The Bluff Creek Bee Club, established in spring of 2013, lost all its bees in the winter of 2014 when a lobe of polar air leaked southward across Iowa, freezing the ground to a depth of two to five and a half feet. When we cracked open our hives in early March, it seemed like the bees were just sleeping. Some perched on top of the racked frames, next to packets of pollen and sugar, half eaten. But when we pried loose the frames of capped wax combs out of the hive boxes, they were still heavy with untouched honey, coated with bees thick as foam, dislodged sisters falling like dark snow to a heap of dead bodies below.

The previous spring, our bee club shook two boxes of two pounds worth of bees into two freshly purchased hives—about nineteen thousand bees in all. They landed on our arms and chests, lighter than feathers, tasted us for sugar or signs of threat, and flew back to their queens, who waited to lay eggs in their new homes. Their hives were at the fringe of a woodland surrounded by farmland. A creek ran through the woods, so the bees were guaranteed a near source of water. The trees were beginning to bud. In the undergrowth, berry bushes and patches of prairie wildflowers bloomed.

At first, we were only cautiously optimistic about keeping bees. Our club of novice beekeepers, mostly graduate students and their partners, were warned repeatedly not to expect much in our first year of beekeeping. Our bee guru, Arvin Foell of the Central Iowa Beekeepers Association, listed off ways in which bees could die before year was up—varroa mites, tracheal mites, foulbrood disease, the nosema fungus, colony collapse disorder. And, there was no telling anymore what the weather would do until it did. We had survived a mostly mild winter in 2013, little snow. We had heard horror stories of winters past, of legendary blizzards and spring floods fed by snowmelt that rerouted whole cities as roads submerged. Iowa, more than eighty-five percent farmland, worried about drought, but that April and May were the wettest on record in over a century. The woodlands thrived. Flowers flourished. My first taste of our spring honey was a revelation of mint and lemon flavors, sourced from blossoms no higher than our ankles.

And so, we came out all summer of 2013, in pairs or groups of threes and fours, every few weeks. We lifted off the roofs of the hives and puffed smoke into their bodies, pulled out the honeycombs to search for eggs smaller than poppy seeds, white against white wax. Our queens were laying well. Our hives grew like building block apartments, a foot-deep brood box for the growing colony to expand into, then another, then the first half-foot super, a kind of hive box used for honey storage alone. Then another super. And a third. When our hives became high rises, we realized we would have more than just a taste of honey for the summer, that we could make a first harvest and still leave plenty behind for the bees to overwinter with.

That winter, I licked pale gold honey off a spoon each morning and thought about liquid heat. Bees huddle and shiver their wings to stay warm. They mass around their queen, and as winter deepens, the ball of bees creeps higher up the hive to stay in the warmth trapped under the roof. Deep within the hive, capped in the honey cells, is the heat of sunshine, pulled out of the ground through plant roots and baked within the leaves, sipped from flowers for seven months, cured and concentrated into syrup, an energy source that powers the bees’ wing muscles, shifted from flight gear to furnace, shivering in the cold dark. We did not visit the hives that winter because we worried about releasing that hard-fought work, hot air escaping through the open mesh of a leafless tree canopy, the breath of bees turning into snow crystals as winter flooded their home.

 

A natural beehive looks like a collection of vertically-stacked organs—lungs, kidneys, bowels—a frozen waterfall of wax combs that has the bulk and substance of a larger animal. Crossbeams of wax cells called burr comb keep the structure stabilized. The entire hive may hang from a tree branch or be tucked inside a hollow trunk. The hive may be thought of as the exoskeleton of a superorganism, controlled by the hum of thousands of tiny minds. No single honey bee can survive on its own. Instead, bees communicate with each other, collectively driving reproductive, feeding, and defensive behaviors that put the colony’s survival over that of any individual. They build hive structures to maximize security for the most vulnerable—eggs, larvae, and the queen, the only fertile individual among the bees’ ranks.

