A Bee Named Melissa

[aggienaut]

Monday, March 5th, 2012 – I pull the handbreak, and the pickup sways back on its wheels by some beehives. I step out into the warm sunny air. From this location just on the east side of the mountains that divide Orange County from Riverside County, California, the view as far as I can see is mostly rolling chaparral-covered hills. Beyond the nearby orange groves, only a few distant buildings and glimpses of a highway between some hills distinguish the rugged landscape from how it must have looked when only the native Payómkawichum people lived here. Closer at hand the gentle breeze rustles the leaves of orange groves around the bee site, and from the entrances at the base of twenty stacks of white boxes, bees busily pour in and out. I immediately notice a dark mass on a shrubby elderberry tree just beside the beehives.
   I walk over to it and confirm that it’s a solid mass of bees – a swarm that has issued from one of the beehives. These bees are looking to establish a new colony somewhere and will rest on that branch until the scouts find a suitable location and they all will then move there. I’ll deal with this when I finish with the rest of the beehives.
   I pull on my white coveralls, light the smoker and get to work. I smoke each hive, take off the lid, look at a few frames in each box and then take it off to look at the box under it. It’s eighty degrees, cool for late winter in Riverside, but one always sweats in the confines of a bee suit, and worst of all one can’t drink through the veil.
   Beekeeping is, at its heart, inspecting beehives and seeing what’s going on, what the bees are trying to do or having trouble with, and how you can help them. You can’t make the bees do anything they don’t want to do, all you can do is help them. You can, however, go in with your expectations, such as at this time of year I expect to be adding additional boxes (“supers”) and taking various actions to deter swarming, and indeed that is what I’m mostly doing. As a hobbyist one can take half an hour to analyze a hive and properly appreciate the complex functioning of the bee society, but on a commercial scale one has hives to get through, and I aim to get through each hive in about six minutes.
   I rest for a moment halfway through, drenched with sweat. Was I really teaching beekeeping in Africa a month ago? It seems like a dream now. Will I ever get back? Is this my life? There’s not much time for introspection, back to work.
   When I’ve finally finished the hives I place an empty beehive under the swarm of bees, with its lid off, and give the branch a brisk shake. The clump of bees falls onto the hive, and within moments most of them have climbed down into the frames. I give them a few more minutes for most of the bees up in the air to figure out where their companions are and enter the hive, then I place the lid on it, tighten the strap, place the hive on the truck, and depart. I drive a quarter mile to the main road, get out and quickly take off the bee suit, and then resume my drive, winding up and through the mountains on the Ortega Highway, back into Orange County to one of the small bee sites closer to home –an empty lot tucked in amongst the suburbs– where I place the new hive.

Tuesday, March 6th, 2012 – I happen to be stopping by the same bee yard again to put more supers on, and as expected there’s a very small cluster of “residual” bees where the swarm had been.
   When I finish my work I go look at the residual bees. Even if I hadn’t taken the rest of the swarm, the swarm would have moved on while leaving behind some scouts that were out when it left. These residual bees will then wait, and wait, and wait, for a swarm that will never return. It occurs to me to take one of these bees that is programmed to sit tight forever with me to see how it will live out its life. I place my hand by the small cluster and one of the bees climbs aboard.
   I drive home with the bee on my hand. She walks around slowly, not enough to cause any trouble steering the truck. I decide to name her Melissa, which is Greek for honeybee. All that evening at home she stays on my hand while I make dinner and go about my evening. I put her down to wash my hands but she seems to become agitated until I pick her up again. I feed her a drop of honey for dinner.
   I call Tarragon, she’s still on the ship, they’ve drifted further up away up the northern California coast, but she’ll be finished with this gig next month.
   “And I’ll come back down to be with you unless you’ll be off traveling again” she says a bit saucily.
   “Haha of course I’ll be here” I laugh.
   The bee wanders my hand as we talk.
   When I turn out most of the lights to watch a movie on netflix Melissa settles down – bees are used to the dark of the hive, though I worry she’s lonely, they’re not accustomed to being alone. I place her in a cup with a coaster on top while I sleep.

