JEFFREY UTZINGER | DISASSEMBLY REQUIRED

The downside of mail order honeybees is that some arrive dead. A grim fact you discover while cajoling live bees from their plastic carrying container into a new hive, and you realize not all the bodies are writhing, tumbling, and coalescing around the queen or floating about, scouting the immediate area. Amongst this furious life, you’ll find immobile insects, their legs and wings tangled together, forming strands, some of which fall into the hive where they hang like macabre garland over frames until, one by one, the bee husks detach, blanketing the hive’s floor. A reminder that, despite their astonishing replication rate, rapid wing velocity, dogged pursuit of enemies, coupled with an ability to sting, bees are fragile. If not handled with care, they damage as easily as glass beads.

Honeybees remove their dead as quickly as possible to prevent the spread of disease. This I knew from my experience with outdoor hives. What I have never witnessed until installing an indoor observation hive, however, is the work of undertaker bees. In the midst of bees masticating wax to build comb, giving directions to nectar sources, or tending to pollen others have carried in, I catch a glimpse of a solitary bee hauling away a dead one. The hive’s exit is located near the bottom of the hive where most of the dead settled after a few days, and so the route these undertaker bees choose is confounding. Each dead bee is carried first to the hive’s top, a harrowing feat given that a bee corpse, even counting for loss of moisture, is roughly the same size and weight as a live bee. The bees travel with their dead weight up the acrylic sheets which form the see-through walls of the hive, presumably to avoid the impediments of other bees going about their work on the frames. A wise choice, except the sheets are smooth and hive traffic is chaotic—as often as not, an undertaker bee midway up the hive collides with another worker and finds herself sliding down the smooth plastic, forced to restart her journey like a miniature Sisyphus hauling corpses instead of rocks.

Undertaker bees do, ultimately, make it to the top of the hive but each one I happen to see complete her upward journey disappears with her cargo behind a frame. I know the dead bees’ final destination is indeed the ground outside the window because I see them there, hanging in the lilyturf grass and weeds or curled among the diatomaceous earth (scattered to deter hive beetles) like forgotten victims of some aircraft disaster. The route the living and the dead take, however, as they descend through the interior frames is shrouded in mystery. As is the reason bees opt not to take the direct route across the hive bottom. The inefficiency of the whole operation is baffling, especially when so much of bees’ work is geared towards expediency and driven, perhaps, by a sense that they have but a few weeks before their own internal engines fail, and they transition from bearing the dead to being the one borne. Time is running out the moment the clock starts.

The mystery might lie with the queen who is in residence, hidden between frames at the top of the hive. Is it possible that each dead bee must pass the queen’s final inspection before being removed from the hive? There might be practical reasons for this—the queen assessing the overall health of the hive based on mortality rates, or perhaps she serves as the hive’s coroner, confirming the presence—rather than the mere appearance—of death. These suppositions are anthropomorphizing at best, but better guesses than what I like to imagine is the reason for this journey: a funeral procession passing by a mourning community before the corpse is presented to the queen who pays her final respects.

“I think they’re tearing the dead bees apart,” my son says.

“Well,” I say, “probably not?”

“You should come look.”

“The dead ones are just breaking down somehow?”

“It’s sad,” he says.

My son, nearly sixteen, uninterested and unimpressed by most anything in my realm, has studied the honeybees, transfixed, every day since I installed the hive a few weeks ago. His childhood, spent mainly indoors, has been very different than mine, absent a bevy of male cousins and a neighborhood of lost boys; he’s been spared the viscera of hunting and fishing, summer vacations on farms, unforgivable insect experimentation. If indeed the

undertaker bees are dismantling the dead, I don’t want it to drive him away from the joy of observing honeybees, especially when observing him has brought me such joy.

But there it is: a bee fumbling upwards clutching a thorax, and not far behind, a second bee transporting an abdomen. Impossible to determine if their parcels were once part of the same intact body. And really, would it matter?

Honeybees have an hourglass design—a waist so thin, one wonders how they remain intact during flight, and how they don’t break apart upon landing. A waist easy enough to saw through with mandibles. One might also wonder if this is a flaw in their design. Not so. The hourglass shape allows bees to bend without breaking as they puncture your skin, driving the stinger home.

The voyeuristic nature of observing honeybees this closely gives me pause: what gives me the right to this access? To witness the queen bee lay eggs that, a few days later, bloom into larvae curled at the bottom of yet-to-becapped cells. And later still, to watch an antenna poke out, then eyes, head, and legs until a new bee emerges. To watch bees with heads pressed against the acrylic sides, their eyes narrowed to slits, sleeping perhaps, certainly in a rare static state, dreaming perchance that when they awake, the looming faces of father and son, so like a planet and its moon—one weary and aging, the other shiny and new—casting their shadows, have disappeared from sight, perhaps for good, to let the honeybees live—no matter how brief it may be—in peace.