Bees In Winter: A Haiku

ball of bees cluster

around queen, snow insulates

insect body heat

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.

How to Defeat the Evils of Nepotism

As you've probably noticed, I'm quite fond of comparing honeybees to humans. We both exist in complex social systems that aim to sustain us. We both love honey. We humans love to name things. (Do honeybees have names for us? Perhaps certain buzz frequencies that signify "human?") We distinguish between individual things and the groups in which they congregate. A colony of bees. A gaggle of geese. A parliament of owls. An army of frogs. A knot of toads. (The list goes on...)

But what of ourselves?? A family of humans? A culture of humans? A society of humans? We map family trees based on sexual relations that produce babies. Is this the only way to distinguish our kin?

The family tree of a honeybee colony would resemble a thick, round shrub more than a towering oak: a drone might be his mother's lover. Although the prolific deadbeat dad has challenged the patriarchal system of organization, most women in America still change their last names upon marriage to signify membership in a new system of kinship. The idea of family is defined in this way: the Griffins, the McChards, the Plakiai...

The queen bee's mating flight lasts for two to three days and intimately involves between 10 and 25 drones, depending on her penchant for doing the nasty. This rowdy sexcapade is productive enough for the queen to never mate again. She carries the sperm inside of her, and deposits sperm and egg in a honeycomb cell to create a female worker bee, and egg alone to create a male drone. She will continue depositing egg and sperm into honeycomb cells unceasingly for the remainder of her life.

In the bee world, if a mother queen dies unexpectedly, worker bees will feed royal jelly to a handful of larvae. Imagine you are a female worker bee. Your mom just died and you must replace her. You are in charge of choosing the cells in which you will deposit royal jelly. Cell A contains the larvae of some random chick. Cell B contains the larvae of your sister. Interestingly, entomologists have noted that you will almost always choose your sister's larvae. Bees are nepotists!

Natural selection does trump nepotism. Remember that you must feed royal jelly to more than one larval bee. When the virgin queens emerge, they duke it out to the death, and the last one standing becomes royalty.

Nepotism is, therefore, a natural-enough tendency. But I've got problems with it. When I was in middle school, I was a "bad influence." Or so it seemed to the mothers of my female friends. In reality, I was incredibly unhappy, as most teenagers tend to be, and did not need to be excommunicated from my only friends by overprotective moms. (Seriously, if I didn't peer pressure your daughter into smoking weed, somebody else would've. And that somebody might have been a scary old man instead of sweet little me.)

Of course moms are protective of their kids, but calling a 13-year-old on the phone and forbidding her to speak to, let alone be friends with, her daughter is just plain cruel. I'm not the only bad influence to have this happen, either. The result of the mother bee's overreaction is a super-strong, super-small kinship system that excludes anyone who doesn't share a last name.

Does this mean that it is wrong for the worker bee to choose her sister to become queen? Well, this is the point at which my argument falls apart.

We 'Mericans tend to like our circles close-knit, uniform, and exclusive. But kinship need not be familial. When like-minded, inspired individuals work together to create a supportive, productive community, a new kind of family is born. Like a honeybee colony, each individual is important only insofar as she is part of a whole.

When people work together toward a common goal that is both satisfying and fruitful, something magical happens.

We're no longer alone in this confusing world!

In this way, life bursts forth from concrete, life free from nepotism.

At Added Value, when we harvest, cook, and eat meals on the farm together, we say this blessing:

We thank the sun and the air,

the water and the soil,

the many hands it took to grow this food,

and the many hands it took to prepare it.

I love my many families.

Brothers and Sisters

Last week I mentioned my favorite childhood video, Free To Be... You And Me. Upon realizing that only a few lucky people watched this tape as a child repeatedly, and after some serious Free To Be-style dancing, (see below,) I decided that more people should watch it because its awesome.

Here's one of my favoritest pieces of film, ever:

Honeybee brothers and sisters do not get along so grandly, nor do they wear as many turtlenecks. Drones are lecherous louses seeped in skullduggery from tiny brain to stingerless butt. Observe: Drones being lazy:

These girls are younguns. We can tell because they're small and furry. They're probably checkin out their new lives at about this point: where the honey is, what to do when they have to go to the bathroom (hold it,) how to fly...many practice runs ensue. Gotta get those wings in fanning shape.

