Environment

I drove out to Hudson, a conservative town in rural New Hampshire, to meet leaders of the New Hampshire Beekeepers Association. I arrived just in time to watch a couple of senior bearded men in flannel shirts and Carhartt pants transport crates of bees into new hives. I was completely entranced by their delicacy and elegance. They seemed to be dancing. I wrote of one of the beekeepers, “He moves in a graceful rhythm … shaking the three-pound crate of bees into the hive, careful not to crush the queen, careful to make sure she has enough bees to tend to her, careful not to disturb or alarm them as he tenderly puts the frames back into the hive. And he does not get stung.” I was not expecting to find old men dancing with the grace of ballerinas under pine trees with a tenderness for the bees I wouldn’t have been able to imagine had I not witnessed it myself. This moment marked the beginning of my interest in what bees could teach us.

HUMANS AND BEES have been in close relationship for thousands of years. The Egyptians were the first to practice organized beekeeping beginning in 3100 BC, taking inspiration from their sun god Re, who was believed to have cried tears that turned into honeybees when they touched the ground, making the bee sacred. In tribes across the African continent, bees were thought to bring messages from ancestors, while in many countries in Europe, the presence of a bee after a death was a sign that the bees were helping carry messages to the world of the dead. From this belief came the practice of “telling the bees,” which most likely originated in Celtic mythology more than six hundred years ago. Although traditions varied, “telling the bees” always involved notifying the insects of a death in the family. Beekeepers draped each hive with black cloth, visiting each one individually to relay the news.

While bees have long been understood to be conduits between the living and the dead, bearing witness to tears from God and the grief of common villagers, less is known about the grief of bees themselves. Can bees feel sad? Do they feel angst? Among the many roles honeybees play in the hive—housekeeper, queen bee attendant, forager—the one that catches my attention is the undertaker bee, whose primary job is to locate their dead brethren and remove them from the hive. (Depending on the health of the hive and its approximately sixty thousand inhabitants, this is no small job.) My beekeeper friend Amy, who, like me, has loved bees since she was a little girl, tells me over lunch that one of the craziest things about this is that there’s only one bee doing it at a time. “Just one bee will lift the body out of the hive and then fly away with it as far as possible,” she says. “Can you imagine lifting one whole dead human by yourself and carrying it as far as you can?” We marvel over this feat of spectacular strength. “It’s always the females doing it,” she adds, which makes me smile, because all worker bees are female. The male drone bees only number in the hundreds and their only purpose is to mate with the queen bee, after which they die.

But I want to know if the undertaker bees feel anything while they are removing dead bees. Do bees have emotions?

A few years ago the first study to show what scientists colloquially refer to as “bee screams” was published. Scientists found that when giant hornets drew near Asian honeybees, the honeybees put their abdomens into the air and ran while vibrating their wings, making a noise like “a human scream.” The sound has also been described as “shrieking” and “crying.” According to scientists, honeybees’ “antipredator pipes” share acoustic traits with alarm shrieks and panic calls that mirror more socially complex vertebrates.

I am not surprised at all that a tiny insect also screams in a way that has been compared to a human scream. I don’t think it has anything to do with social complexity or being a large vertebrate, but rather something much more primal and universal to the experience of being alive. Every day for months after my baby daughter’s death I also felt compelled to scream. I wanted to scream at the dogwood blossoms outside my home in Massachusetts; I wanted to scream at the grocery cashier cracking jokes. I never associated the urge with being human. I felt it was what an animal did who was no longer safe in the world. When I read the study, the sharp edges of my own grief felt soothed by the underlying revelation—there are profound connections shared between living creatures, no matter the size of our brains, no matter how loud the sound of our screams.

I wanted to know more.

I HAVE LOVED BEES my entire life, though my love for beekeepers started when I was writing a story for the Boston Globe about the dangers of mites to bee colonies in North America. I drove out to Hudson, a conservative town in rural New Hampshire, to meet leaders of the New Hampshire Beekeepers Association. I arrived just in time to watch a couple of senior bearded men in flannel shirts and Carhartt pants transport crates of bees into new hives. I was completely entranced by their delicacy and elegance. They seemed to be dancing. I wrote of one of the beekeepers, “He moves in a graceful rhythm … shaking the three-pound crate of bees into the hive, careful not to crush the queen, careful to make sure she has enough bees to tend to her, careful not to disturb or alarm them as he tenderly puts the frames back into the hive. And he does not get stung.” I was not expecting to find old men dancing with the grace of ballerinas under pine trees with a tenderness for the bees I wouldn’t have been able to imagine had I not witnessed it myself. This moment marked the beginning of my interest in what bees could teach us.

