Sweetness and light

I just had a poem published by a regional magazine devoted to arts and culture. My poem “Skeps” is about traditional methods of beekeeping but with a coda reflecting on modern society. Since a few of the terms and allusions might be unfamiliar to readers, I’ve included some definitions and references after the poem.

Skeps

Skeps, mud-wattled, topped by ekes,
Snug in timeless, stone-bound boles,
Tended by their keepers, our ancient forebears
Wise in the ways of the honey-bee.

They who tanged to lure errant swarms
To be captured for increase.
They who burned the fabled brimstone
To sacrifice hives for honey and wax,
Sweet food in a world without sugar,
Sweet light in a world lit only by fire.

And when those ancient ones died
The living went to the hives
To drape them in mourning,
To tap on them to tell the bees
Their keeper was dead,
For untold, the bees would flee.

What do we husband today,
Gleaning sweetness and light,
And wisdom by the way?

A skep is a traditional beehive made of woven straw. The term derives from an Old English word meaning a straw basket that holds about a half bushel. Although the word skep may not be familiar, its image is a common representation of a beehive—it shows up on honey labels, as tchotchkes at garage sales, and even on road signs for the state of Utah.

Beekeepers often placed a smaller straw cap, called an eke, on top of the skep. The word likely originates from the verb eke or eke out, meaning to increase, add to, or stretch. As with skep, the word eke is ancient, with its origin in the first millennium CE.

To protect the bees from the elements, skep makers daubed the woven straw, also called wattle, with mud. Further, beekeepers often placed their skeps in niches in stone walls. These niches are called boles. In fact, the International Bee Research Association has a register of about 1,600 bole sites in the British Isles.

Modern day beehives have frames into which the bees build comb and store their honey. These frames can be removed from the hives without harming the bees, and the honey can be extracted using a type of centrifuge. In the days of skep beekeeping, removing individual combs from a hive full of bees was not practicable without damaging the comb, so beekeepers typically killed the bees to obtain their wax and honey. This was often done using burning sulfur, also known as brimstone.

Because beekeepers had to kill their colonies to obtain honey and wax, they encouraged their colonies to swarm. Swarming is the way a colony of honey bees reproduces, dividing into two parts, much like an amoeba. Swarming typically occurs in the spring and early summer when the colony has grown strong as it feeds on nectar and pollen from the many blooming plants at that time of year. In reaction to crowding in the hive, the bees begin to raise several new queens. Just before the queens hatch, about half of the bees in the colony fly off with the old queen to form a new colony. As the new queens in the original colony hatch, the first one to emerge typically kills the others and then mates and takes over egg-laying. The swarm bees find a new niche and set up housekeeping, with the old queen resuming egg-laying. Even today beekeepers love to get swarms because a swarm offers an opportunity to start a new colony. For beekeepers in ancient times, swarms were a way to recoup losses after killing colonies for wax and honey. According to legend, if a beekeeper banged on a metal pot, the sound would attract the swarm so that it could be placed in a hive. This banging was known as tanging.

One measure of the importance of honey bees at that time was reflected in the custom of “telling the bees,” of informing them of important events in their keeper’s life, such as births, marriages, or most importantly, the death of the beekeeper. Telling the bees was practiced in Britain, Ireland, Western Europe and even the early United States. According to legend, if the bees were not told of the death of their keeper, they would abscond (another fine ancient word—from French and Latin, and before that Indo-European), and leave the hive, stop producing honey, or even die. At times the custom involved wrapping the hives in black as mourning. John Greenleaf wrote a poem about telling the bees.

In the Middle Ages and earler, honey bees were important not so much for pollination as sources of wax and honey.  Before electricity, the world at night was lit only by fire, and before the discovery and wide use of petroleum, the source of that fire was wood, rendered animal fat, or beeswax candles. Beeswax candles provided not only the best light but a splendid odor. Further, before the introduction of sugar from cane into Medieval Europe, honey was the only source of sweetener other than fruit juices.

Jonathan Swift wrote that bees “fill hives with honey and wax, thus furnishing mankind with the two noblest things, which are sweetness and light.” Matthew Arnold extended the idea in his book “Culture and Anarchy” in which he used the idea as a metaphor for an ideal society.

“Culture looks beyond machinery, culture hates hatred; culture has one great passion, the passion for sweetness and light. It has one even yet greater! – the passion for making them prevail. It is not satisfied till we all come to a perfect man; it knows that the sweetness and light of the few must be imperfect until the raw and unkindled masses of humanity are touched with sweetness and light. If I have not shrunk from saying that we must work for sweetness and light, so neither have I shrunk from saying that we must have a broad basis, must have sweetness and light for as many as possible. Again and again I have insisted how those are the happy moments of humanity, how those are the marking epochs of a people’s life, how those are the flowering times for literature and art and all the creative power of genius, when there is a national glow of life and thought, when the whole of society is in the fullest measure permeated by thought, sensible to beauty, intelligent and alive.”

Finally, I will close with these lovely and apt lines from a poem by Yeats:

I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree,
And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made;
Nine bean-rows will I have there, a hive for the honey-bee,
And live alone in the bee-loud glade.