The Bee Whisperer January 26
I’ve been reading about beekeeping over at Flimsy Sanity. They’re endlessly entertaining creatures - although a bit anal-retentive (do bees have anuses?) - in their perfectly ordered societies. No wonder Sherlock Holmes kept them as a hobby.
Poor But Sweet
My grandfather and two uncles were beekeepers. They lived in a remote West Virginia holler, so poverty-stricken that their tar-paper shack was one step up from a homeless person’s cardboard box. Baths were taken in a creek behind the house. The toilet was a two-hole, open pit outhouse where old, crinkly Sears catalogs served as paper. Water came from an open, leaf-choked spring about 1/2 mile from the house. Wood chopped from near the spring heated the place - although one year they disassembled the dining room and burnt it in the single pot-bellied stove when the snow was too deep to cut wood.
As a boy of 12 or so, I clearly remember electricity coming to the holler courtesy of a spool of wire on the back of a mule and tree-mounted insulators leading from the gravel road atop the high ridge. Food was a combination of spuds, corn, and cabbage from a rock-strewn garden, supplemented by squirrel and coon killed in the surrounding hills. A dozen chickens had the run of the place, sometimes coming into the house in the summer. They laid eggs under the house where I collected them immediately before being fried in lard. Ten or 12 beehives provided sweetener for coffee and fresh biscuits.
The three men of the house were practiced beekeepers, able to understand the intricacies of bee life and capable of gathering fresh bees into the fold by carefully moving wild bees into their pitiful homemade boxes. As my grandfather grew older, my uncles tended the bees more and more. They wore thick clothes tied off at the sleeves and ankles and topped with netted pith helmets for protection. They always approached the hives hesitantly, armed with smokers - small containers with a bellows atop and smoldering rags inside. Sprayed into the front of the hives, it induced a lazy euphoria - a sort of marijuana high encouraging the bees to be less active. But even with the protection, the uncles suffered stings and yelled loudly in pain each time.
Zen and the Art of Beekeeping
But watching my grandfather was a zen experience. He connected with the bees in a supernatural way, a sort of “bee whisperer” who understood them better than most folks understand their neighbors. He rarely wore the beekeeper getup and gave the bees the most fragile of highs.
He approached the hives slowly and methodically, creeping so slowly the bees must have considered him a tree suddenly sprung up from the ground around the hives. With bare hands, he gently scooped the bees away from their front door, opened the tops of the hives, and slowly drew out honey-dripped screens full off comb and royal jelly. He softly brushed the bees off the screen and removed the gooey gold. The bees never seemed to mind his benevolent robberies of their sticky home. They rarely stung him for his efforts.
As a suburban kid raised on refined sugar I didn’t like honey. But as the years flew by I adjusted and came to love the sweet nectar spread on fresh biscuits and in my tea. When I eat it today, I flash back to those visits over home and think of my grandfather, the bee whisperer, gently going about his business while the bees went about theirs. The old man may have been achingly poor, but his relationship with the bees kept him spiritually fed.
And, that’s just not something you can say about fresh squirrel meat in a pool of red gravy.
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Peacechick Mary Jan 26
It’s a girlie book, but you might enjoy, “The Secret Life of Bees”. We are all into bees lately, it seems. Takes me back to vacations with my grandparents who also kept bees. My cousin and I stayed there together. She and I speak in amazement of dancing around and playing in close contact with the bee hives and never being stung. We used to run barefoot through the garden, grabbing fresh vegetables, strawberries or raspberries on the fly. And, we had squirrel or rabbit for dinner with fresh squeezed grape juice. It was a hard life for my grandparents, but heaven for us. Thanks for the tour down memory lane.
Anonymous Jan 27
The post by Flimsy Sanity has a link to an interesting video, “Bee Dance (Waggle Dance).” Mathematician Barbara Shipman of the University of Rochester described her own interpretation of this interesting phenomonon of how bees communication using a dance language, rather like the primitive dance communication that took place in the teenage beach-romance fims of Annette Funicello and Frankie Avalon.
In an article in Discover Magazine, “Quantum Honeybees,” she states that honeybees are able to see into a dimension of space that is invisible to us, that bees have a “sixth sense” that gives them direct access to the quantum world of subatomic particles.
“Ultimately magnetism is described by quantum fields. I think the physics of bees’ bodies, their physiology, must be constructed such that they are sensitive to quantum fields, that is, the bee perceives these fields through quantum mechanical interactions between the fields and the atoms in the membranes of certain cells.”
In a very real sense, I have no idea what she is talking about, but it makes me think of stuff like Buckaroo Banzai being able to see the dimensionally disguised Lecktroids from Planet 10, or certain episodes of the Twilight Zone.
“How could bees of little brain come up with anything as complex as a dance language? The answer could lie not in biology but in six-dimensional math and the bizarre world of quantum mechanics.”
(This description of our inability to see part of our universe is actually very different than the description of our inability to see part of our universe posed recently about the question of dark matter and dark energy by Cap’n Dyke.
Discover Magazine: Quantum Honeybees
UR Math newsletter: Do honeybees know Quantum Mechanics better than people do?
sumo Jan 27
Heartwarming family stories are the best. You do them so well. I’ve been stung by a lot of creatures…but I have to say I disliked the bee sting the most. I was stung by wasps on the left side of my head after disturbing a nest apparently…swelled up and my jaw went numbish. But the dozen or so that zapped me still weren’t as bad as a single bee sting. Pretty things they are…but Mr. Sumo is the kind of person that will die if stung and doesn’t have his shot kit nearby. Funny things those little bees…beautiful at once and deadly too.
Omnipotent Poobah Jan 27
Mary,
You’re welcome. Bees are just the bees knees.
Doc,
I thought you were more of an ape expert, but clearly you know your stuff about bees too.
Sumo,
I was attacked by a swarm of wasps once. It wasn’t so funny at the time, but now I think it was hilarious. Maybe I’ll post that someday.
Anonymous Jan 27
I apologize if I gave the impression that I know anything about bees, or mathematics for that matter! Clearly I don’t know either subject very well. I just felt it was a thought provoking article. Perhaps it did not relate to your post as well as I had originally hoped.
Omnipotent Poobah Jan 27
No need to apologize.
I like to get extra tidbits like that. The world’s an interesting place and I always want to hear what people have to offer. Hell, if we’re basing this on mastery of anything I should just retreat to the basement. I’m may be omnipotent, but I’ve barely mastered operating a toilet