The colony seems ill with a kind of collective mental foulbrood. Like folie á deux gone viral.
1. Post
Late 2022 and petulant billionaire blowhard Elon Musk’s acquisition of Twitter’s just been reluctantly finalized. The platform’s all stirred up and buzzing. Accounts are archived, locked down, deactivated. Poets and writers begin a weird migration in which they Goldilocks their way through various social media apps: first Mastodon, then Post, then Hive. Eventually, most seem to entropically settle back into Twitter again. But there are periodic flurries of movement whenever the platform becomes subject to particularly stupid corporate decisions, or whenever there’s a surge of alarming signs of technological decline or instability: Spoutible. Threads. Bluesky.
You’ve been uneasily perched atop the landslides of the hoarding-infested ruin of your childhood home, trying to carve out small clean spaces in which to keep your socks and underwear, a couple of coffee mugs, your favorite cooking pan. You’ve been more or less living out of a suitcase for nearly a year. (A one-semester visiting professorship, ten weeks at one artist residency, four weeks at another. In-between times spent attempting to unhoard your childhood home in Laramie.) You’ve been feeling especially peripatetic, restless, disenfranchised. You’ve recently become obsessed with TikTok and although too shy to post, you’re secretly riveted to the scrolling panoply of capybaras, cats, recipes, and quick snippets of therapy.
2. Hive
Around the time that literary Twitter’s anxiously swarming back and forth from Mastodon to Post to Hive, the TikTok algorithm magically proffers you a video from texasbeeworks, run by professional beekeeper Erika Thompson—a woman who documents bee rescues. She locates colonies precariously situated in garbage bins, backyard compost bins, abandoned washers, and even inside an abandoned toilet tank. She also homes disenfranchised swarms clustering along the underside of tables, in construction scaffolding, or beneath patio umbrellas. Thompson coaxes the colonies and swarms into new, clean hives that she pulls out from the back of her truck. In a typical bee rescue, Thompson first transfers over any extant honeycomb, to “save the bees’ hard work.” In many videos Thompson, who doesn’t wear a veil or gloves, gently scoops up bees with her bare hands as she carefully initiates the move. When she’s able to locate the queen bee, she places her into a clear plastic clip that can be pinned into the new hive. At this point, and with some smoke, the rest of the bees will voluntarily migrate over. Thompson’s narration is quiet, low-pitched, fast-paced, and ASMR-ishly soothing. She concludes each video by softly intoning, “And it’s another great day of saving the bees!”
In truth, you’re a sucker for any and all videos regarding the transport of living things out of harm’s way into safety: sloths and tortoises gently carried off busy highways and deposited into trees and greenery on the side of the road; a dog stuck in mud at the bottom of an arroyo lifted out with ropes; a family of geese relocated off the third-floor ledge of the National Geographic Society headquarters in Washington, D.C.
The National Geographic goose rescue is a particularly elaborate operation in which City Wildlife experts are called in once the goslings are ready to jump off the concrete ledge and fledge. Two of the goslings easily jump down, flapping themselves to safety, but the third gosling’s unsure. When the timid gosling reluctantly jumps, it’s awkward and ungainly, and there’s a scary gust of wind as it hurtles toward asphalt. But disaster’s averted when one of the wildlife rescuers deftly catches the gosling in a net. There’s a burst of applause from anxious onlookers! Then the goslings are placed in a carrier to ensure that the parents will follow, and the entire goose family’s ceremoniously escorted by City Wildlife through over a mile of busy D.C. city traffic—until they arrive at their new home at Constitution Gardens, which has a large pond.
You find something deeply reassuring about the gentleness, attentiveness, and care in these animal transport narratives in a time that’s so frequently characterized by unrepentant assholery. The viral videos provide a quick hit of dopamine in the midst of ongoing feelings of despair over environmental collapse.
3. Mastodon
You’d been trying to aspire to a similar model of gentleness, attentiveness, and care when you were forced to relocate your declining parents into assisted living. How the situation felt similarly dire: your mother falling asleep with the stove burners still on; your father unable to stand on his own and repeatedly urinating in their shared bed; your parents refusing to allow the social workers dispatched for wellness checks by their medical care providers into the house. Your mother, the queen bee, gently maneuvered into a transparent clip and pinned into the new hive—so that your father, in order to join her, finally agreed to be transported to the assisted living center from the nursing home where he’d been undergoing rehab. It’s not that you expected gratitude, or even thanks, but there was something about the speed with which your parents turned on you—casting you as an avaricious cartoon villain, with sinister and self-serving mustachio-twirling intentions. Because singlehandedly orchestrating this move while working full-time, less than a year out from cancer surgery, had been a huge disruption to your own life—a serious sacrifice of time and energy and resources on your part—and being castigated for it was, frankly, demoralizing.
4. Spoutible
But so much of dealing with your parents’ decline has felt like the daily news—an exhausting see-saw between the downright cataclysmic and the unnervingly absurd. In the midst of all this nauseating sloshing, these tempests threatening to wreck all the teapots, you find yourself trying to make the most of small hopeful progressions, trying to cling to rare little life buoys of sanity. For you, one of these life buoys was the announcement, in early 2023, that a vaccine to protect honeybees from American foulbrood had been developed by a biotech company in Georgia and was conditionally approved by the U.S. Department of Agriculture.
