Wednesday, May 16, 2007

Uncle Engel's Bees

Bees are returning to Uncle Engel’s hives.

In the northern tip of the Eifel, at the very edge of the national forest, in a hidden clearing you might never notice if you didn’t know what you were looking for or at, is a small bee house concealed by mounds of neatly stacked firewood. I saw it for the first time this past winter when HH and I went for a walk in the forest with his Great Uncle Engel. He seems a delicate man to look at him, now in his 70’s his back has begun it’s bend and his voice so soft it is just more than a whisper, but he is far stronger than he appears and every day he climbs the sloping trail from his house to tend his swath of forest, removing fallen trees then sawing them into firewood, and tending his bees.

I don’t know how it came to be that he was given this parcel of public land, perhaps because he’s been coming here since he was old enough to walk. He was raised in a farmhouse just beyond the border of the forest and he told me his grandfather would take him for walks in these same woods and talk to him of the trees and plants and birds, much as he does with HH. As he described it, the forest was his childhood playground and movie theatre and best friend. Perhaps the local fathers decided that Uncle Engel deserved a small patch of this forest for himself, or maybe it was simply that he and his ax and his bees provided an important service to the community. For whatever reason, he has worked there steadily for many years until recently when his bees disappeared.

Just after Easter we went up to the Eifel for a weekend. It was a Sunday morning but unlike his neighbors, for whom Sunday is a day of intense idleness, Engel was wearing work gloves and busy tending to a repair on the house when we came to visit. I had read news reports about the bee colony crisis in America and was curious about how Engel’s bees were weathering this ecological storm. His reply was brief; his bees were dead. My German is still rudimentary but I understood from his expression if not from his words, how devastating this was for him. He told me that beekeepers in the Netherlands were also loosing bees and that he had no idea why this was happening. Unlike some bees that are trucked from field to field in the high season to pollinate the crops, Engel’s bees live a life of relative calm, tucked away in the forest. If whatever it was that was decimating the bee population had reached it’s creepy hands into Engel’s hives, there must be something very wrong in the world.

On Mother’s Day we were back in the Eifel, celebrating the weekend with Oma and happened to see Uncle Engel. He was noticeably happier than during our last visit, he is seldom short of a smile but his eyes seemed just a bit brighter. He said the bees were returning, not his bees, but new bees that had somehow found his hives and were hard at work. Late Sunday afternoon I went for a walk alone in the fields of hops and raps and wheat that abut the forest and noticed here and there a honeybee. I don’t know how Uncle Engel can tell one bee from another, his bees from strangers, but I’m happy for him that the bees, some bees, are returning and that perhaps whatever it was that sent the others away wasn’t so terrible after all.

I’m happy too for HH who has grown accustomed to having a spoonful of Engel’s honey on his peanut butter sandwich in the morning and who looks forward to walking with his Great Uncle in the forest, listening to the gentle lilting dialect he falls into now and then as he guides him along the paths he has known all his life, paths that are even now becoming the stuff of my son’s recollections.

© German Diary 2007

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11 Comments:

Blogger Bob Dylan said...

The whole Bee thing is very confusing to me..is it a variety of things? cell phones, mites, a virus? It is extremely sad.

4:46 PM  
Blogger Cathy said...

Richard;
This is sad news, but god to ehar that it is re-colonizing. Perhaps you know this already, but this phenomenon has a name - "colony collapse disorder" (CCD) - but no explanation. It concerns one type of bee, the European honeybee, or apis mellifera.

One strongly held theory for CCD is a parasitic mite: the Varroa mite. Marla Spivak, a researcher and bee expert at the University of Minnesota has studied the Varroa mite; she might be interested to know of this case.

And if you haven't already: this is a great starting place for reading up on CCD:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colony_Collapse_Disorder

1:52 PM  
Blogger Patches said...

This is a good story and it needs to be told everywhere, it is a story of hope.
I have been reading bee stories a lot lately and this one is unique, it makes me curious.
If the bees left because of a fungus, and other bees came to the hives wouldn’t the fungus still be there and the new bees leave too.
This story should be told to beekeepers.
Thank you for sharing it.

4:49 PM  
Blogger Berlinbound said...

Bob, Cathy & Pixie ...

I have been reading about CCD and find the whole subject very disturbing, so it was quite a surprise when Engel said that bees, which had disappeared in March,had begun returning after Easter. His bees are of the Apis mellifera carnica variey.

6:43 PM  
Blogger Diane Dehler said...

I have been very worried about the bee thing and your post gives me a little hope. BTW I read your Tribute to Joanie and it touched me as I love her Blue album, too.

7:29 AM  
Blogger Cathy said...

How are the new bees doing? Are they thriving? Are their numbers similar to the old colony or are they a smaller group?

2:17 PM  
Blogger Berlinbound said...

Cathy ... It is still too cold in the Eifel for Engel to open the hive and check for a productive Queen or to determine numbers. We will be visiting the area this weekend and I hope to see him ... I'll keep you posted.

3:32 PM  
Blogger Alex S said...

My best friend was just writing about this recently on her blog at http:growwings.blogspot.com . Why isn't this receiving more news? Its insane, isn't it? I'm just discovering your blog today for the fist time-glad to have found it!

5:53 PM  
Blogger Berlinbound said...

Alexandra ...

I'm glad you found it too! Make it a habit why don't you.

8:11 PM  
Blogger Bobby D. said...

I wanted to start some hives up in the Catskills, we bought literature on beekeeping and thought we could at least supply spots for beekeepers to put skeps in. Now another bee blight. I really love bees.
they are furry and the contribute.

May 24th is your birthday?

June 30-- yes we can stop by

8:28 PM  
Blogger Cathy said...

We went to the Museum of Natural History in Halifax today, which ahs an operational colony and at least half of the bees were dead...some of them were still attached to the combs, but were obviously not alive, while other bees worked around them. I hope that researchers find the answer to this soon. I am hoping that honey bees are not the canary in the coal mine....

2:46 AM  

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