About The Bees
Plus, why two people were in the room while I pooped.
A Note For You, If You’re Having A Bad Day
Dear One,
OK, I’ll tell you about the bees.
Wait! Please don’t go. I get that you’re not that interested in bees. You’re not a bee person. They sting. You’re rightly terrified of stinging things. You’ve had a bad experience being around a zenned out guy named Swan (there’s no way that’s his actual name) who told you something about being “one with the hive” or whatever. (And he didn’t wear shoes, and he did wear a sun hat indoors, and he said he didn’t have a phone, and he used the words “bliss” and “eco-capitalism” one too many times.) I’m really going to try, with all my heart, not to veer too far into lanes that make you uncomfortable.
I will also try not to make too many metaphors about bees, although that’s harder. I just did a Google search for “why humans shouldn’t compare themselves too much to bees,” and the first two articles that popped up were “A new study reveals surprising similarities between bees and humans,” and “‘Bees are sentient’: inside the stunning brains of nature’s hardest workers.” Whoops.
I fully admit, without apology, that I originally wanted to get bees simply because I was excited to be a person with bees. I romanticized the urban homestead. My mentor Jill kept (and keeps) bees with her husband Tim, and when we bought our house, she and Tim bought us two colonies as a housewarming present. Not only that, but they helped us install the bees, which was a much bigger deal than I realized. I hung back, hands on hips, nodding like I understood what was going, and wasn’t scared. Really, I saw a ton of stinging things being dumped into a box and thought, “I’ll figure this out later.”
But instead, my husband Luke figured it out later, and used the bees as social lubricant. A lot of cool people are interested in looking at bees, and so I let Luke have those people over to look at our bees, and he took over as beekeeper. In August, Jill and Tim came over again and we harvested all the honey, and all the bees died that winter, and really, I didn’t care that much. I pretended like I cared and wrote an essay about it.
We (Luke) tried again. I’m going to level with you: I can’t remember which year was which, because I was woefully uninvolved. One year, the hives were doing great (said Luke), but then suddenly, tragically, yellow jackets descended. One day, everything was amazing; the next day, things weren’t as good; a week later, the yellow jackets had slaughtered every bee in both hives and eaten all the honey. The other year, the hive just… died. It never took off. The yellow jacket year was much worse for Luke, but both years were hard, and he wanted to give up. I told him I would take over. I liked how we’d gotten to give people honey as Christmas presents, so I wanted to try again.
The next year, spring was too cold, and the bees never came. Between you and me, I was relieved.
And now it is this year. There were many hiccups. The bees were delayed three weeks in a row. Then, finally, they were here. We drove to the suburbs to get them as a family. I don’t know what I was thinking, exactly: getting a package of bees isn’t like getting a package of marshmallow Peeps: they’re not neatly wrapped in cellophane and stackable to put in your trunk. I was handed a wooden box with loose bees buzzing around the outside. Smarter, glove-wearing people had arrived with big Tupperwares to put their bees in. I had arrived with an unpredictable 18-month-old in a sundress who had never seen My Girl.
We drove the tense 25 miles home and no one died (not even a bee). And then, yes, Luke volunteered to install the bees. But I said no.
My friend, it is easy to let Luke install the bees. Maybe you are the Luke in this situation, and you’re always installing the bees for the Sophies in your life, I don’t know. It’s amazing how often we are confronted with a box of bees and an empty hive, and how nine times out of ten, we just let the person who knows how to do the thing, do the thing. I’m stunned by what a profound mistake this can be.
Just one thing is accomplished when you let the person who already knows how to do the thing, do the thing: this time, the thing gets done more expertly. And that’s valuable when the concern is short-term success. Short-term success is important a lot of the time! But it isn’t important all of the time, or even most of the time. There’s a lot at stake when Luke always installs the bees, you guys.
