The Last Hive

I was listening to NPR during my lunch break when the news came through from the UN Environment Programme: the last known species of honey bee had gone extinct. Though the International Union for Conservation of Nature disputed the declaration saying that it was too soon to make a determination, their outlook wasn’t optimistic either. Speculation had already been rampant in the media for months with the usual mixture of recycled stories about the failure of scientists to maintain hives in protected captivity and the ongoing, seemingly futile efforts to search for bees in the wild. Finally, according to the radio host, the UNEP was throwing in the towel as the last known hive had collapsed the previous year and no new sightings had occurred this year despite another exhaustive search.

The announcement did nothing to dampen my appetite. I supposed that there were plenty of people taking the news quite hard and making a fuss on social media, but it didn’t make much of a difference to me. I might have felt a twinge of panic a decade ago, back when the headlines were filled with dire warnings about how the accelerating spread of colony collapse disorder was going to lead to ecological and economic devastation. However, in the intervening years humanity had taken those warnings to heart by developing drones to replace bees as pollinators, genetically modifying bacteria to produce honey and wax, and preemptively devastating various parts of the environment all on our own. Even before the die offs could do the trick, beekeepers were driven out of business by the technological replacements to their bees. The vanishing of the honey bee had been transformed from a critical issue to the sort of thing relegated to slow news days and the rants of nature lovers.

I certainly wasn’t one of those nature lovers. Grass makes my skin itchy. Insects make my skin crawl. A fresh summer day spent outdoors isn’t worth the burnt skin, blocked sinuses, and migraines from the vicious sun and smothering pollen. Give me the sterile breeze from AC and the soft illumination of LED lights any day. Besides, what was the loss of one more species when extinction was so common that it was barely mentioned in the news? I didn’t see why these bees mattered any more than the dozen or so animals that had probably disappeared last week. The news didn’t really impact me and there wasn’t enough time in a lunch break to waste a moment mourning bees.

Later though, sitting at my desk chipping away at monolithic spreadsheets, my thoughts kept turning back to those little stinging nuisances. More precisely, I was reminded of time spent visiting an uncle of mine when I was young. He lived out in the countryside a few hours from the nearest city. It was the sort of area, increasingly rare, where forests and mountains separated one neighbor from another. Long before I’d gone there, the property had been a farm, but the only remaining indication of this had been a dilapidated barn filled with rusty equipment and a small tractor that no longer ran. The ancient wooden structure had also been home to a hive of bees who gave me quite a scare as I was playing around with the relics of a lost era. I was lucky enough to make it back to my uncle’s house with only a few stings.

After that incident, I’d avoided the barn during the rest of our stay. When pressed on the matter of removing the infestation, my uncle had simply shrugged it off as unnecessary since he didn’t use the barn or even really go to that side of the property. With a lopsided grin he’d said that the bees had a better claim to the spot than he did. We had only gone back to visit him a few more times in the following years and I had never even attempted to cross the overgrown lawn to visit the old barn. Now though, I couldn’t help wondering what had happened to those bees. Logically I had to assume that they too had perished along with all the others of their species, but for some reason I couldn’t shake the impression that they would be unaffected by the doom of recent years. In my memories of the barn, everything had a quality of stillness that made it all seem out of sync with time. Even if the barn and all that was inside it were slowly decaying away, it had all been there since before I was born and it seemed that it would outlast me as well.

The very same night I heard about the announcement, I acted on impulse and called my uncle. After a few minutes spent on idle greetings and catching up, I shifted the topic to the barn and asked if it was still there. He answered that it had been the last time he’d looked at it a few days prior. Without mentioning the bees, I arranged to pay him a visit that very weekend. He was mystified as to my sudden interest in seeing him and I didn’t really have the heart to tell him that I was being driven by curiosity over a beehive rather than any urge to socialize with a relative to whom I hadn’t spoken in years.

After work on Friday, I stopped by my apartment briefly to change clothes and pack a few sandwiches before starting on the long drive. I listened to NPR until I was too far from the city to catch the signal; bees were completely out of the news by that point. I drove the rest of the way in silence feeling a mounting tension over the fate of that hive.

