The Music of Bees

“Alice kept certain thoughts behind a firmly closed door in her mind and had resisted Dr. Zimmerman’s gentle prodding. Now, without warning, the door opened a crack. Later she would blame fatigue for her careless bargaining with herself. I’ll just think of his face, she thought. Just that. Then the door burst open and the memories flooded her.”

Alice is still dealing with the stress and grief triggered by the death of her husband, Buddy. Dr. Zimmerman is her therapist. In this scene, she’s driving home when she’s suddenly overwhelmed by memories of Buddy. She thinks she can control the bounds of her memory but is mistaken. Unaware that she’s speeding, she only narrowly avoids hitting Jake in his wheelchair moments later.

“Harry stood outside in the darkness and looked up at the stars, which were so bright there far from any city, brighter than any he’d ever seen. Then he heard the deep, pulsating call of an owl throbbing through the woods around him. Harry could not have said which tree the great bird sat in, as the call seemed to be everywhere at once. The hoot came again, and Harry felt it settle into his chest and fill his heart.”

Like Jake and Alice, Harry, who is new out west, is struck by the beauty of the area’s natural surroundings. The brightness of the stars emphasizes the difference of this rural area from the more urban area he was accustomed to on the East Coast. His reflections on the peaceful night scene give him some temporary rest from his troubles.

“His big dog’s absence was the first thing he noticed. He pushed his way into the house and saw the hook by the door empty of the leash. He listened in vain for the staccato click of nails on linoleum. There was no happy bark from his room. That one tiny spark that held the crushing depression at bay went out.”

Jake has just returned from rehab following his accident. When he realizes that his dog, Cheney, is no longer there, he experiences the full weight of his new situation. Jake’s dog brightened his world, but his father has banished Cheney from his home.

“When a honeybee colony experiences a disturbance, even something as slight as a beekeeper opening a hive to evaluate honey caches or pollen sources, the bees’ first instinct is to communicate with each other.”

This is one of many passages that compare and contrast the lives of bees and humans. Alice has just come close to hitting Jake on the road, and now, unlike the bees, she’s alone in a crucial moment, with no one to turn to for support.

“She’d grown up with such a kind father, his colorful language aside. But she’d met this kind of man before. Every woman in America had by the time she was twenty-five. She’d worked with men to whom bullying was a standard management style.”

Alice has just encountered Jake’s rude and unpleasant father, Ed Stevenson, who has told her in an insulting way to get off his driveway. She immediately knows how to deal with him because she’s familiar with his type from her job. She regards such men as acting like small children, always throwing tantrums, and wonders why women rather than men are often called hysterical.

“It was mesmerizing. People zoomed across the river and back. They launched high in the air, suspended for long, impossible seconds. They did flips and complicated tricks. Out on the large sandbar that spilled into the river, he saw dozens of wet-suited figures launching and lading the great colorful kites.”

Harry gets his first sight of kiteboarding, and he soon develops a passionate interest in it and teaches the skill to young people. It proves to be one of the keys that enable him to improve the quality of his life.

“He breathed in the sweet aroma of fresh beeswax and fermented honey and felt the thrum of a thousand tiny bodies vibrating in unison. It hit him in the heart like a drug. The reverberation ran through his hands and up into his arms. His chest ached, and he though his heart might explode. It was a calming weight, an invisible touchstone, a ‘You Are Here’ marker.”

When Alice shows Jake a beehive for the first time, he’s immediately enthralled by its beauty, which affects him deeply. This is one of the first moments that Jake begins to engage fully with life again. He feels like it’s a new beginning for him, and he isn’t wrong.

“While swarming honeybees can be heartbreaking for their beekeeper, a swarm is actually the sign of a healthy, productive hive. The older daughters decide the colony is overcrowded and, leaving half their sisters with healthy virgin queens, abscond with their mother to greener pastures.”

This is one of many passages that highlight some aspect of bee life. The context is that Alice has just made a mistake. In too much of a hurry, she dropped a box full of bees on Jake. The result is a swarm, in which Alice is stung three times, although Jake, who seems to have a charmed life regarding bees, is unhurt.

“You can do this. Shove it back down in there. As long as she made it to the county planning department by 8:30 a.m. five days a week, no one had to know that Alice Holtzman was made of a million tiny broken pieces held together by cookies, solitary driving, and the sheer determination not to go crazy in public.”

To avoid having to deal with grief and anxiety, Alice is determined to present a calm, efficient exterior to those she comes in contact with. She knows that the reality is quite different from the appearance she’s at pains to present, but at this point, she doesn’t know how to deal with the anxiety she feels.

“Jake hadn’t felt at home since he was a very small child, but he felt something close to it now. This new feeling had lodged in his chest. He put a hand on his sternum and felt his breath rise and fall. What was this feeling? It took him some time to name what he felt. Calm.”

One sunny afternoon, Jake is listening to the sound of the bees and appreciating its musicality. His new occupation of caring for the bees has given him not only a new interest in life but also something even more precious: a sense of well-being that he not only lost after his accident but also hadn’t really known before it. Now, he seems in one sense better off than before he became paralyzed.

“Alice was a childless, middle-aged widow and the last of her family. The treasures she never even knew she’d wanted before had evaporated overnight. She felt—she searched the edges of the emotion for the right word—robbed. Her biggest dreams had disappeared just as she’d become aware of their existence.”

Alice’s therapist, Dr. Zimmerman, helps her deal with disturbing, anxious thoughts, telling her to trace them to their source. Here, Alice gives voice to how, because of her husband’s death, she’ll never have children. She’s alone and will leave no one behind when she dies. She feels like all such possibilities have been closed off.

