony

Chapter 8: The Valley

The Willamette Valley runs north to south for a hundred and fifty miles, from Portland to Eugene, the valley floor flat and wide, twenty to forty miles across, bounded on the west by the Coast Range and on the east by the Cascades, the two mountain ranges framing the valley like the walls of a hive body frame the comb, the geography containing the climate, the climate producing the agriculture, the agriculture sustaining the bees, the bees sustaining the agriculture, the circle that was the valley's economy and the valley's ecology and the valley's identity, the circle that Meg drove through every morning in the dark of April with the headlights cutting the fog and the truck loaded with sugar syrup and the smoker on the seat beside her and the season beginning the way every season began, with the drive, with the road, with the valley.

She drove the county roads. She knew them the way the bees knew their flight paths -- by repetition, by the accumulation of thousands of passages, the roads memorized not as maps but as sequences, the sequence of turns and straightaways and bridge crossings and the particular potholes that appeared every February when the winter rain dissolved the asphalt's edges, the potholes that the county patched in May and that reappeared in November, the annual cycle of the road matching the annual cycle of the bees, the infrastructure decaying and being repaired and decaying again, the maintenance that was the condition of the valley's roads the way the maintenance was the condition of the valley's hives.

The fog was the valley's signature. Advection fog, the meteorologists called it -- warm moist air from the Pacific drawn inland through the Van Duzer Corridor and the other gaps in the Coast Range, the air cooling as it descended into the valley, the moisture condensing into the white blanket that filled the bottomland every morning from October to May, the fog that erased the landscape and that Meg drove through with the patience of a person who had driven through fog for twenty years and who understood that the fog was temporary, was the morning's condition, was the thing that would burn off by ten when the sun gained enough angle to heat the valley floor, and the burning-off was the revelation, the landscape appearing out of the white the way the brood pattern appeared when you pulled a frame, the thing becoming visible, the information emerging from the obscuring.

The valley emerged.

The hazelnut orchards first. The orchards were everywhere -- Yamhill County, Polk County, Marion County -- the rows of trees visible from the road as the fog thinned, the trees bare in early April, the catkins spent, the female flowers fertilized, the nuts beginning the long development that would carry them from the April pollination to the September harvest, five months of growing in the husk, and Meg knew these orchards because she placed hives in them, because the orchards were her clients, because Diane's orchard and the Morrison orchard and the Hansen orchard and the dozen other orchards that contracted her bees for pollination were the landmarks of her working landscape, the trees that she navigated by, the orchards that were as familiar to her as the rooms of her house.

Oregon grew ninety-nine percent of the hazelnuts produced in the United States. Meg knew this fact the way she knew the mite threshold or the queen's development period -- as essential data, as the number that contextualized her work, that placed her two hundred hives in the larger picture of an industry that produced forty thousand tons of hazelnuts per year from seventy thousand acres of orchards, the orchards that depended on pollination, the pollination that depended on bees, the bees that depended on beekeepers, the beekeepers who depended on the orchards, the dependency that was circular, was mutual, was the structure of the agricultural economy expressed in the relationship between the tree and the insect and the woman who moved the insect to the tree.

After the hazelnuts, the grass seed fields. The Willamette Valley was the grass seed capital of the world -- the ryegrass and the fescue and the bluegrass grown in fields that stretched from the road to the horizon, the fields green in April, the grass thick and uniform, the monoculture that the seed industry required, the single species planted in the single field for the single purpose of producing seed that would be harvested and cleaned and shipped to golf courses and lawns and parks and sports fields across the country and across the world, the seed that grew the grass that people walked on without knowing it came from here, from this valley, from these fields that Meg drove past every morning.

The grass seed fields did not need bees. Grass was wind-pollinated -- the pollen carried by air currents from the male flowers to the female flowers, the pollination that happened without the intermediary of an insect, the pollination that was older than the bees, older than the flowering plants that bees had co-evolved with, the wind being the original pollinator, the first mechanism, the mechanism that the flowering plants had improved upon by recruiting insects, by producing nectar, by advertising with petals and scent, the evolutionary innovation that had created the relationship between bee and flower that Meg's livelihood depended on.