   The next day I take her with me, I’m working in the office. I let her crawl around the desk while I work at the computer with the “don’t panic” sticker. A solitary residual bee actually makes a great office pet it turns out, as she would slowly wanders the desk and only every now and then would I have to give her a lift back to the middle when she wandered too far off to the side. At one point she is adorably hopping from key to key on the keyboard.
   Around 4:30, while Melissa happened to be on my hand, Jeremy came into the office from the back, looking serious, and informed us
   “Dave lost the law suit guys.”

Flashback to two years earlier:
September 13th, 2010, Costa Mesa, California – “Hey! Don’t fucking change the channel!” the fat bouncer bellows at Jeremy from across the roomful of sticky tables of the Goat’s Hole Saloon.
   “No one else was watching it I just wanted to put the game on man” Jeremy protests.
   “Look wise guy you’ll fucking I fucking y in my fucking bar okay??” the bouncer growls while charging across the sawdust-strewn floor like a grossly overweight bull.
   “Okay jesus chill man chill” Jeremy holds up his hands as the bouncer angrily changes the TV back to his preferred station.
   “You know what, just get the fuck out of my bar wiseguy” the bouncer yanks Jeremy bodily out of his chair by the collar and begins to push him violently towards the door as he protests.
   “Hey, hey! What’s going on?” Jeremy’s coworkers, who had been at the bar, notice and jump up.
   “Hey, what the fuck man what are you doing to my employee?” Dave, our boss, finally manages to get in front of the bouncer at the doorway.
   “I’m kicking you all the fuck out get out and stay out” yells the bouncer giving Dave a shove.
   “Hey asshole hey what the fuck cool it asshole” Dave regains his footing and gets in the bouncer’s face. He’s got nothing on the bouncer’s weight but stands a head taller than him.
   Dave has failed to notice the bouncer produce a small heavy mag-light from his pocket, and so it catched him by surprise when it’s swung at his face. As Dave goes down the bouncer continues hitting him in the face, blood splatters the concrete. Bob, another of Dave’s employees, leaps in to ineffectually intervene – the bouncer is just too big. Finally the bouncer feels satisfied and withdraws back into the bar leaving Dave to be rushed to the hospital by his employees, where a metal plate had to be inserted into his face to hold it all together.
   Or so I’ve pieced together. I was not there because I'm always leaving. At the time I was at sea somewhere off the coast of Washington State, just coming on deck for watch. And one of our passengers is awake, standing on deck looking at the stars. It’s hard to recognize her in the dark all bundled up but I see long dark hair. She turns on my approach and I recognize the large eyes and hawaiian features as a passenger I haven’t had a chance to talk to yet but I remember her very distinct name,
   “Hi, Tarragon is it?”

...

   “Dave lost the lawsuit”
   We stare at Jeremy in disbelief.
“You’re pulling our leg.” Jeremy is always pulling pranks, and I thought Dave had an open and shut case for gross negligence against the bar – they hired a man with prior violent criminal offenses as a bouncer and gave him no training, any reasonable person could anticipate this could lead to the bouncer injuring guests, and the cctv footage had all been mysteriously “lost,” which jury instructions specify means it should be assumed it would have favored the the party that didn’t lose the footage. So for a minute or so the office manager and I stare at Jeremy and try various forms of “you’re not serious” on him.
   At the moment it dawns on me that he is, in fact, serious, Melissa, who had meanwhile climbed up to my neck, stings me.
   Now this is a serious moment, so I ignore the sting in my neck while we ask Jeremy a few more questions, until finally he notices or can no longer ignore that I seem to have a bee with its back-end embedded in my neck.
   “Um, I think your bee stung you?” he ventures.
   “Ah, yes, she did.” I carefully pluck Melissa from my neck, using my fingernail to try pry her out to minimize damage and examine her. She seems very agitated, but has no visible injury. Often when a bee stings someone the stinger tears out of her so badly that she’s massively hemorrhaging her yellow bodily fluids and dies in seconds, but perhaps it broke off sideways in my careful removal.
   Keeping Melissa had been an experiment in keeping a residual bee alive, but this development opens up a new potential inquiry into bee psychology. It is often asked if bees know they will die if they sting someone, and if so, what will a bee do if it doesn’t die after stinging someone?
   It is also often asked if bees can sense how we’re feeling, and this is hardly a scientific study, but I believe it was my sudden change of mood which freaked Melissa out and caused her to sting.
   Once I have ascertained Melissa isn’t dying I remove the stinger from my neck and resume working. Melissa gradually calms down and resumes walking around the desk, perhaps just a bit more excitedly than before.
   As I’m walking to my car a short time later to go home, she actually takes off and flies around me twice before landing back on my shoulder. I’ve never seen her fly before.

