from the end of a cleansing flight of fancy

  

The relatively cold weather of late, here in northeast London, has been playing on the mind of ‘Field Study’s Man in E11’. He has been fretting about the well being of the honeybees in our allotment apiary; in particular, how they have been standing up to the sub-zero night-time temperatures? I tried to reassure the field student by recounting my experience of briefly opening up the hives earlier in the month to administer some oxalic acid treatment for varrhoa mites. I found each of our hives contained a large cluster of bees; a phenomenon measured by the number of frames apparently occupied by the little creatures. I tried to persuade the field student that this was a very good sign considering the cold spell over Christmas and New Year. It wasn’t just that there were a lot of bees it was also that the hives were still heavy with honey stores and the bees were feeding from fondant we had placed at the top of the hives.

The field student was obviously miffed that he had not been included in these beekeeping tasks. I reminded him that he was in no fit state to do anything of that sort following the ordeal of his making a submission to the ‘Field Report 2014’. The making of his annual report involved an exceptionally arduous and punishing task, one in which he had to revisit and rewrite 100 times, by hand, an experience of getting lost in a field. The student moaned at the memory of that calligraphic, or perhaps, cacographic flagellation. ‘STPD’ – sustained traumatic post description – might be a psycho-geographic condition with which the field student was or is afflicted.

I noticed there were no posts for ‘Lost and Found in E11’ this month. The student may not have been making posts so as to avoid a similar experience later in the year. He was getting idle, and nigh on as moribund as a honeybee might be when it’s body temperature goes below 7.5degrees. The deliberate self-lowering of his mind temperature (psycho-stasis) was not an acceptable way of dealing with the distress of report rewriting. A different therapeutic approach was required and it was to the bees I looked for a solution or therapy to deal with his post report (blog) post aversion. We had to get him exercising his flight of fancy muscles again, to restore the endo-ecto-thermic balance of his mind. I decided to send the diminished student, a quintessential ‘blokey’ adventurer, into the female preserve of a beehive in winter, to immerse his ectothermic self in their social endotherm or ‘nestduftwarmebindung’. I thought this might disturb him and trigger some renewed interest in communication.

Honeybees form a cluster in the nest or hive in winter. One explanation of this phenomenon is that a mass of bees clustered together, as a more singular entity (the social endotherm), has a lower surface area to volume ratio than an individual bee and therefore less heat is dissipated to the atmosphere. The inner cluster temperature might reach as high as 35degrees centigrade – warm enough to prevent the queen bee from succumbing to cold. One of the issues or problems beekeepers have to address is how to maintain air circulation in the hive without over chilling the cluster. Air circulation is necessary to prevent condensation building up as a result of the water created by the metabolising/respiring bees in the cluster.  Excessive moisture in the hive can encourage diseases. Prolonged cold periods also pose the problem of defecation. The bees will not defecate in the hive and therefore have to wait for warmer spells of weather during which they can make cleansing flights – as well as forage for water. This is all received knowledge as in I have not made those temperature measurements or witnessed bees defecating having emerged from a hive after a cold spell. The explanation makes sense however the purpose of ‘Lost and Found in E11’ is not to reproduce sensible explanations without some silliness. There would be no truth in it without silliness.

The field student’s initial concern about the collective thermoregulation of our bee clusters was very soon diminished by a greater (albeit lesser) scatological concern. This scatological concern could have been sensible had it not been for some all too predictable silliness on the part of the field student who brandished a copy of what he had misread as being the, ‘Scatologic Rights of All Nations’ (John Gregory Bourke, 1891).  Rights? No! RITES. ! The field student’s reading, or misreading, akin to droning on from colonial, imperious and condescending ethnographic accounts of exotic rituals, the rites of others, may have infuriated the clusters. He thought his wiggles, waggles and buzzes were going to inspire liberation of the workers. It is possible that the field student experienced another thermodynamic phenomenon – that of ‘balling’ – by which an intruder in the hive, e.g. a hornet - is engulfed by a ball of bees and, by their rapid and intense muscular activity – creating heat – is ‘boiled’ (balled).  Perhaps the field student was ‘balled’ because of all the scatological ideas he presented to the communities of faecally turgid creatures. He was an unwelcome, irritating and stimulating presence.

We have had enough of this silly anthropomorphism until the field student’s next misadventure. Here is a short film composed of two observations of bees in the same locality on the same day, the 24^th January 2015.