HUMANS AND BEES have been in close relationship for thousands of years. The Egyptians were the first to practice organized beekeeping beginning in 3100 BC, taking inspiration from their sun god Re, who was believed to have cried tears that turned into honeybees when they touched the ground, making the bee sacred. In tribes across the African continent, bees were thought to bring messages from ancestors, while in many countries in Europe, the presence of a bee after a death was a sign that the bees were helping carry messages to the world of the dead. From this belief came the practice of “telling the bees,” which most likely originated in Celtic mythology more than six hundred years ago. Although traditions varied, “telling the bees” always involved notifying the insects of a death in the family. Beekeepers draped each hive with black cloth, visiting each one individually to relay the news.

While bees have long been understood to be conduits between the living and the dead, bearing witness to tears from God and the grief of common villagers, less is known about the grief of bees themselves. Can bees feel sad? Do they feel angst? Among the many roles honeybees play in the hive—housekeeper, queen bee attendant, forager—the one that catches my attention is the undertaker bee, whose primary job is to locate their dead brethren and remove them from the hive. (Depending on the health of the hive and its approximately sixty thousand inhabitants, this is no small job.) My beekeeper friend Amy, who, like me, has loved bees since she was a little girl, tells me over lunch that one of the craziest things about this is that there’s only one bee doing it at a time. “Just one bee will lift the body out of the hive and then fly away with it as far as possible,” she says. “Can you imagine lifting one whole dead human by yourself and carrying it as far as you can?” We marvel over this feat of spectacular strength. “It’s always the females doing it,” she adds, which makes me smile, because all worker bees are female. The male drone bees only number in the hundreds and their only purpose is to mate with the queen bee, after which they die.

But I want to know if the undertaker bees feel anything while they are removing dead bees. Do bees have emotions?

A few years ago the first study to show what scientists colloquially refer to as “bee screams” was published. Scientists found that when giant hornets drew near Asian honeybees, the honeybees put their abdomens into the air and ran while vibrating their wings, making a noise like “a human scream.” The sound has also been described as “shrieking” and “crying.” According to scientists, honeybees’ “antipredator pipes” share acoustic traits with alarm shrieks and panic calls that mirror more socially complex vertebrates.

In 1953, Springfield, Missouri, was a city of about 65,000 people and at least 11 escaped Indian cobras slithering loose on the streets.

Between August and October, at least 11 of the snakes were either killed or captured in Springfield, much to the alarm of residents, many of whom fought back with a common gardening tool.

While a local pet shop was always suspected to be the source of the snakes, its owner denied any involvement. It would be 35 years until the person who set the reptiles free came forward.

From the beginning fire has defined Malibu in the American imagination. In Two Years Before the Mast, Richard Henry Dana described sailing northward from San Pedro to Santa Barbara in 1826 and seeing a vast blaze along the coast of José Tapia’s Rancho Topanga Malibu Sequit. Despite—or, as we shall see, more likely because of—the Spanish prohibition of the Chumash and Tong-va Indian practice of annually burning the brush, mountain infernos repeatedly menaced Malibu through the nineteenth century. During the great land boom of the late 1880s, the entire latifundio was sold at $10 per acre to the Boston Brahmin millionaire Frederick Rindge. In his memoirs, Rindge described his unceasing battles against squatters, rustlers, and, above all, recurrent wildfire. The great fire of 1903, which raced from Calabasas to the sea in a few hours, incinerated Rindge’s dream ranch in Malibu Canyon and forced him to move to Los Angeles, where he died in 1905.

From the time of the Tapias, the owners of Rancho Malibu had recognized that the region’s extraordinary fire hazard was shaped, in large part, by the uncanny alignment of its coastal canyons with the annual “fire winds” from the north: the notorious Santa Anas, which blow primarily between Labor Day and Thanksgiving, just before the first rains. Born from high-pressure areas over the Great Basin and Colorado Plateau, the Santa Anas become hot and dry as they descend avalanche-like into Southern California. The San Fernando Valley acts as a giant bellows, sometimes fanning the Santa Anas to hurricane velocity as they roar seaward through the narrow canyons and rugged defiles of the Santa Monica Mountains. Add a spark to the dense, dry vegetation on such an occasion and the hillsides will explode in uncontrollable wildfire: “The speed and heat of the fire is so intense that firefighters can only attempt to prevent lateral spread of the fire while waiting for the winds to abate or the fuel to diminish.”

