Swarm étude

Just when you think you have your day organized and that you are well situated to accomplish all your allotted tasks, something happens. Sometimes it’s a volcano that fills the airspace with resplendent ash or a tornado that sends you scurrying to the dank cellar. Another time it’s a surprise communication from a man you knew forty years ago, and with whom you behaved badly. Regrettably. Yesterday it was a swarm.
The call came as I was reading and making notes about the fractious friendship between Henry James and H.G. Wells. I kept seeing the two men as “the unsexed and the oversexed”, though that is not how the literary rivalry was discussed in the critical context. Esther in Tarrytown said that the bees were swarming, this very minute, and gathering on the crabapple right next to their stone terrace. CSB was not answering his phone. I told her that I could keep trying his phone and that one of us would get there momentarily. I found him, and we did.
The bees were indeed collecting on the crabapple. Often a swarm will alight on a branch and then hang down in a teardrop shape; when this happens all we have to do is snip off the branch and shake the bees into the awaiting hive box. But these bees were wrapped around the tree trunk, so there was no snipping to be done. How could we encourage them to relocate to the hive box we placed atop a white sheet at the base of the tree? We had not brought our bee brush with us, but luckily I was able to borrow a basting brush from Esther. Kneeling beneath the tree I gently brushed the bees downward, and they came. Initially I wasn’t wearing my bee veil, but then I got stung right between the eyes. (This was unfortunate since I generally assert to anyone who will listen that when bees swarm they are not at all defensive and so you will never get stung. The bees that stung me missed that directive.) So I put on my bee veil and the netting kept getting snagged on the crabapple branches, making it harder to see than it is anyway when wearing a veil. And glasses.
The afternoon was waning, and certain tasks could not be ignored, not even for a swarm. So Imogene slipped back inside through the French doors and started practicing her oboe, an elegiac piece, and the bees streamed down towards the hive box, creating a shimmering and undulating new kind of bark. Some bees stood outside the box, upraised their tails and fanned outward the queen’s delicious pheromones, to lure in any stray sister. Would a clarinet have pleased them just as well? A fiddle?

The swarm that didn't happen

After a long morning of recovering from the previous night’s book party with Hubert van Toots in the Library at the Hagiographers Club with a relic, (If you don’t get the reference, you obviously haven’t read the book.) I was finally about to sit down & work. When outside my window I espied thousands of bees flying in that apparently random yet purposeful way they have only when they are swarming. My desk window is quite close to the bay window in the living room where the observation hive lives, and as you may recall, the observation hive has been acting strangely of late. (The dearth of brood. Then the hasty and mysterious dispatch of the newly installed marked Queen. Reginicide?)
I looked and indeed the bees were bearding the extended runway from the observation hive. I ran over to check the hive itself, and – this was the strangest part – it was completely empty. There was not a bee anywhere, not even a single lone bee emerging from a single honeycomb cell.

Of course I immediately called CSB. Sit tight, he said. Go back to work. I normally take unmitigated delight in a swarm (something like a Ringhead at Bayreuth) but in this case I had mixed feelings, because the observation hive’s population was so small to begin with and because of the season (autumn has just begin) which is most definitely not swarming season.
There was nothing to be done.
I stood still among the dancing, careening, swooping bees. My eyes are not good enough to discern a direction. I waited for them to alight on a nearby branch and gather.
I waited in vain.
The bees dissipated into the upper regions.
I returned to my desk.

About an hour later I forlornly went to see the observation hive, and …the bees had returned. All of them.
Did they contemplate swarming and then reconsider mid-flight?
Did something scare them from their comfortable home chez nous?
I have no idea.

One of the odder things I have noted about swarms, or swarming, is that this phenomenon, this brilliant divide-and-increase technique of the honeybees, is always used metaphorically in a negative way. A recent cursory search came up with these examples:
Swarming as a terrorist technique in Mumbai (Times Op-Ed, 2/2009);
Swarming lobbyists (Times, 11/08)
Swarming to characterize E-bay’s takeover strategy (Times, 8/07)
Swarming swindlers (Times, 11/07)
Perhaps more significantly, in NO cases were swarms used to describe behavior viewed as positive, or persons or groups regarded as benign.

