VISITING A bee-loud glade last weekend – at an apiary in Kildare to be exact – I couldn't help wondering why WB Yeats found the prospect of living in such a place conducive to relaxation, writes FRANK McNALLY
Even with protective clothes, I found, peace came dropping slow. It was hard to ignore the fact that some of the ambient loudness emanated from bees engaged on a reconnaissance mission to find a way into my bee-suit. They clearly weren’t fussy where they found it, either. The crotch area would do as well as any other.
Not that they needed to get in to attack: a point underlined by one of my companions in the glade: Colm O’Neill of the North Kildare Beekeepers Association. “Good man,” he commented drily, as I pressed the veil to my face to improve visibility: a common mistake. “That’ll give them a chance to sting you through the net.” We were opening the hives in Pat Mercer’s garden near Clane. And once I was sure of my suit’s impermeability, I began to see Yeats’s point. Living alone in a bee-loud glade might be a bit extreme. But bee-keeping has a therapeutic element, especially during a recession. It could be very useful as a corporate-bonding exercise, I imagine.
The bees in Clane had apparently not heard of the international slow-down. On the contrary, this is boom time in the honey-manufacturing sector, so the hives were working flat out. And in their emphasis on productivity, even at the expense of health-and-safety, bee colonies would warm the heart of any employer.
At the peak of her career, for example, a queen bee lays more than her own weight in eggs daily. Then there are the worker bees, all female, who build up the hive, keep it clean, collect the nectar, turn it into honey, attend the queen’s every need, etc. So exhausting is their routine during peak season that they live for only six weeks: assuming they have not died before then, defending the colony in a suicide-attack.
On the other hand, there are the drones, whose lives are a model to which many human males would aspire. Existing only to fertilise queens (a very athletic activity, performed in the open air at high altitude, presumably to ensure that only strong genes are passed on), they do no other work.
And since their genetic material is essential to the species, they get away with it – up to a point. That point comes when their breeding work is done, or when the food supply runs short; at which time the workers attack them, sometimes biting their legs and wings off, and driving them out.
This being May, the drones are still sponging off the system. And the nectar gatherers have been concentrating of late on hawthorn: a fact confirmed by the fragrance when the hives in Clane were opened.
Hawthorn makes the best honey, which is why you won’t see much of it for sale. The keepers keep it.
It was too early yet for harvesting, however; and the main focus in Kildare was to find the queen in each hive and clip her wings.
Clipping the queen keeps the colony stable by preventing premature swarming. But it’s not easy. First you have to locate her among 50,000 bees, a task facilitated by the dab of bright paint applied to her back during an earlier inspection. Then she has to be isolated; and held delicately between thumb and index finger while her wings are snipped by a scissors in the free hand.
This is not something you can do while wearing gloves. So in common with many beekeepers, Colm O’Neill works with bare hands, protected only by the odd puff from that other vital apiarist’s tool: the “smoker”.
The right kind of smoke calms bees, but only so much. Keepers get stung, and they learn to deal with it. As one bee sank its rear-mounted syringe into O’Neill’s hand on Saturday, he expertly scraped the insect away, sting and all: minimising the pain while also allowing the bee to fight another day.
But when another kamikaze struck during the queen-clipping, this option was not available to either party. The bee-keeper had no choice but to wince and bear it as the worker bee delivered the full payload into the top of his finger. And having laid her life down for the cause, the now sting-less insect crawled off to die.
Occupational fatalities are common in a hive: you’ll probably crush a few workers when putting the lid on. But the health of the monarch is paramount. In War and Peace, seizing any excuse to show off his knowledge about bee-keeping, Leo Tolstoy likened the evacuated Moscow of 1812 to a queenless hive.
“All is neglected and foul. Black robber bees are swiftly and stealthily prowling about the combs, and the short home bees, shrivelled and listless as if they were old, creep slowly about without trying to hinder the robbers, having lost all motive and all sense of life.”
Tolstoy was not alone among great writers in having an intimate knowledge of bee-keeping. The doomed Sylvia Plath was an expert too, through her father, and drew on the subject in some of her best poems. Inevitably, however, the metaphors she used tended to be disturbing. Peace did not come dropping, slow or any other way, to her.