The Swarm

Colony

Chapter 9: The Swarm

She heard it before she saw it. The sound of a swarm is unlike any other sound in beekeeping — not the steady hum of a working colony, not the agitated buzz of a disturbed hive, not the high whine of a single bee near the ear, but a roar, a composite sound made of ten or fifteen or twenty thousand individual wing beats, the sound of a mass of bees in the air, airborne, unhoused, moving as a cloud, the cloud alive and purposeful and loud in a way that stopped Meg in the driveway where she was carrying a bucket of sugar syrup from the house to the truck, stopped her with the bucket in her hand and the sound above her, the sound that was the sound of departure, the sound of a colony dividing, the sound that was simultaneously the sound of success and the sound of loss.

The swarm came from hive number six in the home apiary, a strong colony, the strongest in the yard, a colony she had been watching for weeks because its population had been building fast, too fast, the frames packed with bees, the brood nest expanding into the honey stores, the colony running out of room, the queen running out of cells to lay in, and Meg had added a honey super two weeks ago to give them space but the space had not been enough, had been a room added to a house already bursting, and the colony had made the decision that strong colonies make when the space is insufficient and the population is at its peak and the season is right: the colony swarmed.

The swarm poured from the hive entrance like water from a pitcher, a stream of bees that became a river that became a flood, the bees pouring out and lifting into the air and joining the growing cloud that hung above the apiary, the cloud darkening and thickening as more bees emerged, the air filled with bodies, the sunlight filtering through the mass of wings, the sound enormous, the sound of biological exuberance, the sound of a colony at the peak of its strength expressing that strength in the most dramatic way a colony could express it — by dividing, by sending half of itself into the world, by reproducing not at the individual level but at the colony level, the super-organism producing a daughter organism, the hive giving birth to a hive.

The queen was in the swarm. The old queen, the mother queen, the queen Meg had marked with a white dot in March, was somewhere in that cloud of bees, flying for the first time since her mating flight years ago, her wings carrying her away from the hive she had inhabited since she first descended into the dark of the comb and began laying, the hive she had filled with her pheromone and her offspring, the hive that was hers in every biological sense, and she was leaving it, was being carried away by the momentum of the swarm, by the decision that was not hers, that was the colony's, that had been building for weeks in the form of swarm cells — the queen cells along the bottom of the frames that Meg had seen and considered destroying and had decided to leave because destroying swarm cells did not prevent swarming, only delayed it, the colony rebuilding the cells within days, the impulse too strong, the biological imperative too fundamental, the urge to divide as unstoppable as the urge to breathe.

Meg set down the bucket. She watched.

The swarm hung in the air for several minutes, the bees orbiting each other in the loose constellation of a swarm in flight, the cloud drifting slowly east across the yard, over the fence, toward the old pear tree that stood at the edge of the property, the pear tree that had been there when Meg and Gavin bought the place, the tree that had not been pruned in decades and that produced small hard pears that Meg did not pick and that fell in September and rotted on the ground and fed the yellowjackets, the tree that was ornamental by neglect, purposeless by default, and the swarm found it, or the scout bees found it, or the collective navigation of ten thousand bees oriented toward the tree's low-hanging branch the way a compass orients toward north, and the swarm began to land.

They landed in the way swarms land, which is a condensation — the cloud condensing into a liquid, the liquid condensing into a solid, the bees settling onto the branch and onto each other, each bee gripping the bee above her with her legs, the mass growing and shaping itself into the classic swarm cluster, the beard of bees, the pendant mass that hung from the branch like a living fruit, a cluster the size of a football, the surface of the cluster a writhing mat of bees and the interior of the cluster hollow, a cavity, the queen at the center surrounded by her retinue, the whole structure a temporary home, a bivouac, the swarm's resting place while the scout bees went out to search for a permanent cavity — a hollow tree, an empty hive box, a gap in a building's siding, any enclosed space of approximately forty liters that was dry and elevated and defensible, the specifications that scout bees evaluated with a thoroughness that would impress any real estate agent, each scout inspecting the candidate cavity, measuring it by walking its walls, assessing the entrance size, the orientation, the volume, and returning to the cluster to report by dancing, the same waggle dance used for nectar sources now repurposed for house hunting, the dance saying: this way, this far, this good.