Segueing in the most arbitrary fashion, from a swarm that did not occur, to a roman à clef that is not:

At the aforementioned lovely book party my dear friend and gracious host, Paco, pointed out that despite our long friendship and history together, he has never found himself as a character in one of my books. And – this is the remarkable part – he lamented this fact!
I know Paco quite well and did not expect to be surprised by his remarks (honored, delighted, mortified, chagrined maybe), but this did surprise me because the truth is that certain people who think they appear in my stories are not pleased. They object to being in the book, and then they object because I got it wrong! And despite all my reassurances that I write fiction and that the characters really are fictional (I’ve even been told they are “all lies” as if that were a problem) the objections continue.

A former relative (how’s that for an awkward epithet?) was fearful that she or my ex would appear in Absent a Miracle and so, long before the book was available for sale, she bought an Advance Review Copy on E-bay.
(Pity the poor reviewer with stacks of ARCs clamoring for shelf space. And then, mirabile dictu, E-Bay) According to my ex I should be flattered because she (former relative) actually finished the book. Was this meant as a comment on the quality of the book or on her reading skill?

In my long ago short novel, Expecting, the narrator had a brother. I have 3 brothers and all three of them objected to the fact that they were not identifiably in the book and that I had lumped all brothers into one generic brother.

What’s a writer to do?

Loving a swarm

From ABC news:“Thousands of bees -- in a hive -- in a building between 4th Avenue and Irving Place -- and it was no joke to the employees here at GameStop. They were trapped inside their store. The sign in the window said, "temporarily closed, due to bee infestation."


I hear of a swarm and I immediately want to be there, right where the bees are. I want to stand amidst the bees as they fly to and from the swarm with complete attention and intention.
When we first became beekeepers five years ago, an older beekeeper (a psychiatrist who studied the hive to expand his understanding of the human brain) told us that a swarm was one of the most wonderful things we would ever experience. I had no idea what he was talking about.
And then our first hive swarmed, and we were in the back yard with the bees as they exited the hive in flight patterns of Boschian wonder, as they clustered on the branch of a nearby apple tree, as the cluster of interconnected bees grew to the size of a basketball shaped like a heart, as the scout bees went off looking for a suitable new home and returned to share their findings via the waggle dance. Then I got it. I was electrified and after much searching I find that is the best word for what it felt like to me. I was in the midst of an electrical force field. Just as the bees were dedicated to the queen’s pheromones, I sensed my own adrenalin rising and dashing about in every direction. You know how it is when you first fall in love and you can’t eat or sleep and you don’t quite understand what exactly is so altered but you know that the world looks remarkably rosy? You can’t live that way forever, but it’s great when it happens. And that’s what being with a swarm is like for me. Through no merit of my own I can exist briefly among the bees as they engage in this perfect and ancient task of dividing to increase.
Saturday some honeybees (probably about 30,000 workers plus one queen) swarmed in Union Square. Or so said the headline. It seems there was a hive living inside the wall of a video game store (Waggle Dance Pong? Buzz Saw Massacre? Bringin’ in the Pollen? Bee very very Scared?) and employees at the store noticed the bees, who may very well have been there for years or only days. Then panic set in. The employees believed they were “trapped inside the store”. They put up a sign, “Closed due to bee infestation,” and awaited rescue.
No one was stung.
Honeybees swarm when their hive has become too crowded. Rather than fighting it out, they collectively create a new queen by taking several fertilized eggs and feeding them Royal Jelly. Royal Jelly is secreted from the hypopharyngeal glands in the heads of the bees and when a larva is fed exclusively on Royal Jelly, she becomes a queen. (This same substance is used in extremely expensive creams and lotions, based on the notion that what makes a queen will make your skin younger. There appears to be no basis for this claim, and as you can imagine, extracting it is laborious and bizarre.) Having ensured her replacement, and the continuance of the remaining hive, the queen and half her bees, about 30,000 at this time of year, will depart, having first provisioned themselves for the expedition by gorging with honey and pollen. They will first cluster on a nearby limb or eave, or in the much-ballyhooed incident last year on the Upper East Side, on a newspaper vending machine. And while the queen is safely in the center, scout bees – older and wiser bees – go out to find their new home. They periodically return and indicate their findings by performing the waggle dance upon the bodies of their clustered sisters. And somehow, a collective decision comes about. In a recent issue of Science News, Susan Milius posits honeybee swarming as an example of democracy in action. In fact it is better than most democracies, because all of the bees are acting in concert for the good of the hive, its preservation and perpetuation.
Because the swarming bees are weighed down with honey and pollen, and because they are so focused on finding the next perfect cavity, it is unheard of for them to sting. They have better things to do than engage in suicide, because when a bee injects her barbed stinger in your skin most of her entrails are pulled away with it, and she dies.
Now that we are proper beekeepers, one of the things we are meant to do is manage the hives so they do not swarm, because when they swarm you lose most of the honey production for that season, and you risk upsetting your neighbors. We don’t live in the city and our bees have plenty of room in our back yard, but over the years we have lost a few swarms. But this is where CSB and I differ. He really is a proper beekeeper and manages our hives expertly; he is gentle and considerate with the bees, but not sentimental. Not me. If I see swarm cells in a hive, I leave them alone and keep the news to myself. I read the Georgics and long for a swarm.
I would have loved to been in Union Square.