When I arrived at my uncle’s place, it was already late in the evening. I was eager to go check the barn but I figured it would be better to wait for morning’s light, so instead I spent a few hours talking with the old man. As if to confirm my impression of the timelessness of the place, it seemed that he hadn’t changed over the decades either. He already had wrinkled skin and greyed hair when I was a kid, so I supposed that my memories were too vague to be able to tell the difference in how he looked. There was little for us to talk about since nothing of importance happened out there. He lived a simple life based on the standard universal income and didn’t get out much. The property was becoming ever more overgrown as his energy to battle against the verdant reclamation of nature waned. I went to sleep in the guest bedroom that night without having broached the subject of bees.

In the morning I woke up far earlier than I ever would on a day off and went outside immediately after getting dressed. I had to stomp a path through the tall grass covering the yard in order to get over to the barn which was itself now veiled by underbrush. In my memories, the building had been painted red, but the bare wood in front of me made me realize that the image in my mind had become tinged with fabrications. Had it always been leaning in partial collapse or had it become unstable in the years since I last saw it? Through the open front I could see the decrepit shape of a tractor and various wretched things which had once been hoes, hay forks, scythes, and rakes.

Instead of going inside, I slowly circled around the building while looking for any bees that would be leaving to forage or returning with their hauls. At first I saw no signs of life, but after my third circuit an amazing sight appeared from a gap in the boards near the roof. As if a factory whistle I couldn’t hear had been sounded, insects were streaming out from the wood and flying off in all directions. My heart began beating ever more rapidly as I watched the swarm departing. I wanted to get closer to try to confirm what these bugs were, but I did not dare to approach that exit. Looking around, I realized that various wild flowers had grown up in the yard and so I quickly returned that way to check them. Sure enough, I found that several of them were being attended by fuzzy yellow and black bees.

It was an astonishing thing. Experts had spent months trying to find these creatures and finally considered that they might have disappeared entirely, but there they were drifting lazily from flower to flower in front of me. I wasn’t sure how to respond to my discovery. There was a thrilling sensation of knowing something that no one else knew, but I was also greatly confused by how this hive could have been missed by all those conservation organizations. More than that, I didn’t know what I should do next.

What I ended up doing was meandering back over to the barn while watching bees traverse the field. Cautiously, I stepped inside and began looking around. All those years ago, I had never actually seen where the hive was located. I knew it must have been somewhere on the back side of the structure because they hadn’t come after me until I’d begun disturbing things over that way and the hole in the building I’d seen them using was opposite the entrance as well. Standing just inside the barn, I only spotted a couple of bees drifting around near the back of the loft. I waited for several minutes, but they didn’t seem to be bothered by my presence at that distance. I considered climbing the ladder to maybe get a look at the hive itself if any part of it was visible, but I decided not to test the rotting wood so I simply leaned against the wall in the gloom of the old barn.

The morning sun warmed the inside of the building and a nostalgic atmosphere took hold of the space. It really did have a timeless quality matching my memories. I watched the bees idling around the rafters and considered what to do. My first thought was to notify some official group who should be in charge of such things; this was a momentous discovery for those conservationists. But was there a point in doing so? They had already failed to save all of the bees they’d known about and so I had to assume that their knowing or not knowing about this hive also wouldn’t make a difference in the end. Trying to think of the most extreme option opposite to that first idea, I briefly envisioned myself burning the barn to the ground along with the hive. How many people would get the opportunity to personally drive a species to its extinction after all? I could bury the whole matter right there and then; the world would carry on as if I’d found nothing.

That option didn’t appeal to me either though; I had no desire to claim such a dubious honor for myself. The only course of action that seemed right was to simply do nothing. These bees had been going about their existence without any input on my part for decades. Disturbing the outcome in any way seemed wrong. They would either continue on forever along with their barn or else both would eventually fall into ruin. That wasn’t something for me or anyone else to decide, though for my part I did feel like cheering them on.

Having decided to tell no one and take no action, I simply watched the bees for a while until hunger drove me to leave. As I struggled back across the overgrown field I offered a goodbye to the workers courting the flowers and wished them good luck. I hoped that somehow, they’d be wishing me the same year after year.