The Hive in Winter
My beehive, like the rest of the garden, wore a fresh dusting of snow this morning. It’s our first sticking snow of the winter and unseasonably late.
However, 2020 has vanquished normal expectations in every corner of life—personal, professional, political and meteorological. So I’ll just try to take the snow at face value and say it looked beautiful.
Last week were two firsts for me:
I turned in my response to proofreader queries for my debut novel The Music of Bees, which is forthcoming from Dutton, and I completed my first oxalic acid drip on my beehive.
The former of these is harder to explain.
My friends and family have tired of hearing me say I’ve turned in “the final” revision of the novel. They can’t comprehend (and who can blame them) subsequent rounds of editing, copy-editing, proofreading—all accompanied by questions you never thought to ask. (For example, What time is it, exactly, when the cop shows up Wednesday? And what of this habit of naming once-mentioned characters Steve?)
All I can say is that such painstaking work is what makes writing both tedious and addicting.
The oxalic acid drip is easier to explain:
I dribbled a concoction of poison and sugar water on my honeybees. The why of it would take a bit more telling, but the short answer is that oxalic acid is meant to kill off any remaining parasitic varroa mites so that this hive makes it through the winter.
A healthy honeybee hive has about 60,000 members in full summer.
By fall, the queen has stopped laying eggs and the worker bees kick out the drones, which are male and serve no purpose but procreation. (Sorry, guys. No room for freeloaders.) The remaining ladies, about 20,000 or so, cluster together for the duration of the winter. They don’t hibernate, but they can’t leave the hive until the temperature rises above 57 degrees. Forming a ball around the queen they vibrate their bodies to keep the hive toasty, and they survive on stored honey. With luck, honey stores and the medicine I’ve dosed them with, they will emerge strong in the spring.
This afternoon, I put my ear to the hive. I could hear them clicking and whirring away in there. It’s comforting to think of them tucked up inside in the dark.
That’s how my mind feels right now.
With the book put to bed, I have other ideas percolating away—essays, feature stories, maybe another novel taking shape. Like the bees, I’m going to feed on my stores. On the outside that looks like equal parts Pride and Prejudice, Netflix, The New Yorker and Christmas cookies. But on the inside, I swear, there’s a writer’s mind at work.