 Worker bees fill wide-open spaces in a hive body with wax combs, and seal narrow openings with propolis, a resin collected from plant sap. All they need is space to crawl between the cells, “bee space,” just under a centimeter’s width gap. Everything else is filled in, with brood and food chambers, or with sealant. Workers guard the narrow hive entrances against raiders, insect, bird, or mammal. Smaller animals must squeeze through the bees’ crawl spaces to get to the food stores, and larger animals have no choice but to rip through the combs to gain access. Bees vigorously defend against both forms of attack.

Honey bee domestication dates back over seven thousand years. Since the eighteenth century, this has led to the development of artificial hives that allow honey extraction and inspection without disrupting the colony. Commercially speaking, there are few advantages to destroying a hive for honey. Notwithstanding the threat of bee stings, building a hive from scratch is an enormous investment on the part of both bees and beekeepers. If a colony survives its first winter, honey bees thousands-strong emerge in early spring, immediately and easily outcompeting other insects in their search for food. Their surplus is just one of our rewards for beekeeping.

Domesticated bees are also a genetic tinker-toy—carefully selected for traits including gentleness when handled, increased honey production, and good grooming behavior to protect against parasites. Disrupting or killing a colony for honey would mean returning to the genetic drawing board.

And so, the design of an artificial beehive appears to be a triumph of interspecies cooperation—an architectural structure that both bees and humans can use without conflict, to the mutual benefit of both. The smooth lobes and natural order of the wild beehive are artificially constrained by the standardized measurements of a Langstroth hive, the preferred design for commercial beekeeping. The frames in a Langstroth hive are rectangular, set a bee-space distance apart from each other, and from the walls of the hive box. Since there is no room between the frames and walls to build burr comb, beekeepers can inspect deep into the hive body, pulling out the guts of the hive, frame by rectangular frame, without disturbing the brood. Drones can be plucked out of their pupal cells to check for parasitic mites, developing queen cells can be separated for selective queen breeding. Entire racks of honey-loaded supers may be taken off a hive at the end of each growing season.

Perhaps no other domestic animal’s lifestyle lends itself so easily to inspection and modification. Since both the bees and their hives are modular, beekeepers can take out parts alive or inanimate and replace them with others. Should the bees feel the collective urge to leave a hive because it will no longer support them, the beekeeper can add another brood box or super to accommodate the surging population. The beekeeper can just as likely split the hive into two, replace an old, ailing queen with a younger one. A cattle or poultry farmer does not have it so easy. Consider—come milking season, detaching a cow’s udders from its body. Come the time of slaughter, slicing off a chicken’s breasts and releasing the flightless creature back to the yard, to scratch and peck and fatten another year. With bees, the maxim comes true—the whole is bigger than the sum of its parts.

 

Bluff Creek Bee Club members would cite many reasons for keeping bees. Something about the artisanal flair of harvesting one’s own honey. A reason to feel connected to the land around us. The novelty of such a hobby—most of us grew up in places where keeping hives would seem inconceivable. Superficially, however, we might also have said: They are just so cute. These are insects with stingers, sure, but they also have enormous eyes, long tongues, and furry thoraxes. Their hindmost legs have pannier-like structures on them, little baskets for holding pollen. We cannot help but anthropomorphize.

When we released our bees in spring, one of them landed on a club member’s shirt and clung for what seemed an hour. We named that bee Jane Goodall and hoped she would live a long life.

Jane Goodall was a slightly blondish bee. She was of Italian extraction—the subspecies of western honey bee known as Apis mellifera ligustica. Although her mother was a Midwesterner, Jane Goodall was born in California, during the peak of the almond blossom season. She was raised on an exclusive diet of almond nectar and almond pollen for twenty days, not because she was special, but because there was nothing else to eat. Outside her hive, her foraging sisters soared through a city of trees, avenues upon avenues of petal-crusted almond limbs stretching over 880 thousand acres. For ease of access, the lanes between the gridlocked trees were clear of undergrowth, dirt paths wide enough for almond shaking machines to ride through in the fall.

