Poems by Kasey Butcher Santana
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How to Grieve a Lost Beehive
by Kasey Butcher Santana
Kasey lives near the foothills of the Rocky Mountains, in the Clear Creek Watershed. From the pasture where alpacas graze while she tends to the bees and pumpkin patch, she can see North Table Mountain and the Flatirons.
In winter, bees hunker down with the honey they made all summer, keeping their cluster warm inside the hive. Between the quiet cold of winter and the flurry of summer activity, however, autumn poses the risk of burglary. As blossoming plants fade with the season changing, but the days are still warm enough for foragers to fly in search of resources, the risk of robbing increases. A forager might come across another hive and test the entrance. If she can get inside and finds good resources, she flies home to tell her sisters where the treasure is. En masse, they descend on the hive, ready to take whatever they can get away with. The scene grows violent as bees fight for their home and hard-earned honey.
Out my kitchen window on a sunny autumn day, I saw a huge group of bees flying around the entrance of my beehive. When bees graduate from in-hive chores to foraging, they do an orientation flight, making figure-8s of increasing size, setting their internal GPS so they can find home again. A large number of bees in early October was a good sign of a healthy colony for winter. Later, I went out to the garden and saw that the bees were frantic outside the hive. A horde flew in aggressive zigzags rather than the dance of the figure 8. Bees wrestled on the ground and an opportunistic yellowjacket flew away with a decapitated bee. My bees were being robbed.
I dashed across the yard to get the sprinkler, simulating a rainstorm to try to get the bees to leave. Over the next two days, I used my smoker, water, and even VapoRub to deter the robbers. I closed the hive entrance to one bee-width so that the foragers coming home with heavy loads of pollen on their legs could find their way inside. On the third day, there were few robbers around and my bees, looking shiny and bald from having their fuzz ripped out in combat, stood around examining each other, as if to say, “Is that really you? Are you okay?” The next day, I quickly inspected the hive. Their queen, Hippolyta I, was still there, as was plenty of honey. The robbers had tested the wrong hive and the colony inside prevailed.
The most likely outcome of robbing is that the colony is severely weakened and cannot survive the winter. A beekeeper can feed a robbed hive sugar syrup, allowing the workers to replace honey, but if the queen is killed or the population or honeycomb are badly damaged, it is probably too late in the year for the colony to recover before winter. When I saw the robbers attacking, I imagined how lonely I would feel without having bees to check on, pressing my ear to the side of the hive on a snowy morning and keeping a lookout for bees coming out for cleansing flights on warm winter afternoons. In the grand scheme of things, my bees are just one colony, they do not make or break the ecosystem, but I love them in a way that perhaps only other beekeepers can understand.
I got lucky. Losing a beehive is simply part of keeping bees. Colonies are killed by robbers, whether wasps or other bees. Unchecked parasites can spread disease and cause the population to dwindle. Bees starve or simply decide that their hive is no longer suitable and abscond. A neighbor’s use of pesticides can poison a colony. Because bees are so vulnerable and losing a hive is a fairly typical experience, it is easy not to see how their lives connect to ours. As this species struggles to adapt to changing seasons, hotter summers, pesticides, and parasites, their survival is one vital thread in a cord that binds the ecosystem together. Because a bee colony is like a superorganism, losing a single hive is perhaps more like losing one individual than a whole civilization, but when hive losses total 40 percent in a winter, it is hard not to grieve.
Bees have long been connected with death in human culture. The recent passing of Queen Elizabeth II introduced many people to the old tradition of telling the bees about a death in the family. The queen’s beekeeper draped her hive in a black sash, following Celtic custom. Traditionally, bees were considered intermediaries between this world and the next, and not keeping them appraised of major life events might trigger them to abscond, leaving the hive for good.
Telling the bees, however, is not a method for grieving the bees themselves; rather, the ritual allows the beekeeper to grieve their own loss with the bees as an intermediary. How, then, can we mourn the loss of our bees? If a beekeeper loses one colony in their apiary, the most natural action is to tell the other bees about the loss. Losses that wipe out an entire apiary or the death of a colony the keeper is attached to hurt more. While waiting for spring and the opportunity to try again, a ritual may help honor the lost hive and acknowledge grief over the bees' deaths.
Rituals for Grieving a Beehive
Doing a hive autopsy to discover clues for why the colony died is an important step in grieving and cleaning up the hive to reuse it in the spring. Look for clues like mite droppings, a lack of resources, or signs that bees died from pesticide exposure.
Draping the hive in black cloth was part of the tradition of telling the bees, but why could it not also be used to mourn the beehive itself? Drape the hive in a black scarf or ribbon for a mourning period.
Building a native bee house can honor a lost honeybee hive by helping a native bee, such as a bumble bee, carpenter bee, or leafcutter, find a safe spot to nest in the spring. These houses are often simple to make using wood or materials that might be available around the house.
While eating a spoonful of honey, read a poem about bees beside the lost hive. Or, enjoy a Bee's Knees Cocktail and toast your bees.
Do a waggle dance in your bees’ honor. Bees use a waggling dance to communicate with each other. Make figure-8s and shake your bum as a salute to your bees.
Invent your own tradition, to honor a lost beehive and feel the grief that comes from the lost lives and the loss of the effort put into keeping a colony alive, by the bees and the beekeeper.
Rituals for Lost Species
The loss of a colony, however upsetting, does not compare in scale to the loss of a species. As climate change accelerates, and conservationists fight to support the populations of endangered species, others struggle. The Alaskan snow crab harvest was canceled after the population dropped by billions of crustaceans. In the Pacific Northwest, environmentalists shared images of streams running dry, clogged with dead salmon. Recently, The World Wildlife Fund's Living Planet Index found that, on average, the population of wild animals has declined by 69% since 1970. Losses are not limited to the animal kingdom. Arborists fear that the changing climate puts the trees native to much of the globe at risk of extinction. In a warming world, how do we grieve the loss of species in systems we are both part of and threatened by ourselves?
In Generation Dread: Finding Purpose in an Age of Climate Crisis, Britt Wray writes about public mourning as a way to bring these losses into the conversation and to work through the grief that climate change creates: “By channeling our private grief into the public work of mourning, we can render ecological losses visible, point out their root cause, and bring the tragedies—from spoiled farms to vanishing species—into the realm of mattering. Breaking silence on a large scale is what makes disappearance count.” She explains that, although it is not customary to mourn the non-human world, rituals for doing so give people a way to feel connected to the natural world and how the changes in our ecosystems impact us. She argues that community rituals such as Brighton, England's Remembrance Day for Lost Species illustrate one way to address the toll that climate crisis and species loss impact many people.
When we grieve our pets or our lost beehives, or even when we look away from an animal killed in a roadway, we acknowledge that animals deserve mourning. As I monitor my bees over the winter, holding my breath and hoping to hear their buzz—a sign of life—through the wall of the hive, I brace myself for the day when I might have to do a waggle dance in their honor, mourning the loss of this single, precious hive and all it stands for.
© Kasey Butcher Santana