Come autumn, the workers will commit fratricide, ripping each and every drone to shreds, one by one. They're completely disposable during the winter. The queen can lay drone eggs when they're needed, which won't be until spring.

I believe dogs act more like humans than bees in their relationships with one another. Marley and Bosco, loyal brothers and my sweet pooches, could be right up there on the poles wearing turtlenecks, dancing their little furry little tails off.

The Incredible Grossness of Life

Dana and I went into the hives yesterday to check things out and add a super (box sans bottom) to the hive. I started with Shera's hive; everything looked good in the hood. I moved to Catra's hive, using my hive tool to pry open the propolis-glued cover. Things looked quite busy, even for a bee. Dana held the surrounding frames down as I pried a fat one out of its waxy thicket. The bees had constructed a wax bridge between the frame in my hand and the one in the box. Apparently, the queen had laid eggs in the bridge. My hand had twisted the bridge in two, releasing two white, slimy, slug-like beings that are called bee larvae from their cells, prematurely. Bee larva in action is gross. They squirm and squiggle and look so exposed next to the worker bees. But that's their destiny. So weird.

"Dana, take a picture of this, this is gross. For the blog and to document it. Actually, this is really gross. Never mind, nobody wants to see this. Ew, this is disgusting, I don't want to see this."

That was my thought process, or what I tried to get across in words, most likely more convoluted, fragmented words, to Dana, armed with my camera.

Queen bees lay eggs in honeycomb cells. Eggs become larvae. Larvae become pupae, or, soft, white bee skeletons with sinister eyes. Pupae become bees, which push their way out of the cells as the fuzzy little buzzers we all love.

I shoved the larvae frame back in place and moved on to a frame at the other end of the super to the site of the potential supercedure cells. Well, it turned out that these weren't supercedure cells; rather, they were either worker or drone cells. Supercedure cells would be much more peanut-like than these cells. Most excitingly, we witnessed the "birth" of a bee: see the little (leg? antenna?) sticking out of the cell? It was just feeling its way into this intricately bizarre world of ours, of honeybees, all animals...

A new friend helps her out.

She pushes herself into the world.

Welcome to our world, small bee.

Royal Races: Bees vs. Humans

My kid sis and future beekeeper Dana had alerted me to the possibility of supercedure cells in the hive, so I had to inspect. Supercedure cells look like wax peanut shells protruding from the comb; the colony is creating new virgin queens. The presence of supercedure cells in a hive typically means one of two things: they will replace the existing queen with the virgin queen by suffocating her in a tight ball of buzzing bees because they're in some vital way unhappy with her, or the existing queen and up to 3/4 or the colony are preparing to swarm, leaving behind progeny to continue the family line. This is unlikely, as swarm season has passed, although that hasn't stopped countless colonies from deserting their honey-filled homes to starve in a barren winter tree. Bees, like humans, can be self-destructive and don't always act in their actual self-interest.

I smoked the bees; just a puff here and there to confuse the guard bees on the hive landing and mysteriously soothe the colony. Yum.

Free to Be You... And Me, a 1970 film for kids, was a fan favorite among my sisters and I. Marlo Thomas, who is my shero, wrote songs and skits for public figures to sing and perform, about topics like love, sadness, sexuality, and freedom, to name a few. One features a really young Michael Jackson and Roberta Flack singing about growing up... do yourself a favor and watch it.

Anyway, Free to Be... You And Me might be worthy of an entire post, its so fantastic. But I digress...

One skit features a very fast princess named Atalanta, who doesn't want to marry just because that's what girls do, (you go girl!) to her father's cantankerous chagrin. Atalanta races all of the town's men, agreeing to either marry the winner or win and choose. It all comes down to worried Young John and Atalanta... after much suspense (and huffing and puffing,) they cross the finish line at the exact same moment.

The queen's mating flight is much like this skit. After days of training, lecherous drones dazedly passing the virgin queen in the hive, without lust or second thought, the queen releases a pheromone that says "I'm ready" and shoots into the air, emitting a shill chirp, until hundreds of drones from hives near and far race to catch up to her. Eventually, weak suitors fall behind until one single drone, the strongest, remains.

