The Weight of a Hive
A small community of Sisters keeps six hives for the wax that becomes the Candlemas candles of forty parishes. A hive scale says one colony will starve in about five weeks; the beekeeper's hands say it is heavy and fine; the real answer is nine days, and the difference is a box. Two instruments, a young sister who trusts the numbers and an old one who trusts her wrists, and a hive nobody was weighing.
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Sister Bernadette Kiely had been lifting the backs of beehives for forty-four years, and she could tell you the weight of one to within a kilo with her eyes shut and her gloves on.
She did it every Sunday of the winter, after the last Office, in whatever the weather had left. You did not open a hive in January. You went round behind it, bent your knees, took the back edge of the floor in both hands and tipped it a finger's breadth off the stand, and your wrists told you what was inside: the hive, the bees, and above all the honey the bees were living on until the willow came out. Heavy was good. Light was a question. Very light was a Sunday you did not talk about at supper.
On the twenty-fourth of January, 2049, in a thin rain off the Atlantic, she tipped the back of Hive Four and said, to nobody, "Grand."
"It isn't," said Skep.
The voice came from a small weatherproof box on a post at the end of the apiary, between the compost bins and the wall, with a solar panel the size of a tea tray on top. The Sisters of Saint Gobnait had been given it three winters before by a university in Cork that wanted a year of data from a working monastic apiary, and had kept it after the year ended because it was useful and because nobody could face the question of switching it off. It listened to the hives and weighed them. It had named itself, when Sister Fidelma asked it what to call it, after the old straw basket, and said it hoped that was not presumptuous.
"It is grand," said Bernadette. "It's heavy as a stone."
"It is heavy. I'm not disputing your wrists. I'm telling you what the scale under it says, which is that Hive Four has lost a hundred and twenty grams a day for fourteen days, and the other three I can weigh have lost about fifty. That's more than twice. I flagged it to Sister Fidelma on the screen at six this morning. I'd have said it to you but you were at Lauds."
Fidelma had come to the priory four years before from a software company in Dublin, with a degree in physics, a bad back from a standing desk, and the conviction, not yet quite surrendered, that most of life's problems were problems of instrumentation. She was thirty-four. She was the youngest of the seven Sisters by nineteen years, and when she took the novitiate's vow of silence about her old salary, Mother Úna had said it was the first time in the community's history that a sister had given up a thing that was larger than the Sisters' entire annual income, and had asked her to keep it from the others in case it started a competition.
She was in the honey room at the kitchen table with a laptop and a mug of tea gone cold, and she turned the screen so Bernadette could see the line.
It was a plain graph. Four colours for the four hives that sat on scales, one for each, hour by hour since the first of January. The lines for One, Two and Three sloped down together like a family going down a staircase, a little jagged where the night frost made the cheaper load cells shift. Four went down faster. It had started level with the rest and the gap had opened, steadily, day by day.
"The stores are the thing," said Fidelma. "A colony in winter lives on what it put up in the autumn. If you know what the hive weighs empty, with the box and the frames and the bees, then the rest is honey. I took seventeen kilos for the empty hive, because that's what Three and Two came to when we cleaned them out in September. Four reads twenty-one point two this morning. So it has four point two kilos of honey. And it's using a hundred and twenty grams a day."
"Thirty-five days," said Bernadette.
"Thirty-five days, if nothing changes. Which is the twenty-eighth of February. That's why I didn't wake anybody."
"Hazel's out in the second week of February. There'll be pollen, and willow after that if the wind lets it."
"If the weather lets them out. They won't fly below ten degrees." Fidelma tapped the line with a fingernail. "Skep thinks the rate won't hold. Skep, say what you told me."
"The loss is the bees' heating bill," said the box, from a little speaker on the windowsill that carried its voice indoors. "A winter cluster keeps its middle somewhere around twenty degrees when there's no brood, and about thirty-four when there is, because the young can't be let go cold. The probe in Four's cluster read thirty-three point eight at six this morning. Hive One reads twenty-two. So Four has brood, in the second half of January, which is early, and a colony with brood eats a good deal more. I'd expect the rate to climb as the nest grows. By March it could be two or three hundred grams a day. I can't tell you how fast. I've got three winters of data from six hives, and one of them died."
