The Resilience of Bees

The Resilience of Bees

Saturday night, my husband slept on the floor in the girls’ room because they were afraid of a storm.

At 5:30, once the storm had abated, he came back to our bed and said the entire field below our house was under water.

His skid steer, tractor, orchard, our new chicken coop, and generator were all in that field.

He said, “I think your bees are flooded too.”

I couldn’t let myself believe it. I went into the garage and pulled on a raincoat and boots.

I took an umbrella and a high-powered flashlight out into the dark, wet world.

Walking down the hill, I heard the tree fogs pulsing in the darkness and saw my middle daughter’s pink flip flops, left behind like a reminder of sunnier days.

I stood at the edge of the field that had transformed into a glass sheet illuminated by the periodic flash of lightning.

I thought I could see the roof of the wooden hive across the field, but I couldn’t be sure. I went back up to the house, put in contacts, and switched out my boots for hiking sandals.

The tractor stood only about two feet above the waterline, so I skirted the flooding and climbed over brambles and through briars and glistening fall leaves to the corner of the woods.

A clump of silver bees bearded the side of the hive and on one of the floating frames. I waded out into the cold water and grabbed the frame first and pulled it over to the bank of the woods.

The hive—usually too heavy for me to move—had become an ark. Unhooking the strap securing it to the cinder blocks, I ferried the hive across the water and tried to drag it up the bank.

The bees were too waterlogged at first to pay much attention to me, but as I struggled to grasp the hive in the darkness, a few stung the pad of flesh between my thumb and index finger.

The throbbing pain brought me back to reality.

I was standing in water during the tail end of a thunderstorm, and my soggy Christmas pajamas were the only protection I had against a swarming clump of angry bees.

I came back inside and told my husband that I had possibly saved a thousand bees. More bees had been clambering out of the hole in the hive before I left them.

But none of it would matter if I hadn’t saved the queen, or if she hadn’t laid a viable queen egg to replace her, since queens are the only females who can repopulate the hive.

My husband said he hadn’t realized how bad the flooding was until he saw me scanning the field with the flashlight. He rattled off the worth of the equipment he had possibly lost.

But then he sighed. “That’s just money. There is flooding all across Middle Tennessee.”

I couldn’t go back to bed after my rescue attempt.

Instead, I did what I have been doing for years—I sat at the kitchen counter and began typing this out with a beestung right hand to help me understand my own thoughts.

Those bees, bearding the side of the hive as the lightning flashed and floodwaters rose, clung so hard to life even though the odds were stacked against them.

Today, maybe tomorrow, the rain will cease, and the sun will shine again, and the worker bees will go out in search of pollen to make into royal jelly to feed their queen, if she has survived.

They will continue to fight for life, just as we will all continue to fight for life in the midst of ice storms, floods, civil unrest, and pandemics.

The sun will return, and the floodwaters will recede.

And then we will begin again.

Over and over, in this hard, beautiful life, we will begin again. 

What helps you maintain a positive perspective during life’s storms?

(Update on bees: I contacted a master beekeeper, who told us to drain the hive, close it up, and bring the bees in our garage to stay warm. They are now very active and cleaning up their hive after the storm. We will take them back to their old location today, so as not to confuse them, and then move them a little at a time.)