Royal Jelly

One day in the Mekong Delta in Vietnam, a vendor extolled the virtues of royal jelly, the substance created by honeybees to feed their queen, to a glamorous Italian woman. My sister, incogneets, of course, watched as he demonstrated the topical application on his own face, likened royal jelly to the fountain of youth, and promised that regular use of the substance would erase years from the Italian woman's life. The vendor had found his target population for sure: foreign, with money to spend, and deeply concerned about wrinkles.

Royal jelly has been touted as a miracle substance for centuries. I've often wondered how, back in the day, anyone thought that a cactus might be edible. I feel the same way about royal jelly-- who came up with this idea of bee food as topical cream? I imagine some wacky Ancient Egyptian beekeeper discovering the queen's special stash of R.J. in the hive and smearing it all over her face. Why? We'll never know. But something stuck, because royal jelly is hawked worldwide as a miracle, from Burt's Bees products to vendors in the Mekong Delta.

Personally, it seems a bit too precious of an idea to be true: only food fit for a queen contains the secret of youth, blah blah blah. As I've mentioned many times before, the queen ain't all that. She's a baby-making machine, so her food must be pretty nourishing, but it still doesn't follow that it makes sense to smear it on the outside of one's body. Conceptually, perhaps. A conception that, like so many, falls apart in reality.

The seller had an answer for haters like me: "You can eat it too!" he explained of the 2 oz. bottle of royal jelly that cost more than the aggregate costs of my sister's six month journey through Southeast Asia. Although theoretically, eating royal jelly makes more sense to me in terms of deriving health benefits, it seems strangely naive to liken the nutritional needs of a queen bee to those of an adult human. In "Royal Jelly" by Ronald Dahl, a father forcefully feeds his underweight newborn royal jelly. (It is an incredibly creepy, yet strangely informational short story that is highly recommended reading.) The father explains to his wife:

"Practically nobody in the world can afford to buy royal jelly just for eating except maybe one or two multimillionaires. The people who buy it are the ones who make women's face creams and things like that. They're using it as a stunt. They mix a tiny pinch of it into a big jar of face cream and it's selling like hot cakes for absolutely enormous prices. They claim it takes out the wrinkles."

We are obsessed with youth! Why youth? What I mean is, why is youth so cherished, why is aging so desperately feared? Fine, aesthetics. Health. But we tend to collectively forget most of the unsexy aspects of youth, like having to go to bed at specific times, having to eat things we didn't like, puberty, braces and, later on, being broke. Plus, is there no beauty in a lined face?

All worker bees follow the same lifeline. They begin their lives as nurse bees, then become builders, architects, until finally they become foragers. Bees must go through a training period before foraging. During this period they practice flying short distances, presumably learn the waggle dance, build up their wing strength, you know, normal bee stuff. You can tell which ones are foragers-in-training outside the hive: they're the tentative little dudes (gender neutral, because all foragers are necessarily female) making circles that grow over time.

Foraging, in my opinion, is the best part for honeybees, a pleasure afforded only to the oldest folks in the hive. They get to go explore all the flowers in the hood! Healthy honeybees will forage until their bodies wear out: tattered wings, limbs missing, cockeyed, perhaps. Hopefully they die in the fields among the flowers. Otherwise they'll be carried out by their sisters and deposited as far away from the hive as possible. (Honeybees are impeccably tidy.)

Bees got it right, in my opinion: save the best for last. Imagine if we were constantly looking ahead, waiting for wisdom. We'd be excited by wrinkles and balding. We'd write songs called "Forever Old." Retirement would be like spring break in Cancun.

I might eat royal jelly if, and this is a big if, I realize, somebody convinced me that by eating it I would become a bee, like in Dahl's story, but only for one day and not in the winter. Imagine the secrets that would be revealed to me! Who is behind the hive mind?!?

The same sister, plagued with unquenchable wanderlust, loves this quote from Barbara Kingsolver's The Poisonwood Bible,and I believe it is an apt way to wrap up this rambling post:

"To live is to be marked. To live is to change, to acquire the words of a story, and that is the only celebration we mortals really know. In perfect stillness, frankly, I've only found sorrow."

I don't want to be obsessed with youth when I am old. I want to enjoy it now, live it, use it, celebrate it. But when it's gone, and I'm not sure that it ever really leaves, I will look in the mirror at a face marked with change, and hopefully I will smile with the knowledge that I really, truly lived the life I'd imagined.

Hive-Mind: The Man Behind the Curtain

Anthropomorphism is considered by many great minds to be self-indulgent, suggesting departure from truth and marking the human tendency to sentimentalize. But answer me this: how can we attempt to understand animal experience without framing it, in some meaningful way, with human experience?

Dog days of summer finally upon us here in NYC, honeybee colonies are at their strongest in number. The new, spring hive has housed a handful of generations of bees already, and the current inhabitants continue to work for a future that they'll never see.

Each pair of pollen pants tells a story. A fearless forager bumbles home, weighed down by the heavy pants, and waddles inside where her sisters take a load off Sally. The pollen pants will be transferred from Sally's legs to those famous hexagons that all bee fans know and love. Scientists originally thought that long ago, bees evolved by learning to build tiny hexagons when their non-hexagonal cells naturally smooshed into the six-sided cubbies. Now, it seems that the hexagons have always existed; in other words, Ma Nature imbued honeybees with the ability to build these fascinatingly precise wax cells at their very creation.

