But my least favorite photo was a magnificent closeup of a bumble bee hovering over a daisy. I couldn't bear to look at it.
Why did I find this beautiful photo so upsetting? WBUR volunteers admonished me: we need bees in order to survive, we need bees in order to pollinate plants so that we can eat; we need bees for honey! Well, of course I knew all of this; I had grown up with bees in three beehives in our back yard, and helped my Uncle Paul care for them . . .
The bees pollinated my father's vegetable garden, my uncle's apple and pear trees, and cured my father, my aunts and uncles and grandfathers and grandmothers of arthritis. Yes -- didn't you know? Bee stings cure arthritis!
Every summer Sunday, among our many visitors, would be an aunt or an uncle who wanted the cure. Mary Baju, one Sunday, would bravely bare her knee, Uncle Khosrov, his elbow, while Uncle Paul, protected under his beekeeper's screened hat, long pants, long-sleeved shirt and gloves, smoker at hand, would pick up a worker bee with his tweezers, and hold it to the arthritic knee, the arthritic elbow. The worker bee would then do her duty and sting that arthritic joint, giving up her life so that the joint would be healed. I always wondered whether the bee sting hurt so much that the arthritic knee no longer felt the pain of the arthritis. . . but my uncles and aunts, and my father, all survivors of the Armenian Genocide 1915-1922, swore that the cure was a cure.
The only problem was that after years of the remedy, my father became allergic to bee stings. Now what . . . his brother (and the garden and fruit trees) were committed to apiculture, and my father would die if he were stung by a bee -- die, that is, if he didn't keep epinephrine at the ready by his side as an antidote to the sting . . . which, of course, my fearless father would never do!
What happened? The garden thrived, the trees thrived, the bees thrived, the relatives thrived. Uncle Paul became famous as he performed in full regalia for years before Claflin Elementary School students (who walked as a class to the house from the old Claflin School in Newtonville Square and later from the new Claflin School across the street from our house), giving them a dramatic 'hands on' lesson on bees and honey which they remember to this day. (Thanks be to God, the bees never stung the children!) And the bees who did NOT sting folks, those bees died of old age, as did my father who died in March of 2010 at 97 years old, having survived the arthritis and the allergy to bee stings without ever having to use the epinephrine which he so disdained.
Oh, and the Egyptian connection. . . As Mark Andrews reminds us, and you may remember,
ancient vessels that were uncorked by 20th century archaeologists in the Valley of the Kings still contained . . . honey that was almost liquid but still preserved its scent after thousands of years.
I wonder if our bees, the bees that resided in hives on Lowell Avenue in Newtonville, Massachusetts, in the 1950's and 1960's, were descended from the bees of Ancient Egypt . . .
Wonderful memories of our backyard . . . not so wonderful memory of being stung on the bottom of my foot: while an innocent Bee was enjoying clover, I stepped on her.
ReplyDeleteWhen I attended my Newton High School Reunion, there were a few classmates that actually remembered the experience of walking to our home from the Claflin Elementary School, and standing around the Beehive for the Bee lecture and demonstration. Do you think, the Newton School System would permit this field trip now-a-days?
Arthritis cure, eh ... I wonder. Honey is certainly a remarkable substance, especially as an additive in baking - and because of it I learned one of my favorite words, deliquescent.
ReplyDeleteReplying to SS: The bee sting, NOT the bee's honey, is the cure for arthritis. In fact, recently a friend recommended honey for curing a burn -- I tried it; don't you. It didn't work. Ice works for burns, not honey!
ReplyDeleteI remember the bees too!!! Uncle Paul insisted that we HAD to have honey on anything we were eating for breakfast!!! And, it had the comb in the container with the honey. What fond memories. I was always afraid to get too close to the hives, but it was totally fascinating for a small child!! Thanks for sharing. Arpy
ReplyDeleteI was raised on half an acre by immigrant parents who had survived the genocide of the Armenians at the hand of the Moslem Turks. My parents carried with them the spirit of the Garden, the first one. As a child, @3-5 years old, I can remember helping to plant 17 fruit trees, 100 Colorado Blue Spruce, care for a 1500 square foot vegetable garden that was fed by our compost pile, chicken manure, and 3 hives of honey bees. I can remember the calls that would come into our home variously throughout my primary and secondary school years beseeching us to deliver our neighbors close and far flung from swarms of honey bees housed as new residences in their one or two or three trees in their backyard or front yard. Armed with a smoker and a beekeepers helmet/shroud, my uncle and I would ride as paladins to our besieged neighbors and deliver them from the sweetest distraction of their lives. Those bees, orchard and vegetable garden were tributaries to our spiritual wealth which was grounded on a Sunday morning by the preaching of my great-uncle Vartan who had survived the sentence of death handed down to him by a Turkish court in the early 1900’s, just prior to the beginning of the granite block of the darkness of days, for preaching the Gospel of Jesus Christ, a gospel that delivered his soul from the hell of this life lived outside the pasture of our Great Shepherd, and the hell of eternal separation from the God of Light and Life. The Garden was the life of our land and was a reminder of what was lost at the Fall and an incentive to restore that which was lost. The honey bees were the visible warriors of redemption laid down by the hand of God to sustain life and to deliver it from the siege of winter.
ReplyDeleteMarashgirl remembers the talks given by Johnny Furber, president of the beekeepers association, and later by uncle paul who became president of the association. what stands out the most from those apiary homilies of spring was the year of 1955. this is the year that one of the 50 or so children crowding around johnny ferber who was clothed perfectly in beekeeper's regalia, fitting for the authority and mystery of his position, was asked if the bees had ever stung any of the children that had been attending these grandee mornings away from classroom and teachers and erasers and closed windows. johnny ferber removed his hat, suddenly being made aware of the foolishness of being armored amidst so many not so fortunate, and in a pellucid moment, declared NEVER! Hubris being what it is never fails to provide the punch line of who really is in charge, because as soon as that wondrous declaration had been made, as honey dripping unceremoniously from comb spilling over with the fatness of the land,
ReplyDeleteAlva, the smallest and most frail of all the girls in my class, the girl who spent 1 hour sipping her milk from a straw when we were in Kindergarten, let out a scream that belied her diminutive station in the hierarchy of childhood. she had been stung! it was a scream that shattered the peace of the spring morning, if it had been Sunday, it would have shattered the Sabbath rest. as one, the crowd of 50 children, many of whom could never bear the frustration of waiting for alva to finish her milk discovered an empathy that had been lacking all those years for the smallest of them. the children orchestrated a cry of unity and in that moment the orchestra was reduced to one section, Tympany. That was when Uncle Paul inherited the title of apiarist lecturer extraordinaire. never again did we see Johnny Ferber on our land while school was still in session.