At Random for Feb. 17, 2012

Bees not as busy as we think

I often read to learn something, but there are other times when I open a book, magazine or newspaper simply because I want to hear the voice of a writer I like.

Sue Hubbell is that kind of writer for me. I read her regardless of her chosen subject, for no other reason than the chance to float along on the music of her sentences.

Hubbell has written books about everything from her life in the Ozarks to the mysteries of genetics, and I’m always willing to follow her, like a snake charmed from a basket, wherever she decides to go.

That is why, although I have no other interest in bees beyond the honey they produce for my toast, I spent a recent afternoon with “A Book of Bees,” Hubbell’s account of her years as a professional beekeeper in rural Missouri.

First published in 1988, “A Book of Bees” pretends to be a how-to guide for those who might want to become beekeepers themselves. That’s not the life for me, but I read Hubbell’s manual anyway, since bees are merely her starting point for considering a hundred other things, including self-sufficiency, the value of neighbors, the pleasures of leisure and the virtue of hard work. Sue Hubbell invariably teaches me, even though I’m reading her prose for pleasure, not knowledge.

If not for Hubbell, after all, I wouldn’t have learned that the term “busy as a bee” is based on the possibly false assumption that bees are industrious creatures, when, in fact, they might be six-legged sluggards. “Bees look terribly busy,” Hubbell tells readers.

“An opened hive is the stuff of platitude, but the truth is that bees, like other animals (including humans), spend a lot of time doing nothing at all.”

Beyond her extensive personal experience with bees and their habits, Hubbell also draws upon some earlier research on the subject to prove her point.

Here’s Hubbell:

“In an 1899 study, one Professor C.F. Hodge marked bees and watched them from daylight to dark. He reported, ‘No single bee that I watched ever worked more than three and one-half hours a day.’ In one case he saw a worker bee crawl into a cell and he watched her remain lying there quietly for nearly five hours. In the 1950s, Martin Lindauer, an entomologist, followed up on these observations. In a rigorous study, he tagged great numbers of bees and found that they spent a lot of time doing nothing at all, or very little. One typical bee, during a hundred and seventy-seven observation hours, did absolutely nothing for seventy of them . . .”

I read Hubbell’s book in an armchair on a quiet winter day, part of a long family weekend spent in honor of my birthday. Hubbell’s gift to me was the permission I found to sit still for a while without guilt.

If the bees aren’t nearly as busy as we think they are, or so I concluded, then maybe we don’t have to be quite so busy, either.