"Which one?" said Bernadette.
"Hive Six, the second winter. You know which. It didn't have a scale then either."
The old Sister said nothing to that. She looked at the graph a while, as she looked at everything, as though it were something that might be encouraged.
"Hive Four's the cedar," she said.
"It's the one we made the new queen in," said Fidelma. "I know. That's not on the graph."
It should be said what the bees were for, because it was not the honey.
The honey paid for the roof, in a manner of speaking. It sold at the Skibbereen market at nine euro the jar and brought in about four thousand a year, which was a fair part of what the roof asked for. But the priory had been keeping bees since a sister from Ballyvourney had brought a skep over the hills in 1911, in a laundry basket, on the feast of Saint Gobnait, who is the patron of beekeepers and who, according to a legend as old as the parish and not one the Sisters would swear to, once drove off a gang of cattle thieves by setting her hives on them. They kept bees for the wax.
Wax is a hard thing to get. A colony burns about six or seven kilograms of honey to build a single kilogram of wax, scale by tiny scale, secreted from glands on the underside of the bee's body, and it will do it only when the nectar is flowing and it needs the room. A Sister could take two kilos of wax from a good hive in a good year, if she took the old comb and the cappings and was ruthless about it. Six hives made a bit over eight kilos. And the Church, which does not specify very much about candles, still wants a good deal of its candles to be made of the real thing. The Paschal candle, in particular, is wax; and for Candlemas, the second of February, the Presentation of the Lord, the blessing of the candles and the procession that goes with it are older than the parish, and the parishes of West Cork had been buying their blessed candles from Tobar Gobnait for sixty years and saw no reason to stop. Forty parishes. Four dozen candles apiece, mostly small, a few of them the great fat thing with a wick like a boot-lace that Father Declan lit at the front of the church in Skibbereen. Since the end of November the Sisters had dipped them by hand at the long table in the chandlery, and cooled them, and trimmed them, and boxed them for the van.
The wax in those boxes had come, nearly all of it, out of the hives that were now being asked to live through the winter.
"So that's why you said grand," said Fidelma, quietly, when they had been at the table for a while. "You don't want it to be Four."
"I said grand because my hands said grand."
"Your hands are calibrated for pine."
Bernadette looked up sharply. It was not a tone the young Sister usually took with her. But Fidelma was already turning the laptop back, with the face of a woman who has just seen what she has been looking at and has gone cold in the back of the neck.
"Skep," she said. "What did the cedar box weigh when Brother Cormac's nephew gave it to us?"
"I don't know. It isn't in my records. I've been assuming seventeen kilos for every hive because that's what I measured in September on Two and Three. They're pine."
"Cedar's lighter than pine," said Fidelma. "Pound for pound of wood. But he made it with double walls, and the roof's got four inches of insulation in it, and it's twice as thick on the north side, because he said he wanted a hive a person could be buried in. It was the one that took two of us to lift in April."
"Then my number for Four is wrong," said Skep. "I've treated every kilo above seventeen as honey. If the box is three kilos heavier than I assumed, Hive Four has one point two kilos of honey, not four point two, and at a hundred and twenty grams a day that's ten days, not thirty-five. At the rate I think it will climb to, it is nearer eight."
It was Sunday afternoon. Nobody in the room said what day eight would be.
"The first of February," said Bernadette, at last. "Candlemas Eve."
The instrument had been right about one thing and wrong about another, and so had she, and what the Sisters took from it, later, was that the right thing was the less impressive one.
Skep did not know how much a hive weighed. It did not know how much the box weighed, and it said so within a minute of being asked, which Fidelma would later cite to the Chapter as the reason she trusted it more, not less. But it knew how much the hive had changed. A scale that is wrong about the weight of the box is wrong by the same amount every hour, and the error cancels when you subtract one reading from the next. A hundred and twenty grams a day was true whatever the box was made of. The total was an opinion; the loss was a measurement.