But Jane Goodall never had a chance to see the great almond orchards of San Joaquin for herself. She emerged from her pupa and immediately began tending to her younger siblings in their wax cells. For almost two weeks, she kissed almond nectar off her older, forager sisters’ tongues and passed it on to the nurse sisters who surrounded her. She then felt the jerk and rattle of her hive lifted onto a semi-truck and endured twenty-seven hours of steady vibrations as she was moved back to Iowa to live out the rest of her days.

In Iowa, there were no almond blossoms, only the moist touch of a winter not quite past.

As Jane prepared for her maiden forager flight, she noticed the change on her hive-mates’ tongues. The taste of ephemeral flowers, there a moment and gone the next day, growing in fringe habitats along creeks or fence posts, between roads or fields. Before she could seek out these flowers for herself, she was scooped into a six by ten by sixteen-inch box with about seven thousand sisters, a new queen, and a can of sugar syrup to weather out her entrapment. A day later, we shook her out, at last, into a permanent home.

I do not blame Jane’s confusion, holding on to a cotton shirt for life while her mates whirled about their new hive. The air glinted with their bodies, and we moved our limbs like we were underwater, adrift in a sea of cellophane wings and furry legs, all-seeing eyes and stingers. Jane was a point of focus, as unsure of our world as we were of hers.

When Jane eventually shook off her bewilderment, we lost her to the crowd. Perhaps she went back to the new queen, unrelated to her but already emitting a hypnotic pheromone—tend me, feed me, make this place safe for my eggs. Bees trust their sense of smell, which tells apart kin from foe, egg-layer from nest-builder. Jane’s mother was gone, and within a matter of weeks she and her sisters would be dead, and the new queen and her new worker children would shore up the Bluff Creek hives till winter came. What other prospects did a California-born honey bee released in Iowa have, but to make do with what she was given?

Perhaps she flew straight up into the sky. Bees orient their flight paths by the angle of sunlight relative to their homes, relative to landmarks that surround them. Maybe Jane Goodall flew through the delicate rods of bur oak and black walnut branches, the leathery leaves of eastern red cedar, searching for where the sun rose and fell. She may have spotted the creek, ox-bowed and cleaving soil from its banks, brown as blood from spring thaw, dragging mud off farm fields into the water.

If I were Jane I would have flown higher still, till the tree canopy shriveled into a wooded tendril against the landscape, tracing slopes too steep to farm. Everywhere else in this part of Iowa had long been shorn of woodland. Iowa’s rivers are like cracks in a careful tilework of farm fields, mostly for corn or soybeans. The corn would not shed pollen for a couple months yet, the soybeans would not blossom for longer still. Soaring over this food desert, I would have no option but to return to the slivers of woods, where plants flowered like clockwork, a new species to mark each passing week, a riot of lifetimes erupting and dying in the margins of a world laid out by grid.

 

The honey bee is native to Africa, Asia, and Europe. Apis mellifera, the western honey bee, adapted across this geographic area to climatic variations, local plant types, predators, and pests. Domestication further honed A. mellifera’s adaptive strengths. I imagine us now selecting bees from a honey-bee catalogue, with maps and figures under each subspecies, reminiscent of the diagrams on the backs of seed packets—suitable for growth in temperate zones, suitable for the tropics, suitable for urban beekeepers with only a balcony and some tomato plants. The honey-bee genome was fully sequenced in 2006, but we have performed cruder forms of genetic selection for as long as we have courted bees for their gifts.

But there are a staggering number of bee species throughout the world. Where we have cultivated some thirty-three subspecies of Apis mellifera, flowering plants have coaxed at least twenty thousand species of bees to pollinate them. Some bee-plant relationships are so specific as to resemble locks in keys. In the United States alone, there are at least four thousand identified native bee species. For comparison, worldwide, there are four thousand known mammal species compared to over a hundred thousand hymenopterans, the superorder of insects that includes wasps, ants, and bees.