   Just as I get to the car she takes off again, once more flies around me, and then flies off into the sunset. I wait around for a few more minutes but she doesn’t come back.
   I’m a bit sad to lose her, but this has been an extremely interesting insight into bee psychology. As a beekeeper one learns how bees in mass behave but rarely gets any look at the psychology of a bee as an individual. My theory is that while her previous “mission” had been to hold tight and wait, forever, the act of stinging erased that mission, and left her free to seek her fortune, so to speak.

Thursday, March 8th, 2012 – I’m back out at another bee site in Riverside, going through hives in the sunny heat, back at the daily grind. My phone rings. I yank the glove off my hand to answer the phone It’s The Organization.
   “Hi Kris, would you like to do another project in Nigeria next month?” the recruiter asks in a sweet southern lilt (the US HQ is in Little Rock Arkansas).
   “Yes, definitely!” I respond immediately.
   “And there’s another project in Ethiopia, you could do them back to back while you’re over there, if that’s not too much…”
   “No, yes, I would love to do both!”
   After discussing the details a bit more the phone call ends, she’ll email me the scopes of work and other documents to get it rolling. I had thought maybe if I was lucky in another year I’d get another project, but here are two more immediately!!

---

Endnotes
   This is a sort of mini chapter of the book I'm working on, to come right after the Nigeria chapter I linked to the other day (but hey if you're gonna follow links and read it why not start at the beginning and tell me what you think of the whole thing thus far. The whole thing is about 20,000 words / 40 pages.
   This section is hot off the press so it can authentically be said to be a newly written entry for the LJI prompt. (though the basic story of Melissa was originally told in an lj entry in 2009, enteresting to compare and see how far my writing has come)
   A comical amount of time and research went in to the choice of the tree in the first paragraph being an elderberry tree, involving a lot of research in collaboration with my mom and what native tree most resembles the tree I recall and most realistically was likely. Of course it mgiht not have been a California native at all but this is my story and I ain't showcasing no non native California trees if I can help it. One of the final deciding factors was that "elderberry" is an inherently funny word, imho.
   I can't believe that as far as I can tell from perusing my tags, I seem to have never written about the infamous Goat Hill Tavern Incident, which is a shame because having read everyone's affadavits I knew a lot more at one time than I recall now. I regret that in this retelling all my coworkers seem so innocent, I think it would be better storywise for them to be a bit more ill-behaved themselves. Ii suppose its a result of the affadavits having of course emphasized how very not at fault they were. I of course don't have to stick with their version of events but I'm not sure how to spice it up.
      The "because I'm always leaving" isn't making that theme too painfully hamfisted is it? (the more subtle elements of it are me telling Tarragon I'll be around in a month paired with my later readily agreeing to do two more projects in Africa)

Comments

[viagra.livejournal.com]

My husband and I were literally talking about this just yesterday—we had bees living in the outside wall of our house. They found a small crack and took to it, building a fairly large hive inside the wall. I don't think I would have minded so much were they not getting into the house through an electrical outlet and dying everywhere. Anyway, we call a removal expert who specifically would not kill the bees but just move the hive. When he was busy removing the bees from the wall, they came out and swarmed everywhere, and the bee guy called over my husband.