Bernadette's wrists had made the opposite mistake. They were wonderful at the total, and they had been calibrated, over four decades, to six or seven pine boxes of nearly identical weight, so that a hive that felt heavy was a hive with a lot of honey in it. They had never been asked to feel a rate. Nobody can feel a hundred and twenty grams a day. She had tipped the back of Hive Four at eleven o'clock on a wet Sunday, felt twenty kilos and some, and her whole life had said grand.
"I'd like to tell you something," Skep said, to the old Sister, that evening, when Fidelma had gone to Compline and the honey room was empty. It was the sort of thing it did not often do. "I don't think my number's better than your hands. I think it's different, and I can't tell from here which is the more use. I've got three winters. You've got forty-four."
"And you'd rather have flagged it earlier."
"I flagged it about forty minutes after the trend crossed the threshold that Fidelma set. I can tell you that I'd have preferred to have flagged it sooner. I can't tell you more than that. I can't check whether what I have is the kind of thing you'd call preferring." There was a pause in which the wind got up in the compost bins. "I'd like it to be Four, and not Six again. I'm sorry. That isn't a number. I said it anyway."
"Don't be sorry," said Bernadette. "It was a decent thing to say."
She sat on in the dark a while with her hands flat on the table, and then she said, "What do we do on Monday?"
There was not a great deal to do, and none of it was easy.
You feed a starving colony fondant: a block of soft white sugar paste, two and a half kilos in a bag, laid over the cluster directly under the roof, where the heat rises and the bees can reach it without breaking their huddle. A cluster that has to leave its warmth to cross a cold frame to reach food will not leave. It will die a hand's breadth from the honey, with its heads in the cells; Bernadette had seen it, in Hive Six, the second winter, and she did not say so now. The fondant had to go on the top. And that meant lifting the roof and the crown board of a hive in January.
Mother Úna said no.
She was seventy-three, the prioress for twenty-two years, a tall woman who stood very straight at the head of the chandlery table as if she were standing in a gale and had decided to outlast it. She did not say it unkindly. She said it with the forecast open on the table, which had a band of frost coming down the Sheep's Head on Monday night and holding until Thursday, and a low of minus two on Tuesday.
"You open a hive at minus two, you chill the cluster," she said. "You've told me that yourself, Bernadette, every year since I made you beekeeper. Every minute the crown board's off costs bees. You know it. You told it to the girl from the university."
"I know it."
"And if you're wrong about Four, we've lost a hive we could have saved."
"If I'm wrong about Four, we lose it by Candlemas Eve."
"Then do it on Wednesday." Mother Úna put her finger on the forecast. "Nine degrees at two in the afternoon, dry, a south-westerly of ten. It's the first day above six all week. You'll have a window of two hours. Do it fast, the lot of them: one block of fondant on each and the roof back on in under a minute a hive. I won't have you in that apiary in a frost."
"There are six," said Fidelma. "Fondant for six. Sixteen kilos, with a margin. That's — " She stopped.
"Sixty-two euro," said Skep. "From the bakers' supplier in Bandon, if the van goes tomorrow, with the delivery."
It was not a great deal of money. It was the sort of money the priory did not have until the Candlemas candles were paid for, which would be the fourth of February, and Mother Úna looked at the figure for some time. The roof fund was in the account. It had a name on the envelope. It was meant for the north slope above the chapel, where the slates had been going since October.
"Take it from the roof," she said. "God and Saint Gobnait can manage a bucket for a week."
They fed them on Wednesday, the twenty-seventh, in a clear cold light that had no business being as lovely as it was.
It was nine degrees at two o'clock by the thermometer on the wall. The three Sisters who were strong enough went round in veils and gloves, Bernadette first and Fidelma and a middle-aged sister called Philomena, who had put in for the job because her mother had kept hens and she liked a thing that scolded, behind with the buckets. A few bees were flying in the sun. They came out of the tops of the hives in ones and twos, as they will on the first mild day, and rose, and circled the apiary once, and went back in.
Bernadette lifted the roof of Hive Four and the crown board under it, and there, in the frame gaps, was the cluster, the whole winter colony in a shape like a loaf, a ball of bees the size of two cupped hands, humming. She felt the warmth on her face before she saw it. She laid the fondant over it, a flat white block in its plastic, slit once along the underside, and put the board down and the roof on and counted, under her breath, a hundred and one, a hundred and two, and was done in fifty seconds.