I, Sophie, installed the bees, and it was very hard. The bees behaved nothing like in the video with the guy who just dumped bees into the hive box no big deal, without gloves or a mask on, chatting idly with his tender southern drawl about “the nice breeze” and “this staple’s on the wrong side” and “they’re free bees.” I had to walk away from the operation several times and go stand in the street to breathe and say to myself, “You’re OK. These are bees, not Republican Congressmen. They don’t have any interest in hurting you. They’re freaked out because they’ve had a long travel day. And now it’s your job to get them into their new home, and they’re counting on you. You can do this.” I re-watched the YouTube video about how to install the box with the queen (which looked like the image below) twelve times, and felt confident I’d done it correctly by the end. When it was all over, I felt proud, and I ate a bunch of tacos.
BUT THAT’S NOT THE END OF THIS STORY.
Because I didn’t do that good of a job. Because it was my first time installing bees, and also, it rained for a week and it was 40 degrees, and the bees were travel-shocked. I installed the queen well (go me!), but by spraying some of the bees with sugar water to stun them, as one of the videos had suggested, I’d created a situation where they couldn’t move in the cold, and many of them froze. When I went to check on them a week later, more than half were dead.
I wept. I Googled weird things.
I started dreaming a lot about bees. I started reading a lot about bees. I became a little obsessed with bees — but not in a way I disliked. I was becoming a true version of who I’d wanted to be when I’d imagined myself with a beehive. I actually hadn’t understood anything about honeybees before, even though I’d listened to podcasts and watched YouTube videos and read Big Swiss (which is great and features prominently a fictional beehive) and developed an internet crush on Erika Thompson (TikTok below). To really know about bees, you have to be really slow with them. This is true about anything.
Tiktok failed to load.Enable 3rd party cookies or use another browser
I cleared out as many of the dead bees as I could, and then I watched the living bees clean out the rest of their dead. I was amazed watching them do this. They often did it as pairs, lifting dead bees out of the hive and carrying them a little ways away, then laying them softly down in neat rows next to other dead bee bodies. I wondered about the methodology, because clearly there was one. It also seemed like such a bummer way to spend a day. I made them a bunch of sugar water and played them classical music, which I read that they might like.
Nevertheless, they were surviving.
A week later, another bad thing happened, which was that the bees started building honeycomb off the lid of the hive box.
They’re not supposed to do this, because it makes everything harder to manage for the humans. (This doesn’t strike me as a GREAT reason not to let them do it, but also, I am following the rules right now because I am such a novice at all this. Maybe in the future I’ll go rogue. I can see myself letting go of all these frames and all this honey harvesting and just co-living with bees forever, because I’m totally in love with them and the more time I spend with them the less I want to bother them.)
I had to go in the box and dismantle this “burr comb” (I felt guilty about this) and move all the bees elsewhere in the hive. This was when I got to really notice their group dynamics: Some of them guard the hive, linking limbs and making chains to protect parts of the comb; some of them are foraging and others are building; presumably, some are raising the young. There are few dudes are there to fuck and then die. And there is one queen, whom I did not see, but who is just there to be huge and lay eggs. That’s it. Eat, be huge, lay eggs. The main thing I noticed as I tried to move the bees was that they could communicate really fast. You can’t move just one bee. Even though each bee is doing her own thing, she is also talking to a bunch of other bees, all the time. All the bees know the plan. The bees are in it together. It looks sort of nice, to never have to weather the trauma of a giant alone.
In doing this dismantling project, I watched a video where a man said, “Think about the hive check as slowly moving a paintbrush back and forth. You don’t want to rush it. You don’t want to panic. You want to enjoy it.” And thinking about looking at frames of bees as an enjoyable experience that I might want to relish changed the game.
The next week, Luke and I set out to find some eggs and some larvae, to see if the queen was still alive. (Did you know that the bees will hang out, slowly dying off, even without a queen? So you have to do the hive check to make sure the queen is still in there. But you don’t actually have to find her; you just have to find her eggs or larvae.) I was VERY worried she was dead. SO MANY WERE DEAD. Luke seemed sure she was still alive, but I felt Luke didn’t worry enough, as a general rule. I thought about the thing with the hive inspections like painting long brush strokes; tai chi stretches; the slow stirring of a bowl of grits. We hung out with the bees for a long while.
