There were bees all over the kitchen when I came home, still swimming in the day’s many errands that mostly involved buying the various things we needed for our new house with Cindy. My mother in law was allergic so I just started killing them, eight or nine on the kitchen window before I was guilty and done. I hate to kill bees. The sun-diseased, plastic flyswatter shattered with each blow, so by the time I killed the last one on the window I was holding a stump. They had swarmed around a glass of wildflowers from the front yard that Lilah had picked for her Mom. Little Mediterranean flowers designed to hold their water and look pretty and not much else, definitely not smell good or attract so many bees. But I took the purple culprits off the window ledge anyway, and threw it all out on the grass in our new and still foreign backyard that was…full of hundreds and hundreds of bees.
I called Louie the pug in and closed the sliding glass doors and stared out at the swirling melee with my hands on my hips. A powerless child locked out of my own back yard. There were thousands of bees, actually. Had to be. The air teemed with them, each one veering on its own busy and drunken tack. And then I saw the thick mass of them, clumped on a branch of the overgrown pine tree by my office door. A basketball, maybe two, of writhing, striped shapes. And the deafening hum of all the bees on the world.
“Shit.”
“What?” Cindy asked, opening one of the never-ending new things for our house.
“Bees.”
The rest of the many plans for today were over. I had never dealt with a swarm of bees before, but I knew at least that. Whatever I had to do would take the rest of the day and I would be lucky to get someone over at all. That was how things worked now that I was a proud homeowner. Why did I buy this goddamned house.
I searched the internet, of course, and after sifting out the omnipresent exterminators found the self-proclaimed “bee man,” of the county, Roger, who collected and did not kill. He was the only one I could get on the phone and he charged 150 dollars.
“It actually takes some manpower and equipment. It’s not an easy operation,” he said in defense of his fee. “It costs about the same as extermination.”
“I’m sure. And I don’t want to kill them. So do you use the bees for honey?”
“I used to. But now I just collect the bees and store ‘em. Some produce. Some don’t. Other people collect the honey if they want to. I just don’t do it anymore.”
“O.K.,” I said, not sure what to say to all of that. Sounded funny but I had no choice. Did bee collectors lie? He asked me all of the, how high is it, how big is the swarm, when did it arrive, kind of questions.
“That tree’s just a temporary place they’re keeping the queen. All those fliers are scouts looking for a more permanent place to build the hive. Underground, in the roof…that could happen in the next day and then you’ve got a bigger problem. They comb in the rafters and then you have rancid honey dripping in your walls. Then you’ll have to call someone else and it’s a lot bigger deal.”
“O.K.”
Someone would call me and someone named Franco was on their way. In the meantime I did my instant, expert-making internet research and watched the swarm tighten on the tree as the afternoon cooled, the sea air making its way back to us with the tide.
“You know In Las Vegas, Pat, you know Pat I work with, he works with bees, and they go and collect the swarms for free. The queen bees are expensive, cost them a couple hundred bucks, so they collect them and use them for honey.”
“Really. Hmm,” I said. Cindy was a collector of things, information being one of the best things she piled up. What she said she knew, she did. I happily closed the internet and went with the Mother-in-law.org plan of action.
So I rushed around trying to keep these bees alive and making honey and save us 150 dollars in the process. I called every bee-keeping club and the only one that called me back was Jeremy. He sounded like he was 12. Two more swarms he had to get through, he said, and he could come out to Los Osos by 5 or so. I cancelled bee man Roger.
“It says here that bees are at their calmest when they swarm,” I said from my office, back on the expert-making device. Cindy “hmm”-d and I went out the back slider to look at it. Inched closer and closer until I could almost reach out and touch the swarming mass. Had to be ten thousand, I thought. Ten thousand little workers surrounding their queen. Beautiful and mesmerizing and I went from seeing the whole thing as a bad omen to falling in love with it. Falling in love with our swarm of bees out my office window.
I took the girls outside, held Lilah and Sophie to see the swarm close up. Their fear from behind the sliding glass door turned to wonder outside right in front of it, a kind of shuddering awe. Brad, my great, hulking sculptor-metal fabricator friend brought his daughter out too and we all nervously gawked at the proceedings. Then Jeremy appeared.