Domesticated honey bees outcompete native species for food and habitat. They disrupt ecosystems by displacing longstanding linkages between native bees and plants, with studies suggesting that this impacts the plants’ fruit and seed production and reduces other pollinator species’ resilience to stressors such as climate change and habitat reduction.

In Iowa, where less than a fraction of a percentage of native plant cover remained, I did not even know what such a loss looked like. We shook our thousands of dead honeybees onto the banks of Bluff Creek. Their bodies would disintegrate and their nutrient subcomponents would be taken up by soil organisms and plants. Nothing we accomplished or failed at that year would register against the great teeming of life and death we would drive past every day. The corn would rise in orderly rows. Soybeans would spread their trifoliate leaves in lush, green false assurance that everything was okay. In the margins, the seeds of the first ephemeral flowering plants would register rising temperature, moisture creeping through their seed coats, the sun clock ticking for minutes longer each day.

Steeped in my own guilt for letting our honey bees die from neglect and inexperience, I did not wonder who else was left to visit the ephemerals when they flowered the next spring—if any other bees made this part of Iowa their home, what they looked like, where they lived, or how they overwintered without humans to minister over them.

 

Graduate students graduate and move away. It is 2015. I feel ephemeral—I am now in Panama, where there are too many species of bees to count, and quite certainly many more that scientists have never described. From my kitchen window, I monitor an oddity—a waxy straw-like protrusion about the length and thickness of my pinkie finger. Over the coming months, I begin to see these little constructs everywhere—in garden walls, under rooftop awnings, in a crack between a plaster façade and an aluminum outer window frame at someone’s workplace. One day, I see the bees that make them.

There are nearly two hundred stingless bee species in the American tropics. They are tiny creatures, most no larger than a honey bee’s wing, and they make their homes in naturally occurring hollows—in trees and lianas, under rock coverings, and in cavities of walls and buildings. The ones I most frequently encounter around my home are of the species Tetragonisca angustula, a yellow-bodied wisp of a creature with bright green, black-spotted eyes. Several of them continually hover at the entrance to their nest, which has the general shapeliness of a tube sock. Others cluster upon the wax tube directly. Every so often, a nest mate will arrive from a foraging excursion and plunge, neat as an arrow, through the nest entrance.

I learn that stingless bees in the region are often collected for cultivation. They can be raised in hollow logs. Though I cannot see it from the kitchen windowsill, the number of bees entering and leaving the hive at any given moment suggest thousands more at work within. Their home includes a little pancake-stack of wax combs for rearing their young, surrounded by undulations of a wax-resin mixture for insulation, and several nodules of honey and pollen pots. I do not see these structures myself but rely on photos taken by bee scientists.

I am drawn to the idea of their home nestling within mine. Where I feel impermanent in place, I also feel entangled with these bees who found a cavity within the walls of a house I did not build, who molded their own home to fit that crevice. I will never keep bees again—the responsibility feels too great to bear. But I find myself thinking about Bluff Creek in Iowa. I wonder what we might have learned if we had cultivated native bees instead of honey bees, meant for that climate, attuned to its rainfall, snowfall, bouts of sun and vegetation. If we had installed wild bee boxes instead of Langstroth hives. If we could have coaxed prairie plants to reclaim the land taken from them by doggerel brush and scrappy, opportunistic trees. I wonder what it would have taken to defend that little sliver of wilderness too steep for row crops as if the whole of it mattered, not just the footpath we mowed every few months, that we failed to tread when it snowed. I wonder what it would have felt like to have been rooted there, instead of shuttling—like honey bees between the Midwest and West Coast, like people raised to believe that homes and friends and jobs and wonders were found elsewhere than the place where they were born.

In Panama, I watch stingless bees dart in and out of their house within my house with bittersweet relief that neither of us is bound to each other, even as we coexist. My breath mingles with theirs and wafts into the trees overhead, where the leaves capture and convert it back into something both of us will take in once more.