Less well understood in the old days was the essential dependence of the dominant vegetation of the Santa Monicas—chamise chaparral, coastal sage scrub, and live oak woodland—upon this cycle of wildfire. Decades of research (especially at the San Dimas Experimental Forest in the San Gabriel Mountains) have given late-twentieth-century science vivid insights into the complex and ultimately beneficial role of fire in recycling nutrients and ensuring seed germination in Southern California’s various pyrophytic flora. Research has also established the overwhelming importance of biomass accumulation rather than ignition frequency in regulating fire destructiveness. As Richard Minnich, the world authority on chaparral brushfire, emphasizes: “Fuel, not ignitions, causes fire. You can send an arsonist to Death Valley and he’ll never be arrested.”

A key revelation was the nonlinear relationship between the age structure of vegetation and the intensity of fire. Botanists and fire geographers discovered that “the probability for an intense fast running fire increases dramatically as the fuels exceed twenty years of age.” Indeed, half-century-old chaparral—heavily laden with dead mass—is calculated to burn with 50 times more intensity than 20-year-old chaparral. Put another way, an acre of old chaparral is the fuel equivalent of about 75 barrels of crude oil. Expanding these calculations even further, a great Malibu firestorm could generate the heat of three million barrels of burning oil at a temperature of 2,000 degrees.

Now a team of researchers has provided hard evidence linking pollution and ancient intellect. They identified the level of pollutants in three ice cores that dated between 500 B.C.E. through 600 C.E. — the era spanning the rise of the Roman Republic through the fall of the Roman Empire. Then they compared those levels with how lead pollution affected the general public during its peak in the 1970s, before it was banned from gasoline.

The lead in the air in Roman times was enough to affect IQs then by about a third as much as in the late 1970s, when the U.S. Clean Air Act went into effect and about twice as much as in the early 2010s, according to the study.

“Elites and non-elites in cities and rural areas alike were affected by the background air pollution — no one could escape the health effects,” says McConnell.

Here, for me anyway, was a strange and arresting new experience of wilderness. I’d started out in full Delusional Romantic mode — a Paddler in a Sea of Fog, full of myself for appreciating my own insignificance in these almost limitless spaces. But in all this vastness there was a kind of claustrophobia to be found. You camp on one of the beaches and the sand is pleasantly soft underfoot. Maybe the sun has come out too and is applying a little warmth and UV to your damp malodorous gear. You look around, breathe deeply, and… you can’t visit the land. Beyond the sand, behind the tent, there’s an almost impenetrable green wall.

Almost: rarely, very rarely, there are short rough paths into the forest that previous visitors have created. One of these, three hundred yards long perhaps, connects two beaches across an isthmus. Trying to follow it makes me feel like a creature out of Tolkein: I have to clamber over branches larger than ordinary trees; I fall into pools of mud; I’m not sure I’m still going the right way; I find myself in mossy deeps where strange fungi loom out of the dark and whisper at me. Then, off to one side, I glimpse that especially eye-popping red cedar.

Wanting to get closer, I leave the path through a rat’s nest of salal and climb onto a trunk that has fallen in the right direction. An elevated highway! But the wood is slick and I manage only a couple of dozen small nervous steps before I see that a drop is opening up on either side: five feet, ten, fifteen, into a shadowy chaos of bark, loam, and leafy understory. I have the sensation that there is no forest floor, that the abyss of dying plant matter might go down forever. Ahead of me, across the trunk, the way is blocked by another trunk and its attendant wreckage. I prod, hesitate, back out and try a second route. Then a third, during which I’m attacked by killer brambles and twist an ankle during my escape. No ‘exploring in the forest’ here. The density is like nothing I’ve ever encountered. There’s no way through.

Robert Falcon Scott was right: “It is good to know that there remain wild corners of this dreadfully civilised world.” But after getting back to our narrow beach and failing to find any other paths, I thought: I don’t belong here. This place belongs to the trees, which are lending it to the bears and the wolves. The forest is saying: ‘Now that you’ve seen this, and appreciated what it really is, don’t come back.’

Later, I wondered if that was just a different kind of Romanticism.