Who is the man behind the curtain? Who pulls the levers and pushes the buttons?

The Wizard of Oz builds a fantastical world upon an illusion of power. The queen bee (named anthropomorphically... you're busted, scientists...) exerts a similar illusion of power over her human fanatics. We love the Queen Bee... she's a fine-assed woman who won't take nothin from no one. She rules the roost with sass and class, right?

Wrong. The queen bee is more bumbling man behind the curtain than great and powerful wizard. Come on, Sir Francis Bacon and other haters, if you want to criticize anthropomorphism then don't call her Queen Bee in the science books. You might give people the wrong idea.

Although it is unclear who makes the decisions in a colony, meticulous observation suggests that decisions are reached by consensus in the honeybee world. All elections must eventually resolve themselves unanimously. Does one, sole honeybee organize it all? Does this honeybee pass down her role as hive-mind to a future sister by filling a single brood cell with knowledge? Only Ma Nature knows, and she's pretty tight-lipped.

Human cannot master bee. Within their ordered, efficient, just yet ruthless world, the hive-mind of the honeybee is as unpredictable as human history. How can't we anthropomorphize when speaking of honeybees? We're all just lonely animals trying to understand our own finite existences. The honeybee's short yet harried life gives us small, hexagon-shaped glimpses into our own small places in this widening gyre of consciousness.

The Sisterhood of the Waggling Hammer-Pants

Astute observers who live in the Northeast will have undoubtedly noticed that June, that famously splendid month filled with beautiful blossoms, BBQs, and bikinis, has been a real Betty Bummer this year. As I consume my own version of "bee tea" and wax melancholy about the rain, I cannot help but worry about my flying friends.

When it rains, honeybees seek cover, just like us. Some of them stay home on "lookout duty" (see above,) while others are hard at work cleaning comb, nursing brood, and tending to the queen. The young'uns (0-10 days old) usually perform these duties. The teenagers(10-20 days old) have more complicated chores like storing nectar brought by foragers, building comb, and making sure that the brood chamber stays properly heated and ventilated. The adult honeybee (20-30 days old and aka "The Fearless Forager,") is most likely to display behavior akin to that of the adult human, dipping under leaf coverings and bar awnings, respectively, to take a "time out" until the rain passes.

At times, it rains for so long that honeybees, like humans, spend more time in their temporary shelters than they had originally anticipated. This proves costly for the honeybees, as each moment spent waiting out the storm means less honey for the colony, and come winter, they could starve. Similarly, each moment an adult human spends waiting out the storm means less money for the landlord, and come winter, they could starve. (Analogies, like plants, require sunlight to grow. Perhaps the reader would prefer a more explicit yet formal induction? Human: Money::Bee: Honey)

The Fearless Foragers wait patiently for gravity to ease up on the raindrops, then scramble to collect as much nectar as possible before the next downpour. Fearless Foragers constantly gather information about flower patches, rain or shine. Dodging fat raindrops, they'll return to their hives with samples of nectar for their friends to try. If the nectar tantalizes their tiny taste buds, they'll pay attention to said Fearless Forager, who will most certainly be performing an intricate dance at that very moment.

Honeybees can fly up to 3 miles to find a sublime patch of honeysuckle or the like, so succulent nectar sources require in-depth directions. The Fearless Forager will perform a "waggle dance," (known in some circles as a "figure-8 dance,) on the dance floor located immediately inside the hive entrance, in front of an eager audience.

For those of you who are kinesthetic learners, follow these steps:

1. wiggle while advancing slowly ahead

2. turn to the left, full circle

3. repeat step 1

4. turn to the right, full circle

5. repeat steps 1-4

The dance conveys a boatload of info:

-the more vigorously a honeybee waggles, the better quality the nectar source. (Whatever naturally blooms at any given time of the year is simultaneously the honeybee's number one choice.)

-one full waggle (steps 1-4) is equal to a certain number of feet, and a bee usually waggles between 1 and 100 times! We humans use units of measurements like yards and miles and funlongs... honeybees use waggles.

-the honeybee angles her body during the dance to precisely triangulate the nectar source using the sun's position at the given moment. Imagine a gigantic protractor drawing straight lines from the sun to the flowers-in-question to the bee's tiny dancing shoes. Now that's some kind of delightful math that I never learned in school!

Honeybees are most concerned with sharing. A honeybee will provide her friends with samples of found riches, assess the quality of the riches and opine her conclusions, then provide detailed directions to the source of the riches. Charmingly, all this is expressed in a sassy little dance!

The honeybee's survival depends on other honeybees. She cannot exist alone; without her sisters, she becomes wholly obsolete. Btw, I'm not just tossing around these feminine personal pronouns to mix up the status quo, I'm saying that the honeybee colony is 85% female, and all the males do are laze around, bang the queen, and die. They can't even sting. They live off the labor of their busy sisters and fulfill their singular purpose efficiently. Just sayin. Let the ladies lovingly labor at leisure, and lovely things will likely happen.

The rain's ghost infests the air completely. If I were a cow, I'd be lying down with my girls. If I were a bee, I'd be a senior citizen. But I'd be a brave forager. And even I, brave, senior honeybee that I'd be, would stay inside tonight.