On Bees 

(June 2023)

There’s a man in fancy dress standing over there, in the mid-distance. He’s in this baggie, white onesie that appears to hang heavily off of his shoulders. I’ve found him in a field, again. Hanging around like a lost vagrant. I shout ‘alright?’ then wave my hand. I’m about fifty metres away and can just about make out the fuzzy black clouds in the air around him. He turns his head, looks at me for a moment, then shuffles behind a few trees with a wooden box in his hands. I close the gate from the road and head towards the far end of the field. He reappears, now pacing forwards with a different coloured box in his arms. Beyond the figure of dad-as-DIY-astronaut, a hedgerow merges gradually into a row of native birch and hawthorn trees. Behind these trees, the Black Mountains range from south to north. The horizon line rises and falls from Waun Fach past Mynydd Troed towards Hay Bluff. A few wisps of clouds. Blue sky. Like a cliché, Romantic-era painting. I wade through knee high grass, moving closer. The trees are laden with white blossom. ‘I’ve never seen Hawthorn like this,’ my dad says later. Hawthorn is a common native tree here and a primary provider of nectar and pollen for his bees and various wild pollinators. It has been in bloom for over six weeks. This is unusual, I am told. ‘Means a really cold, harsh winter,’ my dad tells me, speculating. The cold dark of winter is hard to fathom here, now, after another week of hot, dry weather. Nearby reservoirs are already drained to their lowest level from last year’s extreme heat. Wales, famously a country of rain, of drizzle, of grey clouds and of false promises of good weather during school summer holidays, is now a land of sunshine, heat and drought. It’s the hottest beginning to June in recorded history. I move through a patch of bramble. The thorns tug at my shirt. A few bees, disturbed, fly off of the bramble’s flower. A vibration grows louder in the air. 

‘Wouldn’t get any closer,’ my dad says without looking up. I’m maybe ten metres away from him and his hives. Streams of bees pass erratically through the air. He’s leaning over a tall hive, with the lid off, and is looking inside. Irate, flying insects swarming in the air around him. I presume they’re irate. He’s bothered them quite a lot. ‘Checking the queen Tom,’ my dad says. The bees are not happy. They understand his actions as an existential threat. They’re going for his face, although he is protected by a black, mesh-gauze netting on the front of his white onesie’s headpiece. He lifts a frame heavy with wax honeycomb. There are larvae inside each capsule, of which there are hundreds. Then, on putting that one back and lifting another frame, points a gloved finger at a larger insect in comparison to the other bees crawling around the frame. ‘The queen,’ my dad says. She scuttles quickly along the comb, searching for a place to hide. He puts the frame carefully back inside the box. This solitary queen is the mother of every living creature inside this hive. Tens of thousands of children. And somehow, they all know immediately and implicitly what to do. Work, build, mate, forage, defend, attack. A few bees threaten my face. Bomb towards me. They apparently know to target mouths and eyes, sites of heat and moisture. I shut my mouth. The majority of bees, though, continue with their work. Flying up into the air, or crashing back down, legs laden with pollen. Many of her offspring fly miles in search of food. They travel along invisible tracks and maps, instinctively knowing the exact route back to their home. When bees (honey, bumble and solitary) are exposed to neonicotinoids within particular crops, they lose their ability to navigate back to the hive, they get lost, then die. Neonicotinoids are currently illegal in the UK, although it is and has been a battleground waged by ‘big agrochemical’ companies and farming lobbyists for a while. Profits are good. Very good. Better, of course, than biodiversity or ecological breakdown. Shell and Bayer designed and patented neonicotinoids in the 1980s. The initial seed crop is soaked in the neonicotinoid chemical. It then remains in the plant for the duration of the crop life cycle, and contaminates, poisons, kills many insects and small invertebrates that pollinate, eat or live near the crop. The shareholders of Bayer and Shell are okay with this, it is safe to assume. An unfortunate and unforeseen consequence of a highly successful pursuit of profit. Shareholders love numbers. The bigger the number in their back account, the bigger the smile on their faces. A cleaner, currently washing the hull of a moored super yacht in a mediterranean harbour, puts down their mop and, after getting the attention of a workmate, points to a wealthy-looking woman dressed in paired down linen. The woman is leaning on the handrail at the bow of the yacht above them. She is smiling maniacally and staring into the mid-distance. “Is she okay?” one of the cleaners whispers to the other. The second cleaner dismisses the concern. “She’s been like that for the last hour or so,” he says, before returning to the work at hand. The smiling woman eventually comes back into consciousness and, after a moment, looks at her smartphone again. Signing into her protonmail account, she checks the email titled ‘Bayer Third Quarter,’ sent to her by her assistant. She opens the .pdf document and the smile erupts across her face again. Her head tilts, and she gazes passively towards the horizon, with the biggest smile on her face you ever saw. Shareholders love numbers. A wasp flies past her. Several wasps have been attempting to eat the leftover breakfast canapé. One of the kitchen staff catches alight a match and places it on a plate of ground coffee, in an attempt to ward away the pests. ‘Fucking bees,’ they mutter. 

