"I'm a lonely old fart, you know, can't keep dogs no more. So without my dogs, I've got bees." Her delicate hands are meticulously kept, sallow white with waning moon fingernail tips. Knotted fingers season the air around her like a chef's expertly conjuring at their kettle. Betty's enthusiasm comes as no surprise to me. The car ride to this pew-less church in Carlisle was filled with my narrow-minded musings on her kind - fit to a tee save her pumpkin patch face: a slight and graying woman in Merrells and a boldly patterned zip-up fleece. Practical, a bit eccentric and impossibly adorable.
Perhaps it is owed to a year in a new place, following a year in another, two years of feeling slightly out of touch, that paints this halo glow on her maternal, sun-shrunk face, compelling me to give her a hug. I find myself wanting to hug the most of them, sitting quiet in their green upholstered folding chairs, fumbling with coat zippers and an occasional winter hat.
If you had asked me months ago how I envisioned my sophomore spring break I wouldn't have said Cancun. And yet, if made to guess between sun-soaking on beer-stained beaches and exchanging tracheal mite fumigation remedies at a Unitarian Church in rural Massachusetts, the latter would have seemed more out of place. It is one thing to participate in a coming-of-age tradition expected of your university peers, it is another to invade an unknown community hoping to take it, for a time, as your own.
Betty's hands bring me back and I foresee my first roadblock. How can I convey her manic lack of inhibition, which seems to dance all pretext from her upper limbs? I need to ask her more about the dogs, I think, but she's already miles ahead. "Rick's just great you know. Real expert. You get the sense he really loves them." Her chin flicks towards a man leaning over a table set up in front. Hiking boots and a crimson sweatshirt, an unlikely president. Betty recently completed Rick's six-week course on beekeeping, something that looked fun at her town's rec. center for the 2008 Winter Season.
The chairs fill steadily and I make my way to the back rows. Betty's hands leap at a young man whose stone features and flaxen crew cut seem too military for this place, "She's an artist," she croons nudging my slow progress forward, "that John's real experienced with bees." John seems slightly irked by the open invitation Betty has given, but I'm already walking towards him, self-conscious at his hesitant gaze. His answers are concise and warily friendly like a man's met by a door-to-door child selling candy. He's been keeping for three years, helping summers on a family farm in Connecticut where he makes a honey wine called mead. John, like the majority of beekeepers, is a hobbyist; his main line of work is as an engineer specializing in defense.
I am drawn to a man sitting just behind us whom John too cannot resist. Periodically, John's eyes flicker towards him anticipating a correction to the specialized jargon he has been murmuring my way for the past five minutes. The sitting man commands respect. He is clearly an old-timer. His face has been tanned by years immersed in the elements and if it weren't for an ample Chris Cringle belly, I'd file him among Steinbeck's dustbowl heroes. His hair is impeccably parted, his fingertips ripped and earth-stained. I make a note of this juxtaposition, which seems to hold promise for my journal-turned eyes. To complete these perfectly set quirks is a name that seems the inverse of Bingo's master: Fred Farmer.
"Aha! I see your eyes. Farmer. That's it. And I didn't change it either. 'Course I had to be in the farming business with a name like mine." Fred smiles, delivering a line perfected from years of farm-stand salesmanship and hunches forward with a business card.
"Pepperell. That's a hike."
"Oh no, forty-five minutes. Fifty tops. Heck, you want a hike, I've been on bee meetings in the Carolinas."
My pencil rushes over my notebook filled with a sense of a found protagonist. I try to keep myself from these artistic considerations, staying as much in the moment as I can. But this is too good. Fred Farmer the aging beekeeper. Part of a family business. Willing to fly for his wing-powered friends. I want to spend the rest of the night seeping in Fred's story. But the room quiets and chairs shuffle as Rick says his opening hellos and my attention is diverted to his table.
He sits between two men, both around his age, one on a laptop the other in a baseball cap, all in hiking boots. The laptop is taped up with all kinds of stickers that I crane forward to read. Make your own damn coffee. Sustainable, localized food. Couldn't see that one coming. I am aware of the curious eyes upon me and blush at how ridiculous I must look: dissecting them like they do a dead bee, prying out answers and evidence. I wonder at their closeness, if I'm the only strange face in the room. But I am kept of too much hypothesis as Rick clears his throat. "Okay now. So every week there's something we like to do just as a sort of welcome. So anyone new to beekeeping, first timers here…" A few hands rise, all from the same row. Fred and John look at me and I wobble a wary elbow upwards, mumbling something about how I don't keep bees.
For me, beekeeping seems utterly exotic and yet it is one of the oldest behaviors of man, part of an ancient relationship with the noble honeybee. Signs of the bees' presence can be found in the rock paintings of Neolithic man and the practice of keeping is thought to precede all other agricultural advancements. Ancient civilizations from the Egyptians to the Greeks dedicated themselves to the rearing of bee colonies, worshiping the bee for its healing powers.
Today, of the estimated 2.5 million colonies in the United States, the majority are "kept." In some ways this statistic seems promising help for the honeybee, with wild colonies surviving an average of only one or two years. And yet, fifty percent of kept colonies are lost each year to an array of diseases and pests plaguing the honeybee. The current evil on everybody's lips, one that evokes an array of grumbles and gasps at the First Unitarian, is Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD).
