bee keeping

Meant to bee

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One of my long-standing ambitions has been to keep bees – to contribute to the fight against bee death, to help the environment in general, and specifically with my garden. Then a friend sent me a link to a new kind of hive that looked really cool, and in a moment of madness I ordered one, so now I had to figure out what it would take to actually do it!

After some snooping around I found a woman my age who keeps loads of bees, and was willing to teach me and provide me with a start-up miniplus (a small nuc, or society).

Our initial meeting wasn’t promising at first – her husband was clearly no fan of bees, and the mere mention of her taking me on as her student had him leaving the room – but once we were in the meadow across from their home things started to look up. Alexandra was clearly in her element, and moved from one mini-hive to the next with the grace of a Tai Chi master. Me, I felt quite clumsy in my new astronaut outfit but it’s interesting and fun, and for the most part the bees are very good-natured, which helped.

A couple of times the hives that we check do react rather aggressively but more often than not the bees let themselves be handled without any apparent concern at all – Alex even reaches in with her bare hand and pushes bees out of the way to show me stuff, something which I wouldn’t have thought possible in a million years.

And there is a lot of stuff to take in: reading the size of cells to determine what kind of bee is being bred; learning what signs to look for to see if a bee is a worker or a drone, old or young, of one species or another; looking at the hive’s behaviour to see how the queen is faring (and vice versa), and so on. It’s rather daunting, and the notion of a full-sized hive feels quite overwhelming, but I guess all beginners start out that way.

After three sessions I am deemed to be ready to care for my own bees (or rather, to not make a complete mess of things), and so I find myself early one morning driving home with a styrofoam box in the trunk filled to the brim with 3,000 new friends. With the exception of bringing my newborn children home from hospital I have never driven this carefully, albeit for different reasons! If these guys get out inside the car it won’t end well, and no lullaby in the world will change that. But nothing happens, the bees stay calm inside their sealed-up box, and accept their new home without fuzz.

The change is noticeable immediately. I never lacked for insects in my garden, but now there are bees on every flowering plant. Oregano, thyme and rocket are still in bloom, and there is a buzz of busy bees there from sunrise to sunset. I take paternal pride in just watching them going about their day – bringing back pollen from my butternut squash (protein rich for their young), making honey (sweet carbs for those long cold nights to come) and generally flying about, discovering their new surroundings.

The work doesn’t end here for me, however: the hive needs protection from mice, woodpeckers, badgers, other bees and the dread varroa. Then the girls need sugar to help them build reserves ahead of winter – as much as six kilos of sugar water before the temperature drops, but not so much as to block the queen from laying more eggs – making winter workers the colony will also need to survive.

And speaking of the queen: she should have been marked before she came here, but wasn’t, so under the carefully watching eyes of my teacher I have to reach into the seething mass of bees, pin her down gently with a finger (the queen, not my teacher), extract her with my bare hands, and paint a dot on her thorax with a marker, all the while having bees all around and all over me. It’s quite daunting, and I have to be reminded to breathe several times during the process, but it goes well, thankfully.

When I’m done Alexandra laughs. I ask what so funny, and she admits she’s never seen a beginner do that on the first attempt. Most bee keepers would use extraction tools and certainly never take off their gloves when performing this operation, she adds. I stare at her, disbelief mingled with pride – it apparently pays to not know what is supposedly not possible when attempting the impossible. I look back at the frames where my newly crowned queen is being greeted by her adulating subjects – one of whom I could arguably be said to be – and I can’t help but laugh, too; clearly this – and I – was meant to bee.

20-20 hindsight

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I always try to sum up the year that was. This time around, it’s both easier and more difficult than usual. Easier, because life has been reduced to the bare essentials in many respects, and more difficult because… well, you know.

Corona/covid came out of nowhere and walloped the world in the face, and the world responded by reeling around like a clown as it tried to come to terms with this new reality.

