Spring should start with a ritual of flowers. Something with water, a bit of meditation and perhaps a floral poem.
Spring for me starts with a panicky prompt from my husband, “Should we inspect the bees today?” As soon as the temperature rises slightly above five Celsius, he starts to worry about our girls swarming. Our girls: our in the sense of evoking a sense of responsibility, the Kaurna word ‘yara’, which implies a mutual belonging. Only without the mutuality – the girls, understandably, don’t feel that we belong to them. We are parasitic hangers on, who attempt to interfere with their natural cycles of reproduction (swarming), who steal the fruits of their exceptionally hard-won labour and who are rather heavy-handed in our inspection of their living quarters.
Nonetheless, earlier this week, we donned our bee suits and looked inside the hive. I’m still not an experienced beek. Not really a beek at all – I feel like a fraud as I light the smoker and look inside. My back injury means my partner does the heavy lifting, while I look for parasites, help clean up the winter’s mess, and search for the queen and the bee larvae. But, despite my trepidity, it is always a slightly magical experience to peer in the hive. To look at a couple tens of thousands of well-armed (if suicidally armed) insects, engaged in their own tasks, each ready to sacrifice for the whole, storing away nectar and pollen that, as an individual, they are unlikely to partake of, instead feeding upon the fodder stored away by an earlier generation of sisters.
The other thing about being in a hive, is that time has to slow. An inspection cannot be rushed. Move too quickly, and you startle the girls. And really, really you don’t want to startle the girls. No matter how long the to-do list is, whether the kids are screaming at each other, whatever else is going on, the inspection is a pause. It is a meditation, almost. You have to focus on what is happening here, now.
I feel I should draw out some philosophical or, more typically, political lesson from the bees. But I won’t. I’ll leave you with a faint buzz in your ears, and the scent of honey in your nostrils.