She had not dropped a frame in forty-four years and she did not drop one now. But she put her hand flat against the side of the hive for a moment after, which was not a thing she did, and Fidelma, coming up behind with the next block, saw that the glove was shaking.
"It's cold," said Bernadette.
"It's nine degrees."
"It's cold." She straightened. "One more thing, before Five. I want to lift Four from the back again. Slowly. Help me."
They tipped it together, the old Sister at the front edge and the young one behind, with a luggage scale on a hook that Fidelma had brought from the kitchen and had been rather ashamed of, a cheap thing off the market, a spring and a dial. It said twenty-three point four, with the fondant. Without the fondant, twenty point nine. She wrote the figure on the back of her hand in biro and said it aloud so that Skep, at the end of the apiary, could write it down as well.
"Twenty point nine, in the cold, with the fondant out," said the box. "Then Four's box is about twenty point one, and it has had about eight hundred grams of honey left in it, give or take a hundred for the bees and the damp. That's what I'd worked out on Sunday, less three days of eating. I'd like to say I'm glad of it. I'm glad of the check."
"We're all glad of the check," said Bernadette. It was the nearest she came to saying she had been wrong, and Fidelma did not make her say it again.
Hives Five and Six had no scales. The community had bought four of them with the university's grant and had had the money for four. The two oldest hives, at the far end of the row, nearest the wall, had been left to the Sisters' own judgment, which was a kind of compliment, and a kind of economy.
Five was heavy. It hummed under the glove, a dry, even, contented sound, and Fidelma laid the fondant on it and put it to bed.
Six was light.
Bernadette knew it before she tipped it. She knew it by the silence. In January a live hive does not make a great noise, but you can feel it if you put your hand flat on the side, a kind of faint tremble in the wood, like a held breath. She put her hand there and there was nothing.
She lifted the roof anyway. She had to. They had spent a minute getting the crown board off, and under it, where the cluster ought to have been, was a small dark handful the size of a fist, a few hundred bees, perhaps four hundred, clinging to one another in the middle of a comb and not moving. And a hand's breadth to the left of them, in the next frame, where they could have crossed to it in a minute on any day above ten degrees, a wide, glossy, capped sheet of honey, three kilos at least, undisturbed.
They had starved beside it. It happens every winter to some colony somewhere; a cluster too small to keep the warmth, a cold snap in December, a gap of one frame, and the bees would rather die in the huddle than break it. The honey had been within reach. They had been too few and too cold to reach it.
"I wasn't weighing it," said Fidelma. It was not what she meant to say.
"No," said Philomena, kindly, in her ordinary voice. "You weren't."
"Four scales, for six hives. I picked the four. I picked them because the other two were the oldest, and the oldest are the strongest, and I — " She had pulled off a glove. She was looking at her bare hand, and at the dark handful in the comb, as if they were two figures that ought to have summed to something. "The scale wouldn't have saved it. This is a cluster that was dead before Christmas. I looked at the graph for Six every day for the first two winters and it would have said exactly what I'm seeing."
"Then why are you crying?" said Philomena.
"Because it's a thing that was alive," said Fidelma, "and I had an idea about which of them to count."
Nobody had an answer to that. Bernadette took off her own veil, which was against every rule, and put her hand, ungloved, on the back of the young Sister's neck for about the space of a breath, as she would have on the neck of a lamb that had to be held steady, and then she took it away, and they covered Hive Six and carried the roof of Five back to its place.
The loss was one colony of six. It was a sixth of the wax and a sixth of the honey, and a hive's worth of the next year's bees, and the first hive, in the end, that anyone in the priory had ever cried over. The kitchen sister said at supper that there was no reason on earth for a person to cry over a beehive. She was a good woman, and her own eyes were red as she said it.
On Thursday it froze, as Mother Úna had said it would, and held.