But the grass seed fields mattered to the bees because the fields had margins. The margins -- the fence rows, the drainage ditches, the road shoulders, the strips of uncultivated land between the fields and the roads -- were where the wildflowers grew. The clover and the vetch and the dandelion and the wild radish and the bird's-foot trefoil, the plants that the seed farmers did not plant and did not spray and did not cultivate, the plants that grew because the soil allowed them and the sun reached them and the rain watered them, the plants that were the bees' forage, the nectar and pollen sources that sustained Meg's colonies through the spring and summer, the plants that were the ingredients of the honey she would harvest in August.

The wildflower margins were the bees' landscape within the valley's landscape. The bees did not see the valley the way Meg saw it -- the orchards and the fields and the vineyards and the farms. The bees saw the valley as a map of food sources, a landscape of nectar and pollen, the map changing weekly as the blooms progressed, the April map different from the May map different from the June map, the landscape in constant flux, the food supply shifting across the valley's geography as the species bloomed in sequence, each species at its appointed time, each bloom a window, the window opening and closing according to the temperature and the rainfall and the photoperiod and the genetics of the plant, the variables that no beekeeper controlled and that every beekeeper depended on.

The pollen calendar. Meg kept it in her head and in her notebooks, the sequence that she had been observing for twenty years and that she knew the way a priest knew the liturgical calendar, the sequence of observances that structured the year, each bloom an observance, each observance an event in the seasonal progression that was the beekeeper's religion if the beekeeper had a religion, which Meg did not, Meg having substituted the pollen calendar for the church calendar years ago, the substitution not deliberate but natural, the blooms replacing the saints' days, the nectar flows replacing the feast days, the biological calendar supplanting the ecclesiastical because the biological calendar was the one that mattered to the bees and the bees were the ones Meg attended.

February: the willows. The red willows along the creek, the first pollen of the year, the thin yellow catkins that appeared before the leaves, the catkins dusting the air with pollen so fine it looked like smoke, and the bees found it, the first foragers of the spring venturing out on warm afternoons, the temperature barely fifty degrees, the flights short, the pollen loads visible on the bees' hind legs as they returned to the hive, the bright yellow baskets that were the signal -- to the colony and to the beekeeper -- that the season had begun, that the fast was over, that the first food of the new year had arrived.

March: the maples. The big-leaf maples along the roads and the creeks, the red maples in the gardens, the pollen heavy and abundant, the orange and yellow loads that the foragers brought in by the thousands, the colony's protein supply replenished after the winter's depletion, the pollen that the nurse bees consumed and converted into the royal jelly and the brood food that fed the larvae, the protein that was the foundation of the spring buildup, the larvae needing pollen the way the colony needed the queen -- essentially, fundamentally, without substitute.

April: the cherries, the plums, the pears. The fruit tree bloom, the orchards' two weeks of extravagance, the petals white and pink, the nectar flowing, the bees working the blossoms from dawn to dusk on warm days, the pollination contracts in full effect, Meg's hives placed in the orchards earning their keep, the bees doing the work that the trees required and that the farmers paid for, the transactional heart of the agricultural relationship.

April also: the dandelions. The dandelions that most people cursed and that beekeepers blessed, the bright yellow flowers that appeared in every lawn and every field margin and every disturbed piece of ground in the valley, the flowers that produced both nectar and pollen and that were available in quantities that no cultivated crop could match, the dandelion being the valley's most reliable forage plant, the plant that bloomed from March through November, the plant that was always there, always producing, the baseline of the bees' diet, the bread of the pollen calendar.

May: the blackberries beginning, the clover beginning, the vetch in the field margins. The transition from the tree bloom to the ground bloom, the forage shifting from the canopy to the understory, the bees adjusting their flight patterns, the foragers that had been flying up into the cherry trees now flying down to the clover in the grass, the colony's orientation changing with the season, the dances on the comb pointing in new directions, the information updating daily as the landscape's menu changed.

June: the clover in full, the blackberry in full, the main flow, the weeks of abundance, the weeks that produced the honey, the weeks that were the point of the calendar, the liturgical climax, the feast day of the beekeeper's year.

July: the blackberry finishing, the clover finishing, the linden if there was linden, the star thistle on the dry hillsides, the forage thinning, the flow tapering, the abundance contracting, the season past its peak.