The Bristol Palin dilemma

The annals of hagiography are full of young women (viz. Dymphna, Winifred, Bega, Oringa, Regina, Grimonia and countless others) who defy the parental diktat to marry and instead consecrate themselves to a life of virginity. This defiance often leads to torture, death or a life spent in drag.
But Rita of Cascia, as pious as any virgin, submitted to her father’s decree and married the vile, brutal and philandering man chosen for her. And to make it worse, the two sons she bore followed in their father’s footsteps. When the horrid husband was killed by an enemy, the sons swore to avenge his death. Rita was so appalled by this longing for vengeance that she prayed they would die rather than commit a murder.
Her prayer was answered. Her sons contracted a deadly illness; their mother’s gentle nursing brought them round to a state of contrition so they were able to die forgiven.

Saint Rita’s story begs the question: which is the surer path to sainthood: a miserable enforced marriage or sacrificial virginity?
You could certainly argue that it was her marriage that led directly to Rita praying for the death of her own sons.

There are few circumstances in which I might argue for the merits of abstinence over safe sex, but Rita’s might be one.

Oddly enough, Rita is not a patron saint of bees, though surely her claim is as good as Ambrose’s or Bernard’s, and maybe better. The story goes that a swarm of white bees flew around her sweet milk-spattered face as the infant Rita slept in her crib, that they flew in and out of her mouth and never stung her.
This would not be a very remarkable feat for honeybees who generally do not sting unless they are bothered or feeling threatened. But were these honeybees? I have never heard of or seen white honeybees.

There is more. After the death of her husband and sons, Rita finally got her wish and entered the convent. I will spare you a litany of her holiness, her suffering and the suppurating wound that inhabited her forehead. She died in the convent, on this day, in 1457 and not only is her body still incorrupt but the descendants of those bees live in the wall of the cell she died in, and each year at this time they swarm.

St Rita's body in the chapel of Cascia, Italy

Swarming across the sea

Saint Modomnoc (his feast was 2 days ago but we were at the Calder circus, all bent wire, movement and whimsy) was an Irish priest studying and preaching in Wales. One of his tasks there was to tend the bees, and of course he grew fond of his bees. (And they of him.) The story goes that when he informed the bees he planned to cross the Irish Sea and convert those pesky Irish, they swarmed and followed him across the water. In this way Ireland got her first honeybees.

I have stood in the midst of swarming bees, and I have watched as the bees exited their hive and collected themselves on a nearby branch in order to reconnoiter, secure the queen and send out scouts to find a new home, and it was been wonderful. I don’t say that lightly. Generally in nature we find bees singly, gathering nectar and going about their business. En masse, they generate electricity in the air and you can quite literally stand there while thousands fly purposefully around you, and never touch you, because they are focused on only one thing: finding a new home.
Modomnoc must have had a great crossing of the Irish Sea. I can’t imagine a better one.