In Free To Be... You And Me, instead of joining together in union, the princess travels the world on her horse and her suitor becomes a great scientist- and the story ends with the possibility of a love reconnection after they'd followed their respective dreams, but assures the viewer that another ending wouldn't make the story any less significant.

In the bee world, the queen and the winning drone do join in union. In fact, their union is so strong that the drone's sex organs are ripped off to remain in the queen's body as he falls to earth with intestines dangling from serrated abdomen. When she returns to the hive, her attendants remove the drone's bottom-half from the queen's bottom-half. She'll get her kicks for 2-3 days, return to the hive, and never mate again.

In Free To Be... You And Me, Alan Alda and Marlo Thomas narrate. There is no narrator in the bee's story, but if there were, it would be Werner Herzog. He would contrast the queen's sexual burden with the workers' sexual disenfranchisement. He would continue to use the word "increezingly." He would empathize with queen and drone, slaves to their hard working sisters and daughters.

Atalanta is only a princess, but she enjoys the right to choose, a right that separates us from insects and other species that are bound to the ball-and-chain of instinct and dragged, or perhaps exalted, through life by a mysterious plan devised by Ma Nature that humans simply cannot decipher. The queen bee is a queen in name only, her nomenclature more parody than analogy.

Princess Atalanta is sovereign, and her suitors probably envy her power or are delighted by the idea of her. Queen bees are peons, held captive by their base ability to procreate. They are owned exclusively by their daughters, who nevertheless care for their mother meticulously. (Did anyone ever read Lois Lowry's The Giver in high school? Think of the birthmothers: held in low opinion, yet essential and thus pampered.)

My queens, Catra and Shera, look big and healthy, but one of them may be a marked woman. Although both of them are actually marked with a green dot, only Shera seems to be potentially marked for assassination. I cannot determine whether or not what I see are supercedure cells. If they are, I hope they do not swarm. It may sound cruel, but I hope they're planning on assassinating Shera. Not because I like a good cat fight, because I don't, and happen to despise the phrase "cat fight" at that, but because its a natural phenomenon that requires no beekeeper action and actually serves the self-interest of the colony. Otherwise, I might have to climb a telephone pole with a bee vacuum, and I'm not feeling too dexterous.

Do you think she knows??

Sneak Preview: Summer Honey

There have been many things in 2009 that I'd never have dreamt would've happened to me. For example, I never would've thought that I'd meet a future employer while fully decked out in bee camo at the Beekeepers' Ball, waggle dancing my little stinger off. While traversing Wall Street in full costume, I didn't feel incredibly "employable." But a few weeks later and I've begun my new (awesome) job at Added Value, a farm in Brooklyn. Yes, a farm in Brooklyn. Check out these stunners: verdant collard greens so robust that a single leaf could act as the Jolly Green Giant's loin cloth! Delicious and nutritious!

All this farm work is building muscles and character, but it is also making me want to crawl into bed before double-digits. I have so many tales to tell about the honeybees but am simply too fatigued to do them justice. Instead, I will share highlights from my 4th of July Weekend, beginning with a 6am walk in good old Wash Heights. (No, this is not a Cara-impersonator, and no, I didn't mean 6pm.)

Morning light never fails to amaze me.

I wanted to sew my western shadow to my feet, but brought the wrong color thread so captured it on my camera instead.
Waiting for the train in Harlem...
...to visit this guy:
And this guy:
And these girls:
Look at that honey glimmering in the sunlight! The bees are capping it with wax.
Everything looked A-OK in the hive.
Both queens were photographed... but you have to come back tomorrow to see them! Ha!
Look at that sweet smile... human bean Hayden:
On the farm today, I learned about the 3 sisters: beans, squash, and corn. Feel free to assign each veggie to each Chard sister at your discretion.
I finally got the broom to work!
So did Dana. She was a natural.
Just a regular Independence Day.

Hayden's shadow looks firmly attached.

Marley and Bosco are my idols. They know how to kick it.
In between my stick-shift lessons, roses:
A perfect Sunday night in early July.