He looked all of 18, actually, and had pollen and honey and what looked like bee guts all over his white and blue striped button down. The only equipment he had was a box with slates on top and a head net. And a placid demeanor that was too relaxed for the situation. As if he was over to get stoned and play video games. I shook his hand and it was dirty, sticky. He smiled easily.
“You need to get any more equipment from the truck?” I asked hopefully. I pictured the smoker and the team of guys named Marcos. Things that the “bee man” had told me about. Effort and equipment and men.
“No, I’m all set,” he said as he peered all around the twirling creature of bees, its own organism now, body and face and limbs. “This is a real nice one. Probably close to 10 thousand in it. Real nice and tight.”
“Want a ladder?” Brad asked. He had joined me outside again. The girls were pressing their noses to the glass, although Lilah opened and shut the glass door while singing opera in her best Ace Ventura imitation. Yes I let my 3 year old watch that movie, no I am not proud of it.
“Yeah, maybe a ladder would be alright.”
We brought the 6-foot ladder to him and he stared at the swarm some more and opened the lid of his wooden crate.
“How are you going to do it?” Brad asked.
“I’m just going to shake them out of the tree down into the box.”
Brad looked at me with wide eyes and all I could say was “really?” although what I was thinking almost out loud was “are you sure that’s a good idea/are you fucking crazy/have you ever done this before!!??”
“Yup. Maybe I could put that patio table under the swarm?”
So we helped construct some guerilla bee-capturing center, which looked to me like a mass stinging center. No smoke, no body suit. This kid was crazy. And he seemed too calm. Unworried. Jeremy positioned the box carefully on the table, directly under the swarm, and put on his head net. Not even any gloves.
“Just gonna…shake it,” Brad said as Jeremy climbed the ladder without response.
We stepped back and the girls pressed their faces harder and yelled silently at the glass, steam coming out of their noses and mouths as he shook the branch with short, violent bursts. They fell in clumps, with very few flying, surprisingly. Brad and I both started to run, but stayed and watched. I tried desperately to see the queen as she fell, I imagined I did, covered in her servant children, their fury muted by the cool air and their togetherness. A tiny crown and gown, fat and bossy and maternal. He shook a few more times, the branch nearly green again, and walked down the ladder and back to the patio. There were a few dozen crawling on his shirt and arms, and they went unnoticed and unbothered.
“So now what?”
“Now we wait,” he said. “Most of them will get in the box on their own. Now that the queen’s there they’ll want to be in there too. Hey I gotta go to the truck to get my brush.”
I thought about the others as I slipped back inside to watch. Without their queen, without the rest of their combined organism. Whirling around the branch and the tree, each moment expecting everyone else to reappear but it never happens, eventually flying off and collecting pollen for nobody, useless and doomed. But Jeremy was working on it. He brushed the piles of bees off the table, into a dustpan, and from there into the box, slowly and surely and carefully. At least they would make it.
He came back inside and had an entire glass of water in one drink. Bees still crawling on him. Watch and wait and make small talk, his head net still a barrier between our sparse conversation.
And then it was time to go, too soon, with bees still on the tree and on the table but Jeremy had to go and the rest would have to be lonely vagabonds for the rest of their lives. He slowly slid the lid into the white painted box and carried it to his car.
“You smoke cigars?”
“Yeah, I do.”
“Don’t leave yet.”
I scrambled off to find cigars and gas money. A Punch and a Montecristo, and he was shutting the trunk of his old Honda, his brush and bees safely inside.
“Here. A couple of nice Cubans and some…”
“Sweet. And gas money. Hey thanks.”
We shook hands and he smiled at me through the net he still wore and there was a bee trapped inside, I saw as he left with his easy smile. It crawled on his cheek by his eye and it was the light rustling of the wind or a moving mole or nothing at all.
The detached bees in the backyard stayed for a couple days, sad reminders of the rest of their family’s body that was so far gone now. They swarmed and searched and rapped at the glass in the afternoon, but Jeremy the bee collector was gone, and had taken their Queen.
What a wonder. Wish everyone could experience a swarm. Hope to get to the beekeeper in Iowa one day.