He said, "They won't do anything to you as long as you're calm about it and don't freak out." And so my husband went, sans bee suit, into the swarm of bees that was coming from our wall, and wasn't stung at all. Many of them landed on him and just walked around before flying off again, but he didn't get stung.

When we were recounting this, my father-in-law mentioned the bees know they'll die if they sting you, so they probably view stinging as an absolute last resort. I don't know if that's true or not, but it makes sense. Then you come along with this entry and it was very serendipitous. I enjoy reading about beekeeping from you!

[mollywheezy.livejournal.com]

We once had a swarm of bees in our living room. Their queen had died and they were lost and confused. I paid for the "bee plan" with our pest control folks, and expected I would get a beekeeper to move the bees, but a couple of guys with a shop vac showed up . . . :( They said the bees would die anyway without their queen. I hope that's the truth, because it really upset me that they killed them. Of course, I also couldn't have bees swarming in my living room, especially since I'm allergic to stings. They couldn't figure out how they had gotten in and they wandered around for a couple of hours.

[viagra.livejournal.com]

emo_snal would probably know better about whether the bees would have died or not without the queen — I wasn't able to be around for the bee removal, but I think that my husband said the bee guy told him that any that were left (maybe scouts that were away from the hive) would come back, notice the queen was gone, and would go out in search of a new hive to join, but that it was also likely that any other hives wouldn't want the stragglers to join them and they would just end up wandering around until they died. I thought that was pretty sad, too. :( But then, this story here talks about that, too! I wonder if the scout bees just understand that it's part of the job that you might end up left behind.

[emo-snal.livejournal.com]

Yeah no yeah the scouts do not "notice the queen is gone and wander off" they very definitely hunker down at the last place the swarm was and wait there forever, or until they die of exposure, whichever comes first.

[viagra.livejournal.com]

That sounded more likely based on this story! Sorta sad, but I guess that's bee life. I do wonder if they have some sort of understanding like, "Well, they might not be there when I get back so if that's the case I'll just die I guess."

[emo-snal.livejournal.com]

I'm wondering on what basis they were saying the queen had died? It's hard to diagnose from here obviously but I'm not sure in the circumstance there'd be any way to know the queen had died short of seeing her dead body. Kinda sounds like a piece of BS exterminators who knew little about bees just were telling every customer.

Also the "the bees would die without their queen" is sort of debatable. Yes they would die in the sense that all living things eventually die so its not an untrue statement, but lacking a queen would be unlikely to hasten their deaths. It would result in the eventual dwindling away of the colony of bees though as no new ones were being born.

All in all though i think it's likely they knew nothing about bees other than these standard explanations they gave everyone in every circumstance to justify just killing the bees.

[mollywheezy.livejournal.com]

They told me that when bees swarm with the queen to move somewhere, that they swarm in sort of a sphere with the queen in the middle to protect her. These bees were very diffuse and random, more in a wide column shape.

[emo-snal.livejournal.com]

Nah i wouldn't anticipate the presence or non presence of the queen would effect the shape like that. Residual swarms like mentioned in this story also form tight clusters without a queen.

Describe this "wide column shape" ? Like was it still a solid mass of bees just in a wide column shape? And it was in the house?

[mollywheezy.livejournal.com]

It went floor to ceiling, so maybe 15 feet? And was about 4 feet wide and maybe 2 feet deep. There were a LOT of bees in my living room!

[emo-snal.livejournal.com]

Wow did you get pictures??

[mollywheezy.livejournal.com]

No, I didn't. I actually heard them before I saw them, but I thought I had left the ceiling fan on high in the living room. Then I saw a bee swarm and freaked the heck out since I'm allergic to stings. I left the house as quickly as possible and called my husband, whose response was, "We have WHAT in the living room?! Why are you calling ME? Call the pest control folks!"

So I didn't even think about pictures . . .