Swarming Bees
For the "Other Loves" series, we've asked some Headland writers about what they love to do other than writing, and how their interests feed into their writing. Peter Arnold-Nott, author of Beekeepers here reflects on his experiences as a hobbyist beekeeper.
For a hobbyist beekeeper like me, a swarming hive presents a mixed blessing.
Frenzied insects fill the sky. Their buzz fills my ears. The taste of their pheromone scent thickens the air. Ten thousand whirring collisions set my skin tingling.
The wonder of reproduction is on display, where the newborn is an entire colony, living and breathing. And homeless.
If I’m around at the time and lucky enough to observe the swarm take flight (weekends are good, if you can manage it) and discover their temporary landing site, perhaps I’ll recapture the exodus of bees and gain a new hive. More hives, more honey.
Perhaps.
Departure. The golden promise of a new future. However, all of this excitement comes at a cost.
Hard-earned energy is consumed, the surplus resources of home abandoned. Certainty and safety are now things of the past. Brood, comb, and honey are all left behind.
In a long and productive life, the queen leaves the hive but twice: First on her mating flight when she is freshly hatched and reigns the hive unchallenged. After that, she will depart her lifelong home only once more. On this final outing—weakened from the matricidal campaign against her, propped up by her remnant of loyalist supporters—risk and danger abound. She may drop exhausted to the dirt mid-swarm. Dragonflies and bee-eating birds swoop the skies. An opportunistic apiarist, attempting to shoo the gathered swarm into a box dragged from winter storage, might damage her with an errant stroke of the brush.
Without their queen and her pheromone control, the swarm must abort and return to the hive, where they are welcomed back like runaway children home in time for dinner.
Yet with their taste for freedom and hive conditions unaddressed, the bees will surely swarm again.
Pushing into autumn when the forest nectar flow is ending and the days are short and cool, the new hive may not recover its stores in time for winter. The original hive, numbers lost to the swarm, also struggles. Without close attention, both hives may perish.
For a hobbyist writer like me, a swarming hive represents a mixed blessing.
Energy. Chaos. Sensory overload. Conflict. Complexities. Narrative arc!
The old queen overthrown by the colony, beaten and starved and forced into exile.
Against enormous odds, she regathers her loyal army and forges ahead to establish a new colony in foreign territory with fresh opportunities.
Panning back, we see the overarching themes: Reproduction. Diversity. Survival. Colonisation.
Division and growth. Division and failure.
Before long, I re-discover that borrowing from nature, chasing down images I find there for metaphor and colour and meaning, sends me tripping down a wombat hole of cliché.
Particularly tempting are those omnipresent features: Sky, river, ocean, mountains. My god, the weather. Guilty on all counts.
The solution to cliché, I read somewhere or other, is specificity. Detail. Granularity. Uniquify your cliché. Own it!
But amidst the detail, risk and danger abound. And disappointment.
Nature’s complex balancing act is never far from the imagery I have tried to exploit. Move a rock over here. Whoops! It was propping up that whole ecosystem there. Thank goodness it’s only fiction.
Working around inconvenient facts, I watch myself overwhelm the story with the image meant to serve it. (“Is that allowed?” “Everything is allowed. Let the image become the story.” “But that’s like honey without toast. Like a river without fish.”)
Far from giving my story wings, coaxing it aloft, those swarming bees have bogged me in minutiae, infesting the story for as long as I am writing it. Foreshadowing? Themes for development? Those can wait for the next draft.
Now there’s a mix of messy metaphors, and it’s even trickier to extract them once the stock is brewing. The original vibrant image that drew me into this story ends up as an unattractive side-dish or in the compost, like beeswax left out in the rain.
I’ll come back to it later.
Time to pull on my bee-keeping suit and go ask the bees.
