by Andree HoolihanSomewhere buried in my mother’s house are pictures of me at age seven or eight, wide-eyed and chubby-cheeked, with Madagascar Hissing cockroaches crawling in my hair.
I’ve always loved bugs. My mother remembers me in Disney Land at age three, letting a carpenter ant crawl up my arm. Some well-meaning passerby brushed it off and stomped it, which made me turn to her and start sobbing: ‘he was my friend!’. When I was seven, my grandparents gave me Madagascar cockroaches. They were slow-moving, dumb, hissed when disturbed, and I loved them with the ardent affection a child with their first pet. Each one seemed to have their own personality—the largest was calm and tolerated my handling, while the smaller one would hiss at the slightest provocation. I chopped vegetables for them, watched as they nibbled daintily on bits of cucumber and melon, played with them constantly, and cried bitterly when they died. These days I’m a little more nervous; fast-moving flying cockroaches upset me, and massive skittering huntsman spiders are terrifying. I still love most bugs; I’m enchanted by the cautious, antenna-waving walk of a katydid and the careful consideration of a jumping spider. I’m the one people turn to when they need a spider or house centipede taken outside, and I’ve somehow convinced my mother to raise bees in our yard. The bees are the latest target of my affection; at the peak of summer there are sixty-thousand of them (give or take), all of them clever and slightly fuzzy and driven by instinct as much as by intellect. When I am home I spend hours crouching in front of the hive watching them come and go, marveling at the intricacies of their alien world. Every bee that enters the hive is checked by the guards stationed at the entrance, but bee guards can be bribed as much as humans can be. A savvy thief comes with nectar in its belly, which it feeds to the guard, who stands aside, allowing the robber to make off with honey. The entrance of a hive is a busy place: the guards check returning foragers, cleaners remove the corpses of their dead sisters, and there is often some small battle being waged between a group of workers and an invading ant or wasp. If you spend long enough by the entrance of a hive the guards will come to check on you, circle around your face buzzing suspiciously, but given time they will realize that you are not a threat and will return to their posts, leaving you to watch them work. If bees recognize their keepers is a topic of endless debate in the beekeeping world. On the one hand, they certainly have the visual acuity necessary to distinguish a human form from a nonhuman one, and studies show that they can correctly identify human faces. On the other, worker bees only live for six weeks during the summer, have a brain the size of a sesame seed, and will absolutely sting you, even if you are the one who treats them for parasites and mixes sugar syrup for them to drink when there are no flowers. Personally, I believe that they do recognize us; we aren’t exactly friends to them, but we have been together thousands of years, humans and bees. They know us. Until the early twentieth century, Europeans and Americans certainly believed that bees recognized their people, so much so that it was considered obligatory to inform bees of major life events, lest they feel abandoned by their keepers. For funerals, hives were wrapped in black and turned to face the funeral procession, while weddings called for festive garlands and a slice of cake left outside the hive. I tell the bees whenever I return home from Taiwan, a gentle knock on the side of the box, a whispered “I’m back” to the guards who come to check me. Telling them may be meaningless, but the traditions of beekeeping are some of the oldest in the world. The Aegeans considered their bees sacred messengers to the underworld, Greeks called the priestess to female gods “bees”; women toiling endlessly for a beloved mother. Millenniums worth of people have opened hives and stared at the majesty of these little insects. People often ask me if I’m afraid of the bees, and to be honest they have never really frightened me. I was stung six times last summer- the result of my own stupidity, they never sting unprovoked- and though it hurt, I felt sad more than anything else. A sting is fatal for a bee; it is a last resort used only when she believes the hive is in great danger, and six of them gave their lives because I was careless. Bees pose no danger provided that you are calm, gentle, and respectful, and working with them is an exercise in meditative slowness. a
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May 2024
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