As the illness went from being an underreported event in a far-flung place to conquering the world, masks became ever more commonplace, as did questions about Sweden’s approach to Covid, which I felt supremely unqualified to answer. Social distancing was the catch phrase on everyone’s (hidden) lips, and then Lockdown was a reality. The inherent flaws of humanity (Loo Roll Riots) and its capacity for empathy (daily Healthcare Applause) were on full display.

In our case the kids and their mom went on holiday to northern Italy in February, just when things got started there, so they had to quarantine before most people. Throughout spring the kids struggled with isolation, an entirely new work interface, and teachers who seemingly had no notion of the burden they were placing on their wards. Luckily for us, there was little work for interpreters, because there was no infrastructure in place to hold large multilingual conferences via internet, so we could help the kids with their transition to distance schooling.

Summer holidays were different, shall we say. Having struggled to even get to Sweden, we isolated as best we could. Whether rafting with the kids and my sister and her family, or kayaking with my brother, I slept outdoors pretty much the whole time – either in a tent or in a hammock slung between a couple of trees. It was lovely, but very brief, as I didn’t get all the leave I asked for (in spite of there being absolutely zero work, my employer insisted on having people on standby…), meaning I had to return to Belgium, where I was forced to self-isolate, and so couldn’t work anyway, of course.

Instead, my mind turned to all the things I had been contemplating doing for a long time, and hadn’t got around to. August saw me take on a flurry of projects: getting solar panels installed, buying a hybrid car, getting bees, planning a swimming pond, constructing a duck house, volunteering at a wildlife rescue center, getting an e-bike, making jams and juice and canning fruit and sauces. It was good.

Then September came around, and a return to school and work, but not as we knew it. School was a strange hybrid, work even more so. Even after more than half a year, both organizations were clearly struggling to come to terms with the new parameters. There was still precious little work for me, so I planned on going to the French alps for a week of paragliding. It wasn’t to be. La rentree had the predictable effect of making cases surge again, and I had to stay home. This was a blessing in disguise, as our beloved cat Misty suddenly died; had I gone I wouldn’t have been there to bury her and grieve her passing with the kids – a poignant reminder of how many people lost loved ones without being able to be there! As it was we buried her in her favorite spot in the garden on the last day of summer. She left a painfully large void in all our lives.

And so we struggled on. Like everyone else we have tried to cope as best we can. In many ways we have been incredibly lucky, in that no one in our family has died from Covid. We still have our jobs. We haven’t been too affected by the many nasty (and under-reported) side effects of Lockdown and isolation, such as domestic violence, depression, substance abuse (ok, fine, sugar consumption levels have been too high). The garden has been an oasis and a constant source of joy.

It does sort of seem like a lost year in some ways, but at the same time I feel very strongly that the world needed this enforced pause to stop and take stock and reflect on where we go from here. I have certainly done so. And even though my ambitions for this year were largely knocked sideways, I have still managed to fulfill some of them: apart from the projects already mentioned I reconnected with old friends and made new ones – you know who you are! – and I did have some fantastic adventures in spite of the limits on travel. Forced to stay at home I did read a lot more than I otherwise would, and played a ton of piano – ninety-nine more years of solitude and I might even get good at it…

So there you go. A year like no other. Some good things, mixed in with a LOT of crap. But this, too, shall pass. Vaccines are coming, the Trump era is hopefully nearing its end (and I’d be lying if I said I didn’t want to see him and his cronies go to prison!), and maybe, just maybe, we can build a better world on the ruins of this one*. If there is one thing that this year has instilled in me, it’s the need for everyone to pitch in and do what has to be done in order for all to prosper.

Here’s to making sure that things improve in 2021!

*Of course, we probably have not seen the last of it yet. Trump declaring martial law in 2021 seems unlikely but then so did Brexit in 2015, and now we have Russian oligarchs buying lordships in the House of Lords even as the country prepares to hurl itself into the abyss.