Around midday yesterday, I had a moment when the store was empty. As it was Sunday, and as I have been showing up for work every single day for the past few months, I did not feel any guilt to have a seat for a moment in the store’s one armchair. I scanned around the room, looking for shelves that needed attention. Then I noticed, just in front of me at the corner of a display table, sat the last copy of a book I formerly had a pile of. I had intended to go through this book months ago, but now with only the one remaining, I picked it up.
While I was expecting a book about bees and beekeeping, A Keeper of Bees: A Story of Hive and Home by Allison Wallace is really a memoir in which bees loom large in the background. Wallace is introduced to her first hive as a doctoral candidate living in rural North Carolina. Her neighbor had come into a hive, and eventually it becomes her hive to tend. Her interest turns into an infatuation. Throughout the rest of this memoir she uses bees and beekeeping both as metaphor and mile marker for the changes in her life.
I am always curious about books about beekeeping because my grandfather, Charlie Kopecky, was a beekeeper. I will always remember the uniquely sweet smell inside the old Ford Econoline that was his bee van. This van was also the one we rode in when going fishing. Most months of the year you could find the dried up bodies of dead bees in the crevices and corners of the van. That scent of the honeycomb persisted into the wintertime when we would sit in that van on frozen lakes fishing for bluegills and walleyes and drinking thermoses of sweetened coffee with cream packed by my grandmother.
As a boy, I was equally fascinated with and terrified by those bees. I was intrigued by my grandfather’s ability to use a box of insects to produce beautiful blond clover honey. It seemed to be a magical production of something from nothing. In my mind at the time, the bees were malicious insects, purposefully causing harm to anyone they would come into contact with. I now know that bees are not so intent on stinging, but at the time, that thought made my grandfather seem heroically brave, being willing to move boxes and steal honey in his bee yard sometimes only wearing his netted helmet and coveralls. I would have liked to work beside him, but would have been too frightened to actually be of any use.
My uncle John now maintains the tradition, keeping bees in his own yards, only a few miles from were his father’s hives resided. Anytime I see my uncle our conversation invariably turns to the bees. I suppose like any other type of livestock, there are always problems. Mites, harsh winters, swarming, and now this phenomona known as “hive collapse” give beekeepers plenty of headaches. At times one is forced to wonder how it could be worth the trouble.
Still, since all those years ago riding in my grandfather’s van, I am also attracted to the idea of keeping bees. After the dedication page in her book Wallace begins with two quotations. One is from Sue Hubbel’s A Book of Bees. It reads “Beekeeping is farming for intellectuals.” This is yet another enticement, though perhaps I have the causation confused; could the practice impart wisdom to the beekeeper? Could it impart some wisdom to me? From my grandfather and uncle I know that the bees make you a student of the weather, of crops and blooms, of seasons, and a student of their own pests and problems. Wallace also must learn this discipline. Would I?
Yesterday, after an hour with the book, I found myself on the internet searching for bee packages, boxes, helmets and smokers. It is a foolish thought, and not one for next spring, but perhaps someday.
