reluctantly have toadmit that Catholic
monks singing a
Gregorian chant—
even Buddhist monks
droning “Om”—are
more musical than a
beehive on a
Christmas midnight.
Then it strikes me: a beehive on a cold winter night, settled in for warmth, sounds like a purring cat. I suddenly realize that this purr existed long before house cats, or even before humanity was there to hear it. There are fossils of honey bees that are 23 to 56 million years old. Saber tooth tigers and mastodons may have heard this sound. In fact, some scientists believe bees may go even further back, all the way to the dinosaur era. I realize that maybe even sweet-toothed sugiyamasauruses heard this sound.
The thought comes to me: it came upon a midnight clear, and it is a glorious song of old. In fact, this may be the oldest living sound I'll ever hear. So who needs carols?
THE KEY OF BEE NATURAL
Adult bees, when they're inside the hive, make the sound of 190 vibrations per second, or a note halfway between the F# and G below middle C on the piano. That's not so interesting. What is fascinating, though, is this: when they fly, the tone bees make is—as it should be—B (248 vibrations per second).
If bees fly in B natural, what note do they sting in?
Bee sharp. What note when they hit the
windshield? Bee flat.
More Bee Sounds (Last Word, I Promise)
Oddly, winter is the time when a beehive is most in tune. Most of the bees that winter over are fully grown female workers bunched together for warmth. During that time relatively few new bees are hatched. In the warmer parts of the year, a hive is made up of not just adult females, but also male drones, young females, and bees of all ages doing different jobs; each of those jobs create different sounds. Newly hatched females are full-sized, but their wings do not become fully hardened into flight-worthy tools until the age of nine days. When they fan their floppy new wings for warmth and ventilation, the lack of wind resistance means their wings fan faster than the adults' wings, making a higher tone. Meanwhile, the oversized drones have bigger wings that flap more slowly, creating a lower tone. The guard bees, protecting the hive from bears and beekeepers, fly fast in a beeline buzz bomb, in order to have the most impact when they give a warning thump and then a sting; this creates a higher, more insistent tone. Perhaps the time to imagine you can hear Christmas carols is in the summer, when there are more notes to choose from.
THE MOST PREVALENT NOTES
Very young bee fanning: C#–D
Adult guard bee attacking: C–C#
Adult bee flying: B
6-day old bee fanning: A–A#
Adult bee fanning: F#–G
Drone flying (loud, like a bronx cheer): Discordant flat low G
KEEPS THE ELEPHANTS AWAY
Why keep bees? Because it keeps the elephants away. Okay, it's an old joke, but just in case you haven't heard it:
A man in a restaurant is perturbed by the odd behavior of a woman at the next table. He asks: “Why do you keep snapping your fingers and tossing your napkin in the air?”
She answers: “Because it keeps the elephants away.”
“But that's ridiculous,” says the man. “There's not a wild elephant for thousands of miles!”
She gives him a triumphant look, and responds: “See how well it works?”
It turns out that bees really can keep the elephants away. In 2011, the BBC reported that Kenya had successfully reversed a serious decline in the elephant population, bringing their numbers up to 7,500. The problem was that pillaging pachyderms began raiding subsistence farmers' fields for tomatoes, potatoes, and corn. The destruction, as you can imagine, of having a bull elephant in your garden can be pretty extreme, and farmers began fighting back with guns and poisons.
The elephants easily knocked down fences and barriers, but in 2009 researchers at the University of Oxford and Save the Elephants discovered a method that was 97 percent effective in repelling elephants: beehives. A group of 17 farms was surrounded by a border of 170 beehives, placed 10 meters (33 feet) apart.
Elephants may be thick-skinned, but they don't like bees for a very good reason. The bees are very good at targeting the vulnerable parts of even thick-skinned animals, around the eyes, mouth, and nose. Elephant trunks are especially sensitive, and the aggressive African bees will fly right up inside them to sting if necessary.
The bottom line is that elephants attempted 32 raids over a three-year period. Only one got through the beeline; the rest were quickly convinced to pack up their trunks and go.
Last news was that conservationists intended to use the idea in other communities as well. Meanwhile, the farmers were trained to harvest honey and wax from their garden guardians, providing additional income and extra motivation for keeping the hives in good shape.
MY CONVERSION
I don't often have road-to-Damascus, struck-by-lighting, instant-enlightenment, come-to-Jesus, scales-falling-from-the-eyes moments. However, my conversion to the Church of the Living Bees was one of those moments. (Say hallelujah, somebody!)
Friends, I had always been apathetic to bees at my strongest moments, slightly scared of them at my weakest. That all changed on a visit to an environmental awareness house in Berkeley, California in the summer of 1978, when I was a young man. It was there that I saw an observation hive.
Previously, I'd seen a few of these beehives with Plexiglas on the sides so you can see inside but had always been indifferent to them.
I loved ant farms, despite their mournful quality, because you could actually see the ants doing something recognizably antlike: digging freeform tunnels, eating, drinking, and carrying the bodies of their constantly expiring farm mates for burial. But beehives? There was no concrete activity I could really figure out. It just looked like modestly repugnant bugs running around randomly, like a lot of cockroaches scurrying around in a box.
Little did I know. I was a fool. Once lost, now found. Blind, but now can see.
What did it take? Somebody with a little knowledge and about two minutes. He pointed out a soccer ball-sized ring of yellows, oranges, and reds in the beeswax cells. This was the pollen that the bees had