While the cause of CCD is still a mystery, scientists speculate that environmental toxins, mites, and global warming are among the perpetrators. That's two strikes for mankind. The disorder has wiped out colonies in 27 states, taking out as much as 90% of bees in kept colonies in the mid-Atlantic region. And it doesn't just affect bees. The holocaust of the honeybee population has forged a less drastic decline in the beekeeping population, some of whom cannot afford the increase in costs to keep their bees healthy. What's more, the mysterious disease has many food scientists worried about the affordability of honey, a staple in global diets, as prices continue to soar. But the agricultural hurt goes beyond the honey crop. Bees are responsible for pollinating what Rick calls "every third bite of food we take," eighty percent of produce in the States alone.
The decimation of the honeybee at the hands of CCD has been compounded by the varroa mite, a pest all too familiar at the Middlesex County Beekeeper Association. A man in a blue cable knit vest with nervous feet asks a question about foulbrood, hesitantly name-dropping the infamous pinhead-sized pest. Murmurs echo through the room, and I hear Betty's words behind her tensed fingers, "Not good, not good."
The tiny killer, introduced into the States in the late 80s, is linked to two deadly pathogens that were cited as the primary cause of mortality for kept and wild honeybee populations in the 1990s. With the recent development of CCD, the mite has played an even larger role in destruction, leaving the honeybee virtually defenseless against the disease.
"The bees are telling us something about the environment," Rick stands over a mug of coffee with me in the kitchen of the church. The ten-minute break has become a half hour potluck affair, members buzzing in and out of the kitchen talking bees, talking weather, talking politics. There is frustration in his voice, a slight strain behind his teacherly inflection. I flip to a new page in my notebook, ready to document the conflict of man versus Man. But Rick does not steer towards political tirades. He is interrupted to give a hug to a woman with grey permed hair. She reminds me of my great Aunt, and has a voice that flashes of Julia Childs.
As the two friends begin catching up, Fred walks my way. His face has become strangely serious. "April 15th though, right around the corner, might be getting $4 million from the government 'cause of all the lost bees from the mites and draught and what not."
"Do you think it'll pass?" My voice is hesitant, bracing for bad news.
"Oh sure, you kidding me? It Christ well better."
Rick, who has been fumbling over a creamer by the coffee station, turns towards us with the languid nonchalance of authority, "Because it's like anything, Allison - any natural disaster. What's happened to these bees…the government can't go on ignoring us forever." I nod knowingly, comprehending nothing and everything about this deep-seated conflict between bureaucracy and invisible farmer.
In September 2007 the 1996 Farm Bill, so hated by apiasts, expired. The modifications to the '96 bill in 2002 were no sign of hope for the bee community. The over $8000 million in government subsidies to divisions in agriculture left a paltry $3 million for the honey crop, by far the produce receiving the lowest aid. Even the second bottom crop, mohair, saw four times as much funding as did honey. And this coming in the peak of ruin of colonies across the country.
As the number of colonies declines yearly and CCD gains momentum with each passing season, the future for the honeybee is a grim one. But inside the First Unitarian church in Carlisle there is hope.
Fred looms above me, belly-mountain sloping up to the crests and valleys of his wind beaten face. His enthused gabble is suspended as his milky eyes survey the scene. "Used to be oh, 2-300 of us back in Waltham. But I swear the truth, saying it's getting more and more of us each year." He looks at me briefly, waiting for a convinced nod. It takes a moment - I knew this guy was a straight shooter from the first words out of his mouth. It doesn't even occur to me to doubt his assessment.
And it's something I have to believe. Rick tells me the past two years have seen 2000 new beekeepers in Massachusetts alone, a pattern he explains partially by the present trend towards organic and locally grown food. As the larger beekeeping community continues to face devastation, people like Nancy Mangion of the Beekeepers Warehouse in Woburn believe the community's one salvation may be these backyard people.
And it's easy to see why. I look to Betty, one of the few thousand taking the plunge. She looms over the hive frame a man has brought in, lips parted frozen in anticipatory glee. Regret is a slow pool in my stomach in the final minutes I spend with this unlikely congregation. Hours before passing through the church's heavy wooden doors, a desire to uncover an unfounded intimacy between man and insect dominated my thoughts. But in this room, well stocked with knits and orthopedic footwear, I realize such hopes belonged to an outsider looking in to herself at the expense of community. For as much as beekeeping reflects that local link between Homo sapien and honeybee, at the first Unitarian Church in Carlisle, I find a wider ripple echoing from that primeval bond: I find the laughter of a woman who sought the medicinal powers of powdered sugar; I find despair in fallen silence: a fellow keeper has lost his fourteenth hive. These men and women have come their two minutes and their two hours to comfort their mourning friends, offering what they can of joy in these wearing times.
Beside me, Fred too is taking it in, a sigh dancing slowly beyond his sun-freckled lips. "Not a bad turn out, nope." His milk pail eyes light upon my own as a stained smile breaks lines in his cheeks. "And it looks to me we've got one more member."