Bee-friending yourself
The apiary is a small one, which only a select few know
about. It’s located in the courtyard of a monastery. You can see the monks walking around, or
visitors who’ve booked a weekend to get lost from their lives. There are no cell phones or laptops allowed, and
the rooms have no clocks. Yet, no one is alone at the monastery and everyone
depends on one another for encouragement, love, food, and peace of mind. Like
the bees I tend to at the monastery, the monks and visitors depend on each
other to make a thriving community. The stronger the hive the sweeter the
honey.
A year ago, I sat on the DC metro thinking about what it
would be like to live here. What would a
new life in DC look like? What kind of
friends would I have and where would I get my haircut? I’d have to leave
everything I had built to find that out.
As I was flying back from DC to Austin I got the call. I was offered the job and four weeks later I
was migrating from Austin, Texas to D.C. After three years of living a
sweltering, magical existence in Austin, scarfing down breakfast tacos and
causing a ruckus on east 6th street, my time in the city had come to a
close. The thirst I felt in Austin was
getting drier and I needed to search in another direction. I loved my friends,
but they could always fly to come visit me. I had no family, mortgage, or
paramour. I left in three weeks. If it didn’t fit in a box it was sold on
Craigslist. If it couldn’t be sold it
went to the curb and was promptly gone the next morning. Austin being a city of
transients, everyone there likes a good deal.
Bees leave their hives for many reasons. One type of flight is called a “foraging
flight” in which the bee flies out of the hive in a random direction in search of
nectar, honeydew, pollen, or water. I was seeking sweeter nectar.
I left with a bang. My last weekend I managed to have a
fling with the co-worker I’d been infatuated with for a year. It didn’t help
that he wasn’t single, but the intensity felt in such a short period made my
takeoff that much more charged with rocket fuel. I felt I had come to Austin how I was leaving
it; open to change, slightly heartbroken, confident I was making the right
decision. For the second time in my life
I was ready to live in a city where no one knew my name.
The first few weeks you move to a new place are thrilling,
exhilarating. You walk around the streets with a smile on your face. Every face entrances you; every building arch
you’re enamored by is one you’ve never seen before. The inevitable daily drudge has yet to muck
up this new city you live in, and for those first few weeks all you can see are
the possibilities, the promise, places you never knew existed.
After the first three months faded, real feelings began to
set in. Not the fun ones. I felt
achingly alone. I’d moved before to a
different city without knowing anyone, but this time I felt hollower on the
inside. I missed the fast fling I had left in Austin, even though I knew there
was no way it would’ve worked out with him anyhow.
A week later I got into my first bike accident ever. In Austin I had lived as a commuter cyclist,
with no car for three years and never got in an accident. This accident in DC seemed even scarier since
I wasn’t wearing a helmet. There I was, glass and blood coming out of my
forehead from the cut above my eyebrow, dribbling down my favorite late-summer
slip dress onto the Adams Morgan concrete beneath me. I could hear the shrieking
ambulance sirens approaching.
It was harder to make friends in DC. Unlike Austin where I had had a grad program
acting as a crutch for early friendships, here it was different. No community to lean on. Who was I in this new place?
I guess I thought that once I finished high school, studied
abroad, graduated college, got my Masters, paid my own bills, lived in a city
as a single, independent woman, every question mark I ever had in my head would
turn into a period. Instead they all just turned into ellipses and I wondered
what I “needed” to do next. What was
next on the checklist? I couldn’t move to a new city again. There was no escape
plan in that exhausted idea.
A man! A man was the only thing missing from my checklist.
Maybe once I had him all the ellipses would be periods. Finally, I could take a
nap and get some rest. If I had only known the ways of the bees months before I
wouldn’t have come to this fear based conclusion. In the hive community the
Queen bee births all the brood (offspring). She is the sole source of life. Without
her presence there is no hive. It is not a patriarchal system. Although the
Queen bee does need Drones (male bees) to produce brood, she relies on her
fellow Worker bees (sterile female bees) to help her and the hive thrive and
stay strong.
Did I mention I have a proclivity for Ernest Hemingway-like men
who are much older than me and make me feel like shit about myself? Well I
started dating one of those men. He would fix it all. These months of my heart
being high-jacked were ones of struggle, no appetite, and tears. All my energy
was spent trying to impress him, getting to know him, lusting after him. I had no energy or foresight to go make new
friends. He would be my key to new friends, a new life; happiness. I was
constantly trying to convince this drone that I was worth loving. I listened to
him talk a lot, but never did much of the talking. I nodded so much I probably
looked like a bobble head. I felt like one too. My head wasn’t really connected
to the rest of my body so my soul felt like a big jumbled mess, confused
between the head and the heart of my plastic existence.
I was being inauthentic.
I remember sending a “Merry Christmas” email to Ernest Hemingway only to
get a response a month later saying, “Sorry we lost touch - you know how that
happens when people date?” Another bold, searing question mark. I was back at
the beginning. I couldn’t take anymore question marks.
Darwin was bothered that he could not rationalize the fact
that sterile Worker bees would display altruism towards the Queen. Where did this will come from if they were unable
to be encouraged by the possibility of offspring? One theory, “Kin selection,”
explains that worker bees are more related to each other than they are to their
parents. By helping each other, they are helping themselves to produce a strong,
thriving hive, in which genes can be passed down for the generations.
I didn’t need a drone
to complete me. What I needed to practice was Kin selection; find a hive to shelter
myself from this raging tornado of abandonment. I didn’t know it yet, but by engaging
in a community, I would find strength as well as enhance the community’s
purpose. This was the only way I’d feel I was helping myself find the periods
to the sentences.
Ever the academic as my student loan debt can confirm, I
signed up for an urban bee keeping class. Why Urban bee keeping? I had never been stung by a bee in my life,
much less kept a bee hive. I live in an apartment complex in DC with no
backyard. I knew I wouldn’t be building a hive my first bee season, but I
wanted to learn about bees. They seemed like a blue print for a perfect
community. They seemed so in sync with one another and mysterious to me.
When a new Queen Bee is introduced to the hive, she is
lowered into a hive encased in a glass vessel, with a cork made from
sugar. As the weeks go by, the bees get
used to the Queen and her pheromones as they slowly eat away the sugar
cork. I desperately wanted someone to
eat away at my sugar cork and let me burst free from this glass house I’d been
living in.
My class became my colony; the hive from which I entered and
was enriched by. Each Saturday I woke up early to get to bee class. I even had a man ask for me to sleep over at
his house after a long night of kissing. I wasn’t feeling him that strongly
anyways, but it was fun to say, “I can’t, I have an urban bee class tomorrow
morning!” and receive the strangest face ever. That’s how I knew he wasn’t
really for me. The bees saved me from another Ernest Hemingway.
I no longer cared about completing my checklist. I only
cared about the bees, and questioning the question marks. What else did I want
to do now that I had freed myself from a checklist existence? What else was I
here to do?
My purpose is not to be the world’s greatest bee keeper. But
taking the class got me out of my comfort zone, led me to question my
insecurities, embrace new people, and make new friendships. Even if I was a
newbie and had no clue what I was talking about when it came to bees, I was now
a part of a community. There was no winning or losing and all my hellos were
received with smiles when I sat in my classroom chair.
Because of bee class I had someone to spend a Sunday brunch
with. And not just one person, but a swarm of people. As I sat on the patio
that Sunday, sipping a mimosa under the early spring sun in the cool breeze
with my new found friends, I realized there were periods at the end of the
sentences in my head. And the ones that ended in question marks did not scare
me anymore. I had found my place in the hive.
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