My hands smell of spring. Flowers, pollen and honey. I've just opened my beehive to see what's going on in there. This is the time when the population of the hive can explode. And, if I don't make room, the bees will swarm, scaring the neighbors and reducing the force of foragers who bring back the nectar that becomes honey and sweetens my coffee.
Beekeeping is the opposite of writing—and it's just like writing.
When the part of my brain that generates words and ideas is tired, it's good to turn that off and do something with my hands. Unlike the realm of ideas, the physical space of the beehive is orderly. The hive consists of one or more rectangular boxes stacked on top of each other. Each box contains a row of ten frames, each one a flat, rectangular piece made of wood or plastic that hangs from an indentation on two sides of the box—like hanging files in a filing cabinet.
To inspect the hive, I take off the top cover and, one by one, pull out the frames to have a look. The bees live an orderly life—most of the time. They build their comb on both sides of the frames in neat rows of hexagons. In the center of the nest, the queen travels in a spiral, laying eggs day and night. The worker bees slowly fill the outer cells with pollen and nectar.
The bees may not be conscious of the results of their daily labor, but each of them understands the state of the colony. Inside the hive is a heady fug of pheromones that tells each bee what should be done.
I can look at the patterns of eggs and nectar and know all is well. The bees know what to do, and they do it without any help from me.
This tidy geometry can be so restful to my brain, anchoring me to the earth.
Some beekeepers open the hive every week to look around. Others (like me) take a peek only a few times a year. Here are the things you can do when you open the beehive:
Pull out the outer frames in the box to see if there's nectar, capped honey and pollen stored around the brood nest. Nectar looks wet; once it's dried out enough, the bees cover it with a wax cap.
Pull out each frame in the center to look for the queen. She's bigger than the other bees, with a longer abdomen. She can be difficult to find among the horde of worker bees covering every frame.
Look for eggs, pollen and capped brood cells. The eggs are white dots smaller than a pinhead attached to the side of the cell. You'll also see larvae, white grubs that curve to fit the cell. When the larvae reach the right stage, the bees cover over the cell so the grub can metamorphose into a new bee.
You can't wrangle honey bees. You can only make it easier for them to do what they are intent on doing: build a safe, warm hive for them; make sure ants don't invade, keep the weeds down around the hive.
And, isn't this a metaphor for the creative process? Like the bees tirelessly filling each cell of the comb, each incident and every sensory experience fills a small part of that unreachable part of my brain where creativity resides.
The beekeeper part of my brain wants to poke at ideas, taking a critical look and managing them into the direction I think they should take. The honeybee part of my brain wants to buzz around, doing things its own way, hidden in the dark. If I'm lucky—and if I don't bother it too much, at some point a sweet idea will emerge.