I was amazed at how totally and utterly no longer scary they were to me. I snapped photographs of them like I was taking pictures of friends. (Or at least, of Norman, my cat.) Then, for the first time ever since we started keeping bees, Luke was able to find the queen. “See her? She’s bigger than the other ones!”
That night, as we tried to catch up on Succession (I’m aggressively “meh” about it), I couldn’t stop staring at the photos I took of the bees. Each little bee, doing her own little thing!
And then then whole unit, operating as a… well, as a UNIT!
And we’re just in here watching Succession, and they’re out there, and we’re sharing the earth, and this is AMAZING. And I know that this isn’t something I’m going to be able to explain to you, because like rock climbing, rat parenting, tomato planting, bookmaking, bird watching, ice sculpting, and a million and a half other very cool but very difficult things to experience in this life, you have to personally try at them and fail at them in order to really see them.
Alllllright, I’m dying to know: what are your thoughts on bees? Truly!
Love,
Sophie
Parenting Paragraph
It’s really hard for me that T can’t communicate with words yet, and I feel like a bad parent that I’m having such a hard time with it. When I say things like, “Are you excited for when she can ask for what she wants with words?” I am met with, “Yeah, but I’m really enjoying this phase of language where she just talks in a language that only she understands.” In general, I feel like I don’t do a good job of just enjoying the moments I’m supposed to enjoy. But it would be so nice for her to be able to say, “I want to go for a walk!” Or even, “Walk, please!” Or even, “Walk!” Instead of “ADHAODSIAHFIOHSOIFODHOIAFHIAJ!” And then, screaming fit.
This morning, I was pooping, and she was in the bathroom playing with her toys, and I was POOPING, and she started crying because her toy fell in the bathtub, and I couldn’t get it for her because I WAS MID-POOP, and Luke was like, “I’ll come get it!” and I was like, “Well, I’m pooping, so I’d like it if NO ONE WAS IN HERE WHILE I AM POOPING,” but instead, my crying child was in there while my husband was sitting in the bathtub while a POOP WAS IN MY BUTT COMING OUT. It was just not how I ever saw my life going, I guess.
I love that she loves seed bread, and wild, foraged food like dandelion leaves and crabapples and wild onion. I love that she sings to Regina Spektor. I love that she laughs at cat videos. I love that she rests on my chest.
This Week In Sophie
Here’s an interview I did with
at about cartooning and more. It was a lot of fun! I’ve excerpted a bit below:Q10) “Dear Sophie" has become a beloved and highly relatable cartoon series for many readers. It has also been praised for its depiction of mental health and self-care. How do you navigate these sensitive topics in your work, and what kind of response have you received from readers? And how did you come up with the concept for this series, and what has been your favourite part of working on it?
Sophie : Wow, thank you! I started writing back to old diary entries as a personal project (and one I recommend to anyone who has old diary entries). I have heard mostly from people who have wanted to take on this project for themselves, and are looking for entryways. To this kind of person, my advice is: dive in! Pick any old diary entry and write back. Young You is back there, waiting.
Monthly Print Vote Time!
I’m switching from a weekly print model to a MONTHLY print model, and you get to vote on which image you’d like me to see a limited print run of! Here are your options for May! Results will be right here next week.
Baby signing is one of those things that sounds like new age silliness but 100% isn’t because talking is harder than signing and words that sound alike are signs that look different and vice versa. 20 words is enough to bridge a lot of the gap (“more” and “all done” go a long way).
Also not silly; there’s nothing wrong with saying “No” to a small child but it’s rarely the useful answer. You’re asking the absolute least qualified person in the room to figure out a) what you want them to stop doing and b) what they should do instead.
As a fellow bee-watcher-from-the-sidelines-while-someone-else-does-it, this was a relatable read (except for the part where you actually take over and do something - what?!). However, I am proud to say that I recently switched the inputs on our TV from the gaming console to the Roku, another task I have exclusively outsourced for eight years so....small wins, ya know?