Oil and Honey by Bill McKibben

Author:Bill McKibben
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Henry Holt and Co.
Published: 2014-10-17T16:00:00+00:00

5

ON THE ROAD AGAIN

Pandemonium! We were in one of Kirk’s big beeyards on the Sunday of Memorial Day weekend, breaking down big hives into small colonies that would then be used for breeding new queens. The task involved lots of lifting and carrying, all of it conducted inside a roaring cloud of bees. “They’re getting mixed in with bees from different colonies, they’re getting taken to a new place, they’ve suddenly got no queen,” said Kirk apologetically. I managed to get stung right through my bee suit—on this day we were dealing with wild animals, not domesticated creatures.

Which probably explains why we were telling wild animal stories as we worked. Pat Whitley was there in a bee veil and blue jeans (he was getting stung through the denim repeatedly); the beeyard was next to his land, by the house he built when he’d moved up from New Jersey some years ago. The standard rent is thirty pounds of honey. His son was the first to take a real interest. “I was watching from the house one day and saw a kid following Kirk in a bee veil,” Pat recalled. “I thought, ‘Oh, he must have a grandson or something helping him.’ No, wait, that’s James’s shirt. He just got started into it, and I got into it to help him.”

Pretty deep into it. Not long before, Pat had climbed halfway up a nearby pine to capture a swarm. A few weeks after that, a bear had crashed through this particular yard, knocking over a stack of boxes in the search for grubs and larvae. (Honey is an afterthought for bears, who really want the protein.) Pat went down to stack them back up, but “I didn’t have all the right equipment, really. It took me an hour, and before I was done I had about fifty thousand stings. Well, twenty stings anyway. I was wearing wool pants, and Kirk told me later that bees don’t like wool. Who knew?” Who indeed? As it turns out, wool retains some degree of animal odor even after you wash it a hundred times. So, wear cotton. Bees, by the way, don’t like a lot of things, including dark colors—perhaps, authorities speculate, because it makes them think you might be a bear.

And bears really are trouble, which is why Pat—a dedicated hunter—decided he’d take down the bruin who’d gotten a taste for the local honey. “I was coming home from a function at the church one evening, and I could hear him crashing around,” he said. “I snuck down, and I could see the shadow in the trees over there, but it was a dark night. If you can’t see, you really shouldn’t shoot. But I figured, so, he likes to come late. I got my blind set up—but the next night he was there by seven thirty, before I could get in place.” After that, the bear had disappeared, and Pat thought he knew why. “On the school bus the other day, the kids were showing pictures of a bear.

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