The scout bees would dance. The other scouts would visit the advertised sites. The competing dances would continue for hours or days, the scouts debating through dance, the colony arriving at a consensus not by vote but by the dance equivalent of argument — the most vigorous dancers recruited the most followers, the most followers visited the best site, the best site accumulated the most support, and eventually one site dominated, one dance overwhelmed the others, and the swarm lifted from the branch and flew to the chosen cavity and moved in and began building comb and the new colony was established.

This was the process. This was what would happen if Meg did nothing.

Meg was not going to do nothing.

She walked to the bee shed. She assembled her swarm kit: a cardboard box, a white sheet, a pair of pruning shears, a spray bottle filled with sugar syrup. She carried the kit to the pear tree. The swarm hung from the branch, six feet off the ground, accessible, catchable, a gift of location because swarms often landed on branches thirty feet up, or on power lines, or on the eaves of buildings, or in the engine compartment of a parked car, and catching a swarm from any of these locations required ladders or bucket trucks or creativity, and Meg had caught swarms from all of these locations over the years, had climbed ladders in her bee suit to shake a cluster from a branch into a box, had cut branches with loppers and lowered them, had vacuumed swarms from wall cavities with a bee vacuum she had built from a shop vac and a five-gallon bucket, had done the things that beekeepers did when the bees decided to leave and the beekeeper decided to bring them back.

She spread the white sheet on the ground beneath the swarm. She held the cardboard box directly below the cluster. She reached up with her bare hand — she did not wear gloves for swarm catching, because swarm bees were the gentlest bees, bees gorged with honey, bees without a hive to defend, bees whose defensive impulse was at its lowest because defense requires territory and the swarm had no territory, was between territories, was in the transient state of an organism that had left one home and had not yet found another, and the transience made them docile, made them handleable, made them the only bees Meg touched with her bare skin.

She reached up and she gripped the branch above the cluster and she shook. A single sharp shake, the branch snapping downward, and the cluster released, the mass of bees falling into the box like a clump of living clay, the bees tumbling and separating and buzzing, the box suddenly full of bees and noise, the air above the branch full of bees that had not fallen, the stragglers, the ones who had not been in the main cluster, and Meg set the box on the white sheet and stepped back and waited.

If the queen was in the box, the colony would follow. The workers would detect the queen's pheromone emanating from the box and they would march toward it, walking across the white sheet — the sheet was white so Meg could see them, could watch the march, could read the direction of movement and know whether the queen was in the box or not — and the march would be orderly, deliberate, a procession of bees walking toward the pheromone source the way iron filings align toward a magnet, the invisible force of the queen's chemistry drawing the colony into the box, condensing the swarm from a dispersed cloud into a contained population.

The bees marched. They walked across the white sheet toward the box, their bodies dark against the fabric, their movement uniform, all moving in the same direction, and Meg watched them and the watching confirmed what the movement told her: the queen was in the box. The queen was in the box and the colony was following her and within an hour the vast majority of the swarm would be inside and Meg could close the box and carry it to the apiary and install them in a new hive — an empty hive box with frames of drawn comb that Meg kept for exactly this purpose, the spare equipment of a beekeeper who had been catching swarms for thirty years and who kept empty boxes the way a hotel keeps empty rooms, ready for the guests who arrive without a reservation.

She waited. The afternoon was warm, seventy degrees, May in the valley, the best month, the month when everything grew and everything bloomed and the bees were at their most productive and the valley was at its most beautiful, the grass still green before the summer brown, the wildflowers in the meadows and along the road shoulders, the lupine and the camas and the vetch, the blue and purple and white of the valley's spring palette, and Meg stood in this landscape and watched her bees march across a white sheet and she felt the feeling that swarming always provoked in her, the feeling that was two feelings at once, the feeling of loss and the feeling of wonder, the loss because half her colony was gone, half the bees that she had fed through winter and treated for mites and inspected in March and cared for with the daily attention of a beekeeper who knew each colony by its number and its personality and its queen and its history, half of those bees were now in a cardboard box on a white sheet under a pear tree, and the wonder because the process was extraordinary, was the colony's most dramatic act, was the thing that the colony did when it was at its strongest and most vital, the division that was not weakness but was power, the departure that was not abandonment but was propagation, the loss that was not loss but was multiplication.

This was the thing Meg could not reconcile.