August: the goldenrod, the asters, the late-season flowers that produced the dark strong honey that some customers preferred and some did not, the honey that tasted of the year's ending, of the season's decline, of the last energy of the landscape before the rain came and the blooms stopped and the foraging ceased.

September, October: the ivy, the late dandelions, the scattered flowers that produced enough to sustain but not enough to store, the maintenance diet, the subsistence forage, the season's final offerings.

This was the calendar. This was the sequence. This was the valley expressed in bloom times, the landscape converted to a schedule of food production, the agricultural economy of the bees, the economy that Meg participated in by placing her hives where the blooms were, by moving the colonies to follow the food, by reading the landscape the way the foragers read the landscape -- where is the nectar, how far is it, how much is there, is it worth the flight.

She drove at dawn. She moved hives at dawn because dawn was when the bees were inside, when the full population was home, when the foragers had not yet left for the day's work, and moving a hive during the day meant leaving behind the foragers who were in the field, the bees that would return to the spot where their hive had been and find empty air and circle and search and eventually die, the lost bees, the orphaned foragers, and Meg did not lose bees if she could help it, did not orphan foragers, did not move hives during the day except in emergencies, the predawn move being the standard practice, the practice that required the two-thirty alarm and the three o'clock loading and the four o'clock driving and the five o'clock placing and the six o'clock unscreening, the schedule that was the beekeeper's version of the farmer's schedule, the up-before-the-sun schedule that the biology required and that the beekeeper obeyed because the beekeeper served the biology.

The truck moved through the valley. The headlights swept the fields, the fog, the road. The valley was dark and the valley was waking, the farms dark, the barns dark, the houses showing the first lights in the kitchens where the farmers were making coffee and pulling on boots and beginning the day that the agriculture required, the day that began before the day began, the pre-dawn labor of people who worked with living systems and who therefore worked on the systems' schedule rather than their own.

Meg was one of them. Meg was a farmer, though she did not grow crops, did not plant seeds, did not cultivate soil. She was a farmer of bees, a tender of colonies, a manager of populations, and her farm was the valley itself, her fields were the clover and the blackberry and the wildflowers that grew where they grew without her planting, her crop was the honey that the bees made from the nectar of flowers she did not own, and the farming was the tending, the moving, the placing, the feeding, the treating, the harvesting, the winterizing, the cycle that was the same cycle every farmer in the valley practiced, the cycle of invest and tend and harvest and rest and begin again.

The valley held her. The valley had held her for twenty years, since she and Gavin had moved from Portland, since they had bought the property on the county road south of McMinnville, since Meg had placed her first hives on the south-facing slope behind the house and had begun the work that would become her life, the work that the valley made possible because the valley was the place where bees could thrive, where the climate was mild and the rainfall was sufficient and the agriculture was diverse and the forage was abundant, the place that had been made for bees the way the hive body was made for the colony, the container that held the thing, the geography that held the biology, the valley that held the bees that held the beekeeper.

She loved the valley. She did not say this. She did not think the word "love" in connection with the landscape because the word seemed inadequate for the relationship, the relationship being not romantic but constitutional, not chosen but given, not the love of a person for a place but the belonging of an organism to its habitat, the way the bee belonged to the hive and the salmon belonged to the river and the hazelnut belonged to the alluvial soil of the valley floor, the belonging that was not emotional but biological, was the fit between the organism and the environment, the fit that said: this is where you function, this is where you produce, this is where you are the thing you are.

The sun cleared the Cascades. The fog burned. The valley appeared -- the orchards and the fields and the vineyards and the farms, the Coast Range blue to the west, the Cascades white to the east, the valley between them green and flat and impossibly fertile, the place where the food grew and the bees flew and the beekeeper drove her truck on the county road along Panther Creek with the smoker on the seat beside her and the season ahead and the work waiting and the pollen calendar turning its next page.

April. The cherries were opening. The dandelions were bright in every field. The bees were flying. And Meg was driving, driving through the valley that held her and her bees, the valley that was the hive, the valley that was the comb, the valley that was the thing that contained the thing that made the thing that was the honey, and the honey was the valley, and the valley was the honey, and the driving was the work, and the work was the morning, and the morning was April, and April was the beginning, and the beginning was always bees.