Back in the field, my dad walks over, away from the intense airborne activity around the two dozen hives previously surrounding him. Bees still dive towards his face. He swats them away disinterestedly. I ask him about the effects of intensified agrochemical farming practices over the last decade on his beekeeping. What he knows, what he has observed and so on. He looks around, at the trees, the hives, then says, ‘honestly, it’s hard to know,’ and shrugs his shoulders. “It’s difficult to really tell,’ he continues. It’s unclear to him how many of the solitary bee species are directly affected by the use of insecticides. Here, in Powys, wind fertilised grain is the main crop and thus not of interest to most insect pollinators. These crops are all aggressively sprayed, however. Fertiliser, herbicides, insecticides: whatever works. He says that he still regularly sees different solitary bees in his garden or in hedgerows, although admittedly less so than before. Certain effects of intense monocultural agrochemical farming are seemingly still difficult to observe. Others, like the health of the river LLynfi a few hundred metres away, are more obvious. Nitrates, phosphorus, ammonia, among other agrochemical waste products leech from neighbouring farmland into the rivers throughout Wales. We have an interactive ‘no-go’ map telling people where not to swim due to raw sewage pouring directly into the waterways. Most rivers and coastlines have a big red cross next to them, meaning they are full of human excrement. Full of shit. Real human and farmstock shit. Nice. A society doing Really Well™ or something like that. My dad returns to his hives, having heard me complain about privatised water utility and river poo several times before. 

I decide to follow the sound of flowing water. Through a set of familiar fields. I’ve been here before at the LLynfi, over the years, standing on this river’s edge, looking at the pebble river bed for signs of life. A dragonfly glides past. Its wings make a deep, machine-like hum, then disappears. I think I see a fish darting away, underneath exposed tree roots. But, no. I try to go back to earlier memories. With my grandad, I’m maybe four or five years old. Me and him are knee deep in fresh, flowing water. I lift a crayfish out of the river. It is large in my hand and wriggles around with numerous spindly limbs. I drop it in panic. It splashes back into the water and disappears. It definitely wants to eat my toes, I think. I thrash my feet to escape its revenge, while making stupid, anxious noises. Maybe thirty years ago. This river, more a depleted stream today, has memories of rainbow trout, perch, bream, crayfish, and a multitude of invertebrates and plant life living under and between the rocks and tree roots. There really isn’t much here. Brown, yellowed scum bubble away around the edges. Thick matts of algae covering the river floor. Everything yellowed. And yet, despite that, it still feels brilliant, still full of potential. There’s a dissonance between the received knowledge of ecological precarity and the ongoing beauty of uninhibited nature. It fractures any sense of certainty I have. I watch the water flow for a while. 

You can order all your beehive equipment on Amazon, now. Maybe Jeff Bezos likes beekeeping. Maybe in the future, History will claim Jeff invented modern beekeeping. But then, you know, maybe not. Later that day, I look like an astronaut in a low budget film, together with my dad. I now can clearly see what those peculiar blackened funnels are. Female worker bees returning and leaving the hive at pace. Collectively, they are genie-like, growing out of small openings in boxes littered underneath a few oak trees in another field. The air around me begins to erupt. It has been festering and threatening to break for some time. In the summer, honey bee colonies are prone to swarming. ‘It’s normal,’ my dad says as the sky grows black. Tens of thousands of bees pour out of a wooden box in front of us. It gets darker. We are one or two metres away. They drown out all other sounds. A large blob-like mass hovering over our heads. We look up, watch in awe. The bees continue to pour out into the dense, floating mass. It feels biblical. A plague entering our minds, for our sins. ‘What are they doing?’ I ask my dad. ‘Looking for a new home,’ he says, ‘if the queen joins them. If not, they’ll be back in half an hour.’ He’s calm. Used to all this, the sound of breaking earth in the sky. The swarm. Neck strained, I watch the cloud above my head block out the sky for a little longer.