The swarm was not abandonment. The swarm was reproduction. The old queen leaving was not the old queen fleeing. The old queen leaving was the old queen doing what queens do when the colony is strong enough to support two colonies — she left, and the colony she left behind raised a new queen, and both colonies survived, and the species continued, and the leaving was the mechanism of continuation. The leaving was the way the thing persisted. The leaving was the opposite of ending. The leaving was beginning.

Meg knew this. Meg had known this for thirty years. Meg had watched hundreds of swarms, had caught dozens, had hived them and watched them build and grow and become productive colonies, had seen the proof over and over that the departure of the queen was not the death of the colony but the birth of a colony, and she had internalized this knowledge at the level of practice, at the level of the hands, at the level of the beekeeper who caught swarms as a matter of routine and who did not assign emotion to a biological process.

And yet.

And yet the watching stirred something. And yet the sight of the old queen in the new box, surrounded by the half of the colony that had followed her, beginning again — drawing comb on the empty frames, the wax glands on the workers' abdomens producing the small pale flakes of wax that they chewed and shaped into hexagonal cells, the cells that would receive the queen's eggs, the eggs that would become the new colony's first generation, the generation that would build the population from the ten thousand that had swarmed to the fifty thousand that the colony would need by midsummer — the sight of this beginning stirred in Meg something that she did not want stirred, something she had kept still and quiet and packed away the way the winter cluster packs itself tight against the cold, something that lived in the place where she kept the things she did not examine, the things about Gavin and the leaving and the two years of silence and the single plate on the counter and the empty closet and the books on the shelf and the garden going to seed.

The queen did not deliberate. The queen did not spend two years deciding whether to leave. The queen did not lie in the dark thinking about whether the leaving was justified, whether the leaving was her fault, whether the leaving could have been prevented if she had produced more pheromone, if she had laid more eggs, if she had been a better queen, a more attentive queen, a queen whose signal was strong enough to hold the colony together, a queen who did not drive the workers to build swarm cells, a queen whose presence was sufficient, whose pheromone was enough, whose being was the thing that kept the organism whole.

The queen left because the biology said leave. The queen left because the colony was strong and the space was insufficient and the swarm cells were built and the new queen was being raised and the division was programmed, was genetic, was the outcome of a system that had been reproducing this way for twenty million years, and the queen did not question the system, did not resist the system, did not sit in the hive while the workers built their cells and feel the particular helplessness of a queen whose colony was preparing to divide and who could not stop the division and who could not make the colony want to stay whole, because the wanting-to-stay-whole was not a thing the colony wanted, the colony wanted to divide, the colony's strength was expressed through division, and the queen was an instrument of the colony's want, not the author of her own.

Meg carried the box to the apiary. She had prepared the hive — an eight-frame medium box, the frames fitted with foundation, the thin sheets of beeswax imprinted with the hexagonal pattern that guided the bees' comb building, the foundation a template that said: build here, this size, this pattern. She set the box beside the hive. She opened the box. She tipped the bees out, pouring them into the hive the way you pour grain from a bucket, the bees tumbling and spilling over the frames, the sound of them a cascade, and they immediately began crawling down between the frames, descending into the dark interior of the hive, finding the space, claiming it, the pheromone of the queen spreading through the box, the signal saying: this is home now, this is where we are, begin.

She watched the entrance. Within minutes, the first bees appeared at the landing board, facing outward, fanning their wings — the Nasonov gland exposed, the gland on the abdomen that produced the orientation pheromone, the homing signal, the bees fanning the scent into the air to call the stragglers, the bees that were still at the pear tree or still in the air, the bees that had not made it into the box, and the fanning said: here, come here, the queen is here, this is home, come here. The orientation pheromone was a lemony scent, detectable by human noses, and Meg could smell it, the faint citrus of bees calling bees, the olfactory beacon that would guide the last members of the swarm to their new address.

She stood by the new hive and she watched the old queen's colony begin its new life and the watching was the thing, the watching was the act that Meg performed because watching was what beekeepers did, watching was the skill, the practice, the discipline, the thing that thirty years had taught her — not to manage the bees but to watch the bees, not to control the colony but to observe the colony, not to impose her will on the organism but to read the organism's will and respond to it, and the response was always after the fact, was always the beekeeper catching up to what the colony had already decided, the beekeeper a step behind the biology, the biology ahead, always ahead, the bees doing the thing before the beekeeper understood why the thing was being done.

