A beekeeper muses on the delights of stewarding a hive

The first chapter of Susan Cormier’s “Dead Bees Still Sting: Tales of Life at the Edge of Nature” begins with the admonition: “Don’t keep bees.” Cormier, who lives with her husband in a small house on the edge of Vancouver, British Columbia, should know. She is a beekeeper herself. Cormier says that bees can be dangerous (even dead ones can sting, if stepped on, so long as their stinger and venom sac are still intact). Their behavior is more complicated to understand than, say, that of a dog or a chicken, which can make bees seem alien and inscrutable.Nevertheless, Cormier still insists that a beekeeper’s labors are amply rewarded. The essays in the book, which focus on beekeeping and other forms of animal husbandry, invite us to explore creaturely worlds beyond our own, and to recognize our kinship with other living beings.When around bees, “Listen with your body,” she instructs. “Learn the slow, soothing hum of calm and the ramping pitch of outrage.” She advises against holding your breath or tensing your muscles. When we are afraid, bees become afraid, and that’s when they sting. Why We Wrote This In “Dead Bees Still Sting,” Susan Cormier draws inspiration from the society of her bee colony. While bees’ behavior can seem inscrutable, she insists that a beekeeper’s labors are amply rewarded, and invites readers to view all our fellow creatures with fresh eyes. If you are a beekeeper, you will be stung. Get over it, Cormier says, because beekeepers are privy to rare delights: the hum of a swarm of bees like “the purring of thousands of kittens,” the gentle caress of the breeze from their wings, the subtly shifting taste of the honey from year to year as weather and ecological conditions change.As a beekeeper, you are also granted a glimpse into a society radically unlike our own, a world of harmony where each bee has its own immutable function. Bees are not to be thought of as individuals, Cormier writes. They are more like specialized cells in the superorganism of the hive. The queen lays the eggs, 1,000 a day; the drones’ sole purpose is to mate with the queen; worker bees forage for nectar and pollen, as well as build, repair, and defend the hive. The latter are paragons of inexhaustible labor. "Dead Bees Still Sting: Tales of Life at the Edge of Nature," by Susan Cormier, Greystone Books, 272 pp. A colony of bees flies 50,000 miles and visits 2 million flowers to produce a single pound of honey, she writes. Members consume nine pounds of honey to make a single pound of wax. Worker bees live for only a few weeks, while the queen can survive for years. Each generation prepares the hive for larvae that they will never see grown. Contrary to a popular myth, bees are indifferent to their keepers. They are nobody’s pets.But their life cycle provides ample food for poetic reflection on the meaning of life, on individuality and community, and on loss and the ever-present possibility of renewal. Cormier invites us to view all our fellow creatures with fresh eyes, which allows us to appreciate their mystery and wonder. Animals are multilayered beings, Cormier writes, whose deepest secrets “science has yet to discover or explain.”Beekeepers earn a reputation for toughness, with their nonchalant attitude toward danger and their physical strength. It’s not easy lifting 40-pound hive boxes, spending hours in the midsummer sun dressed in canvas suits and mesh helmets that make them look like astronauts on a spacewalk. Yet, for all their exploits, beekeepers possess tender hearts – they “are people who have chosen a profession centered on stewarding, shepherding and protecting bees.” They are responsible for thousands, even millions of living creatures. It is an enabling and humbling line of work.Cormier writes about the challenges and rewards of keeping other living beings as well. An apple tree on their property produces no fruit, so she discusses with Bill, her husband, whether to cut it down. That season, the previously barren tree produces one fruit. Had it “overheard us discussing cutting it down ... so it produced a single apple, a Hail Mary held proudly against the sky?” The apple tree is granted a reprieve.Other creatures reach an inflection point. The author writes about her dog’s final walk “sniffing the ghosts of rabbits and the memory of deer.” Death is neither to be celebrated or shunned.Cormier considers the possibility that she will eventually flee the slow-motion tsunami of urbanization that threatens her agrarian retreat. Nothing is forever. “We wait for stability, for the disruptions to end – in nature, in our lives, in our human-built global systems – but that will never come,” Cormier writes. “The act of existing is chaotic.”But the good news is that “the past does not change. The roots of a tree remain stable even when the trunk is broken. Although everything else may alter and shift, our roots hold us up, help us grow.”