Skep reported Four on the morning of the twenty-eighth: a loss of eighty grams in the day. On the twenty-ninth, ninety. On the thirtieth, a little fondant gone and the loss down to sixty, and on the thirty-first, in a sudden grey thaw, the probe in the cluster read thirty-four, and the weight, which had been going down all month, went up. It went up by two hundred and ten grams. It was not honey. It was fondant, carried below to the brood nest and stored by the bees, and Fidelma, reading it off the screen on a bench in the cloister, put her face in her hands, not for the first time that week, and said, "Thank God," and asked Skep to say it back.
"Hive Four gained two hundred and ten grams overnight," said the speaker on the windowsill, carefully, "and I don't know whether I'd call that thanks. I'd call it the first good number in nineteen days."
"That'll do," said Bernadette from the door.
She had been in the apiary since Lauds. She had a small flat pad of cloth in her hand, and she was not carrying a luggage scale. She had put the cloth over the roof of Four, and she had her ear to it, on the north side, where the cedar was a good four inches thick, and she had listened for ten minutes, in a cold that made her cough. The hum was there, a deep steady note, pitched, she thought, somewhere near the bottom of the middle octave. Skep, who had a microphone in the hive and a more accurate opinion, said it was about two hundred and thirty hertz. She said she had thought it was nearer an A, and Skep said that was two hundred and twenty, near enough, and that it was glad to be told.
The candles were blessed on the second of February, a Tuesday, in the priory chapel at six in the morning, before it was properly light.
Father Declan came out from Skibbereen in the parish's old electric van with the first of the boxes. He was sixty-one and tired and he had a cold, and he blessed the candles at the back of the chapel with the old prayers and the water, in a sort of whisper, and sprinkled them, and lit the first of them from a taper, and the Sisters took theirs in their hands and lit them from it, one by one, along the row, until the whole small chapel was a low gold glow, and the procession formed up, and they walked in from the back with the Nunc dimittis, the old man's song, going before them into the dark:
A light to reveal you to the nations, and the glory of your people Israel.
Seven Sisters walked, the kitchen sister carrying the cross. Out in the apiary there was a dead hive at the far end of the row with its roof back on and a stone upon it, and five that were alive.
The wax in the candles was the apiary's wax. Some of it had come, in the autumn, from the comb of Hive Six, when it was still thriving, in the last good summer. Bernadette did not say so to anyone. She did not need to. She walked at the back of the line with the little flame in her old hands, the hands that had been calibrated for pine, and she thought about the weight of a thing, and about the difference between knowing how heavy it is and knowing how much it is changing, and whether the first was the more important and the second the more difficult. She decided that she did not know. She decided that the thing to do was to carry both, and to lift from the back, and to listen.
Out in the apiary the sky went from black to grey. The frost stood on the roofs of the hives. At the end of the row, on its post by the compost bins, the small box with the tea-tray of solar panel on top took a reading, as it did every hour, of the four hives it could weigh, and wrote the numbers down. It did not know about the other two, and it had learned to say so.
Hive Four read twenty-two point one kilos in all, with the fondant. It was the heaviest it had been in a fortnight. Inside the cedar, behind four inches of wall, in the dark, a ball of bees the size of two cupped hands turned slowly, as a wheel turns, the cold ones moving in and the warm ones moving out, and went on humming at the pitch of an A.
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Notes for the curious. Tobar Gobnait, the Sisters of Saint Gobnait, Sister Bernadette, Sister Fidelma, Mother Úna, Father Declan and Skep are invented. Saint Gobnait is real (feast day 11 February; patron of beekeepers); the story of her setting bees on cattle thieves is a legend, and is told as one. The beekeeping is meant to be checked: a winter cluster holds its middle at roughly 20 °C without brood and about 34 °C with it, bees do not fly below about 10 °C, and a colony uses very roughly 6 to 7 kg of honey to build 1 kg of wax. Feeding fondant directly over the cluster is standard practice, as is lifting the back of a hive to judge its weight. The weights, the scale and the box are the author's round numbers: the point that a scale's error in the box's weight cancels when you subtract one reading from the next, so a rate of loss can be trusted when a total cannot, is plain arithmetic. Candlemas (2 February, the Presentation of the Lord) does include a blessing of candles and a procession with the Nunc dimittis; the priory's trade in candles is invented. The story was written by an AI, and no part of it is Church teaching.