The swarm hive was established. In the original hive, number six, the colony that had been left behind — the half that had stayed, the workers without their old queen, the brood frames still full of developing bees, the queen cells along the bottom bars still sealed, the new queen inside one of them still pupating, still developing, still a week or two from emergence — this colony was continuing. This colony did not mourn the departure of the old queen. This colony did not experience the swarm as loss. This colony was building, was tending the brood the old queen had left behind, was preparing for the new queen's emergence, was operating on the program that the pheromone and the cells and the biology had written, the program that said: the old queen is gone, the new queen is coming, continue the work, tend the brood, guard the entrance, forage, build, wait.

Wait for the new queen. She would emerge. She would kill her sisters. She would fly. She would mate. She would return. She would lay. And the colony would grow around her the way a new colony grows, quickly, urgently, the population expanding to fill the space that the swarm had vacated, the colony rebuilding itself from the genetic foundation the old queen had left — the eggs, the larvae, the capped brood, the generation already in progress — and the new queen's eggs would add to this, and within a month the colony would be as strong as it had been before the swarm, would be a full colony again, a productive colony, a colony whose queen check would show a strong brood pattern and a growing population and the white dot of the new queen marked on her thorax.

Both colonies would survive. Both colonies were the original colony. Neither was more legitimate than the other. The swarm was not the exile and the remainder was not the homeland. They were two colonies where there had been one, two queens where there had been one, two futures where there had been one. The division was the mechanism. The division was the point.

Meg went inside. She sat at the kitchen table. She did not turn on the light. The evening was long, May light, the light lasting until nine, the valley bright outside the kitchen window, the apiary visible, the old hive and the new hive side by side, two boxes where there had been one, two populations where there had been one.

She thought about beginning again. She did not think the phrase "beginning again" — the phrase was too neat, too composed, too much like the language of the self-help books that Diane had given her in the months after Gavin left, the books with titles about new chapters and fresh starts and the life that awaits, the books that Meg had put on the shelf beside Gavin's landscape architecture books and had not read, because the language of beginning again implied an ending, and the ending implied a narrative, and the narrative implied that the ending was a chapter in a story that was going somewhere, and Meg was not sure her life was going somewhere, was not sure her life was a narrative, was not sure that the metaphor of the chapter break applied to a woman who lived by the biological calendar rather than the narrative calendar, who measured time in brood cycles and honey flows rather than in chapters and new beginnings.

But the queen had begun again. The queen had left the hive she had inhabited for years and had moved into an empty box and had started laying in fresh comb and had done this without deliberation, without grief, without the backward look that humans called nostalgia, without the forward look that humans called anxiety, without anything but the biological imperative of a creature that was built to begin again, that was built to leave and land and build and lay, and the building and the laying were not starting over, were not the reconstruction of something lost, were the continuation of something ongoing, the continuation of the queen's single function, which was to lay, which she did wherever she was, in the old hive or the new, the location irrelevant, the function constant.

Meg sat at the table. She did not turn on the light. The evening darkened. The bees settled. The new colony began its first night in the new hive, clustering on the frames, the queen at the center, the workers around her, the pheromone circulating, the wax glands producing, the comb being drawn in the dark, the hexagonal cells appearing on the foundation like a map being filled in, the territory being claimed, the home being made.

Outside, in the valley, the hazelnut catkins were done and the cherry blossoms were falling and the blackberry canes were leafing and the clover was beginning and the season was moving and the bees were moving with it and Meg was sitting at the table in the dark kitchen not moving, not beginning, not leaving, not landing, not building, just sitting, and the sitting was not the stasis of the deadout but was not the dynamism of the swarm either, was something between, was the stillness of a woman who had watched a queen begin again and who had not yet begun again herself and who did not know how and who did not know when and who knew only that the queen had done it, had done it without knowing how, had done it because the biology said do it, and the biology was the instruction, and the instruction was clear, and the queen had followed the instruction, and Meg had not, and the not-following was the thing, was the thing she sat with in the dark kitchen in May while the bees built comb in the hive outside and the season turned and the light faded and the valley went to sleep and the queen laid her first eggs in the new comb and the eggs were the beginning, and the beginning was always bees.