3:45 p.m.
The drive to the bee tree is long and beautiful. Sun streams over grass and dirt roads, fluffy clouds dot the sky, and little farmhouses stake their claim casually on rows of crops.
I’m in the passenger seat with a reporter’s notebook and a pen, absorbing wisdom about bees, which are more interesting than I realized. Dispensing the wisdom is Birney Imes, Dispatch publisher and amateur beekeeper, who is driving over the Alabama border to help a farmer save some bees. Also along is Luisa Porter, a photographer with long hair (remember this for later) and a fear of bees even more crippling than mine.
What happened was a storm blew down this hickory that had entwined with two oaks. The tangled mass, monolithic in scale, had fallen across a path on Bud Bell’s land, and he needed to cut it up to move it. That’s when he found the bees.
“They were living happily within this hollow tree and probably could have been there for years and years, but then the tree fell,” Birney explained sympathetically.
Bees have been disappearing at alarming rates over the last several years.
In 2006, the issue started gaining national attention as beekeepers reported losses of up to 90 percent of their hives. This outbreak of colony collapse disorder (CCD) is still officially unexplained, but most scientists attribute the genocide to either pesticides called neonicotinoids, parasites or a lack of nutrition. Although losses have been cut down, U.S. beekeepers still reported an average loss of 45 percent of their hives for the 2012-2013 winter.
Bud had basic knowledge about the plight of the bees. So, when he found the hive in his fallen tree, he called Birney.
4:28 p.m.
We’re staring at the tree, and it’s huge.
It landed sideways, but has so many branches that the trunk is wedged about eight or 10 feet in the air. We can see some bees crawling around the knotted entrance of their hollow. The plan is to chainsaw the top half of the hollowed-out trunk off and remove it like a lid. Then we’ll extract some of the hive’s honeycomb, which contains brood (bee larvae) and honey. Finally, we have to find the queen bee. When we have the queen and the brood, we’ll put them in a box and move it so the hive can repopulate somewhere else.
It’s the best course of action, but there are still several problems.
First, there’s no way to tell how far the bees have burrowed on either side, so there is a good chance we carve into the hive and upset them. Second, there is a hefty branch, itself as big around as a good-sized tree, in the way. That has to be removed first, and when it is, it could upset the balance of the tree and cause it — and anybody standing on it with a chainsaw — to fall. And finally, beehives in the summer can have as many as 80,000 bees. The only way to distinguish the queen is, according to Birney, that she is slightly larger than the other 79,999 bees.
“She’ll be more elegant,” he says.
I lean over to Luisa, who is standing by Bud’s 4-year-old son Logan and holding her camera nervously.
“Have you ever been stung by a bee before?”
She shakes her head no.
“Me either.”
5:01 p.m.
Birney and Bud are suited up. These suits are white and reminiscent of haz-mat garb, if haz-mat garb also had wide-brim hats with netting attached, and a leftover honey spot on one of the elbows. They look up at the tree.
“How are they going to react when I come in there with a chainsaw?” Bud says.
Birney laughs nervously. “They might not be welcoming.”
Another pause, that Luisa broke.
“Bee welcoming.”
The first chainsaw attack goes off without a hitch. Bud carves into the tree on three sides, creating our lid. If we can pop that off, we can reach in and get what we need — the queen and the brood.
There is another strategizing session between our knights in sweaty beekeeper armor, and talk of crowbars to ply off the wood. Bud stands over the tree with chainsaw in hand, triumphant.
5:20 p.m.
The bees are now going in every direction as Birney and Bud start extracting pieces of honeycomb. One lands on my nose and I scream a word that little Logan shouldn’t know for another few years. Then one lands in Luisa’s hair, which is curly and long, and it gets stuck. Luisa’s worst nightmare is coming true, and she’s flipping her hair and screaming at me to get it out. I start swatting at it with my reporter’s notebook, but I mostly just hit her in the head repeatedly. Logan is laughing at us. Finally, the notebook hits home. The buzzing peters out and I maneuver the dead bee out of her hair with the edge of my book. Luisa thanks me.
Maybe beekeeping isn’t so bad. Companies should do this on corporate retreats to work out office tension.
5:43 p.m.
Still no sign of the queen. Birney comes down from the tree, holding a piece of honeycomb. It’s dripping with honey that’s almost clear. He splits it, flicks a straggling bee off of the comb and hands it to me. “It’s like eating flowers,” he says later.
I’m determined not to lose face again, so I eat the whole piece of comb in a single bite. He’s right. It tastes like springtime exploding in my mouth. I’m not sure what to do with the comb after I’ve eaten the honey, though, so I reluctantly start chewing.
Luisa is more wary before accepting her piece. “Do you eat the comb, too?”
“No,” Birney said. “That’s just wax. You spit that out.”
Oh.
5:54 p.m.
The rescue mission is winding down, although the queen has proved as elusive as she apparently is elegant. There’s talk of leaving the hive box until tomorrow and hoping she and the remainder of the hive have migrated to the box by then. Logan and I start to name the bees. Brian, Britney, Bee-atrice. He asks what the queen’s name is. I guess Brenda. He decides it’s Queen Big Red. Elegant, indeed.
Birney and Bud are climbing down for the last time when Birney asks if I want to see the hive up close.
I still haven’t been stung so I’m feeling brave. I don Bud’s haz-mat suit and climb the tree with Birney.
“Isn’t that something?” Birney says as we peer over the edge.
It really is. If you’ve never seen a hive up close, I recommend it (kind of). This world that exists in five feet of a hollowed-out tree has a complex hierarchy of roles and a collective goal. Worker bees, the only kind that sting and collect honey, will travel up to three miles to forage. In their entire three- to six-week lifetime, a bee will collect a tenth of a teaspoon of honey. It takes 556 worker bees to gather a pound of honey. Birney sums it up as we climb down.
“It’s a group effort.”
6:08 p.m.
The bees are in the box and haz-mat suits are in the trunk. We’ve done what we can for the day, though Birney will come back in a few days to take the hive somewhere it can repopulate. I hug Luisa, shake hands with Bud and pat Logan on the head, feeling a camaraderie for my fellow beekeepers.
The sun is starting to set on the Alabama farmland as we drive away.
I’m feeling good about myself for being a part of this, which is odd because I had nothing to do with the actual rescue process. I remember what Birney told me on the ride over.
“One of the attractions of beekeeping is that it connects you with the natural world.”
I feel connected. Bees are tiny, scary, seemingly insignificant creatures. Millions are dying, and the few thousand that we saved today do not really make a difference.
But the fact that Bud would take the time to find and call Birney, and that Birney would drive out and meet him, and that we would all stand around for two hours and carry pieces of honeycomb down from a tree — that means something, somehow.
There’s an old story adapted from a Loren Eiseley book about a man walking on the beach. He saw a child picking up objects from the sand and throwing them into the ocean, and he asked what he was doing. The boy said he was throwing starfish back into the ocean, because if he didn’t the sun would dry them up and they would die during low tide. The man said, “Child, don’t you realize there are miles and miles of beach and starfish along every mile? You can’t possibly make a difference!”
The boy picked up another starfish, threw it into the ocean and replied, “It sure made a difference for that one.”
I hope there are always Buds to care about the little things enough to make that phone call, and I hope there are always Birneys to answer. And I hope I’m around to see, because I need to be reminded this is the only way anyone makes a difference: one beehive at a time.
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