Foulbrood, though less deadly to honeybees than varroa mites, seemed like such a gratifyingly repulsive target for the first bee vaccine. Highly contagious, foulbrood’s easily transmitted from hive to hive. Caused by the Paenibacillus bacterium, foulbrood causes honeybee larvae to turn a disturbing dark brown. Hives infected with foulbrood apparently give off a pungent smell of decay and rot, hence the name. Prior to the development of the vaccine, contagion could only be stopped through burning down entire apiaries, as well as any equipment that had come in to contact with infected bees. While antibiotic treatments were also a possibility for dealing with foulbrood, studies have shown that antibiotics are harmful to honeybees’ long-term health and development.
In the Pick Your Dystopia bingo card, Extinction of Pollinators ranks highly among your personal Four Horsemen of the Ecocide—situated squarely alongside Unpotable Water, Unbreathable Air, and Pandemics. So the swell of gleeful rejoicing in certain corners of social media in response to the news of the bee vaccine made perfect sense to you. In fact, you were heartened that so many people might be charmed by the news of a bee vaccine. You, yourself, were exceedingly charmed by the news of a bee vaccine!
5. Threads
As the COVID pandemic continues to malinger, you’ve been wondering if there’s been some sort of ecological tipping point in which zoonotic novel viruses, caused by damaged and dwindling ecosystems, will continue to manifest, proliferate, and surge. That we’ve now officially entered the Age of Pandemics. And if not the Age of Pandemics it seems to be, at the very least, a kind of Age of Contagion. Anything can go viral now—including disinformation, lies, and conspiracy theories. You can’t help but feel as if there’s something distinctly pathogenic and profoundly contagious going on with the QAnon believers, The Great Replacement Theorists, the Flat Earthers, and the COVID is a Hoax-ers. It gives you the same squicky, lifting-up-a-rock-to-discover-something-squirmy-and-upsetting feeling you felt when you discovered the shocking avalanche of mailout materials from the NRA and the five loaded handguns stashed in your childhood bedroom at your parents’ house. The colony seems ill with a kind of collective mental foulbrood. Like folie á deux gone viral.
The challenge in developing the bee vaccine, it turns out, has to do with the fact that insects don’t have antibodies, which are the proteins within an immune system that both recognize and fight off bacteria and viruses. However, once scientists realized that even without antibodies, an insect could acquire immunity, and genetically pass it down to their offspring, they were able to create immunity within a honeybee queen through feeding her royal jelly laced with the vaccine—created from dead Paenibacillus bacterium. When the vaccine makes its way into the queen bee’s ovaries, immunity is conferred to all her hatching larvae.
You think of what’s been passed down from your own mother: the allergies to bees, wasps, spiders, mosquitos; the allergies to wool and horsehair; the high blood pressure; the extreme anxiety. You think of epigenetic trauma. Could the narcissism, the sudden rages, the behavior that presented like textbook borderline personality disorder have possibly been circumvented, or at least ameliorated? What changes in your mother’s early circumstances might have conferred immunity: Not having to grow up in the midst of bombings and war during her childhood in Japan? Your Japanese grandmother not dying in childbirth when your mother was only 14?
You consider the smooth gliding prophylaxis evoked by the sound of the word immunity, how the way the word sounds creates a kind of cognitive dissonance with the officiously administrative or clinical shields of its legal and medical meanings. You are, and always have been, someone who is too porous, too easily saturated. You lack in antibodies. You desire immunity. You wish you could be more immune to and immune from your mother.
6. Bluesky
In one of her TikTok videos, Erika Thompson finds a dilapidated red suitcase on the side of the road containing an old hive of bees. The bees have no food or no brood, but she says the bees are very gentle, unless faced with a direct threat. When a wasp flies into the suitcase and immediately disappears, Thompson remarks that the bees “defended their colony and eliminated the wasp.” When you do a little bit of research to discover exactly how a hive deals with foreign intruders such as wasps, you’re fascinated to learn that bees can heat their abdomens up to over 100 degrees. They cluster around a threat, forming what is known as a “heat ball,” that cooks and suffocates the intruder to death. Thompson loads up the suitcase into the back of her truck and takes it home with her, where the bees voluntarily move themselves into the hive that she proffers to them in her backyard. Thompson says they recognize that it’s a better place for them to live. The queen independently walks herself into the new hive, without needing to be transferred into the special clip. The video concludes: “And it’s another great day of saving the bees!”
Sometimes you wonder how much of your current state of feeling geographically displaced, or unsettled, has to do with feeling relationally and emotionally unsettled by the merciless disintegrations of your parents’ physical and cognitive decline. Your father’s death. Your mother—who used to be larger than life in both her charisma and her cruelty—slowly fading away from Alzheimer’s. Are you living out of a suitcase from necessity, or are you running away from something—trying to out-abandon pending abandonment? When you inevitably become an orphan, will you finally be able to settle down and find a home for yourself, or will you become even more unsettled—a balloon floating away on a let-go string?
Lee Horiksohi Roripaugh (she/they) is a biracial Nisei and the author of five volumes of poetry, most recently tsunami vs. the fukushima 50 (Milkweed Editions, 2019). Her collection of fiction, Reveal Codes (Moon City Press, 2023) was selected as winner of the Moon City Press Short Fiction Award. They are a professor emerita of English at the University of South Dakota, where they serve as editor-in-chief of South Dakota Review.
Read Lee Ann Roripaugh’s essay “Swarm,” also appearing in Terrain.org.
Photo by Tom, courtesy Pixabay.