“‘Typical man thinking. This makes total sense to me, though,’ she said, gesturing at the mass of quivering bodies encircling the queen. ‘This is like Christmas at my house. That’s Abuelita in the middle and all my aunties and mom running around doing whatever she tells them to. She would love this!’”

This is one of the numerous ways that the author slips some information about bees into the narrative in an entertaining way. The speaker is Celia, who’s reacting to Jake’s comment that people once believed that the larger bee was a male and called it the king. A Dutch naturalist in the 17th century discovered the error.

“In five of Alice’s oldest hives, all the bees were dead or dying. The bodies of workers were piled up on top of each other, a still mass of once-golden creatures desiccating and turning brown.”

What Alice already knew in theory about the harmful effects of pesticides now becomes personal and urgent. Her own bees are being devastated by residual pesticide drifting from her neighbor’s orchard. Because the threat has now become personal, her environmental activism begins in earnest from this point.

“He shook his head and looked down at the gravel in the driveway, feeling vertiginous. The ground tilted, and each blue-gray pebble seemed to magnify and shrink away again. He dragged his eyes back up to Alice’s frowning face and opened his mouth.”

Harry’s social anxiety kicks in as he makes several false starts in his job interview with Alice. Here, he experiences unpleasant physical effects too, reflecting his mental and emotional discomfort. Fortunately for him, he still lands the job.

“She did have nice friends, and remembering that made her see she was coming back to her life. She felt that container inside her. She felt her grief, and around the edges of that grief she felt the rest of her life and everything in it growing like a fine wax cone to buffer her sorrow.”

Alice is responding to a remark Jake made about the quality of her friends. She realizes that she’s learning how to honor and deal with her grief about losing her husband without letting it overwhelm her life. This growing strength serves her well in the fight against the pesticide company.

“For some reason he had been gifted with the ability to distinguish the bell-like tone of the lovely queen bees, the uber mothers. It rushed into him, the color and texture of his new life. He stretched his arms over his head and smiled.”

Jake is referring to his ability to identify the G-sharp tone of the queen bee. He’s realizing that he really has found a new life as a beekeeper and that he can excel at it. This marks an important moment in his self-development and his recovery from depression regarding his physical limitations.

“He’d come across many interesting and archaic traditions in his reading—like if you got married, you had to introduce the bride to the hives. And if a beekeeper died, his friends had to tell the bees. One thing that really struck him was this idea of tending to the bees ‘absent of vice.’ Beekeepers were urged not to be ‘rude or drunken.’”

Jake discovers seemingly limitless facts about bees and how to care for them. He cares for them as if they’re family, and his reading reinforces his protectiveness and the need for him to live his best life and be a responsible caretaker. For example, he seems to take seriously the notion that the beekeeper must be free from vice when tending to the bees.

“Each member of a honeybee colony is united by a common bond—the pheromone of their mother and queen, a scent that spreads through the hive as a mark of belonging. […] Humans have no such obvious interconnections, at least outside of their families.”

The narrator emphasizes how community and a sense of belonging are essential in a bee colony. Humans may have a similar feeling of belonging, but usually only within their own families. Jake, however, comes from a dysfunctional family and didn’t experience that. Thus, the need for humans to build communities, beyond the family unit, in which people care for one another is an important element in their welfare and happiness.

“I’ve watched it grow, and I’ve taken a great amount of pride in leading my team in shaping Hood River’s future. We’ve grown from a little orchard town nobody heard of to a destination for international tourism and tech business.”

Bill Chenowith, director of the county’s planning department, fails to mention that the increase in Hood River’s tech business allowed Cascadia Pacific, a large company with a bad environmental record, to run its fiber-optic cable in the county and act as a regional distributor for the pesticide company SupraGro. The county’s growth has therefore had negative effects as well.

“Harry understood that the physics of kiteboarding had to do with Newton’s laws of motion. The combination of lift and drag kept the kite in the air, and the tension between the kite and a person’s body weight was a carefully calibrated feat of aerodynamics. It was a tenuous relationship, never a sure thing. Even so, it gave Harry a newfound sense of possibility to have personally felt the embodiment of those principles.”

Harry finds a creative outlet that he excels at, which boosts his confidence. He’s fascinated not only by the practice of kiteboarding but also by the theory behind it. He’s discovering that he’s not the stupid person that he thinks other people see but an intelligent, creative individual who has much to contribute to life.

“He left feeling tremendously pleased with himself. He had honored his uncle. He would call his mother. Harry Stokes was a man who could solve his own problems. He walked out into the May sunshine and back to the truck, where his new friend Jake waited for him. Whatever was coming next, Harry was ready.”

At the morgue, Harry shows resourcefulness as he overcomes red tape and the unhelpfulness of a receptionist in arranging to collect the remains of his uncle. It’s a significant moment for Harry, who is usually discouraged by difficulties.

“The Schmidt sting pain index was first published in the 1980s by the entomologist Justin Schmidt in an attempt to catalog and compare the pain inflicted by various stinging insects. The Western honeybee rated level 2 out of a possible 4 and with a typical duration of ten minutes.”

Alice has just made a mistake in handling the hive, and Jake experiences what it’s like to be stung. He’s stung at least 20 times but remains calm, once again showing how well-suited he is to work with bees. Alice tends to his stings.

“Harry knew his act was a violation of his parole. He understood he would likely end up back in jail, this time for a minimum of two years. Alice and Jake would find out that he was both a liar and a felon. He would break his mother’s heart all over again. But he did it anyway.”

These are Harry’s thoughts as he commandeers the pesticide truck and drives it away from the scene. He does it because he thinks it’s the right thing to do. He acts for his friends and for the bees. At this crucial point in the story, Harry is very different from the timid, confused individual who first showed up at Alice’s farm.