Word: hives
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Bees are never tame, even when they live in movable frame hive boxes and work in the service of a beekeeper. Even, then, they are perfectly wild...Beekeepers are generally old men, white and sterile. The bees themselves are old women, women without children, past softness. They are each other's captives, partners in a marriage where there are no smiles, no kisses, no words even, only slavery and stinging...
McKay himself is a rich Bostonian of refined sensibility, great kindness and few brains. Because bees tend to start new swarms if the old queen is removed, and can do so up to four times a season, McKay figures he can parlay the ten hives he is taking to Kansas into 10,240 hives in five years. Each hive can "cheerfully" produce 80 to 100 lbs. of honey a year. This he will ship east in summer for sale. The music boxes will take up the trading slack in winter...
...other: what it's like to travel on the Erie Canal: how a character is inadvertently shot; the way in which daguerreotypes are made. He does a lot with bees too, but. as the book implies, they have enough metaphorical possibilities for a series of novels. A hive is a feminist state, with an automatic system for keeping warm that is activated when the temperature in the hive drops to 57° F. Male bees are scarce, underfed and all but useless...
Because of the chemical's shell, the bee is at first unaffected and blithely returns to the hive to make honey. But the following spring, or even two years later, disaster strikes. Larvae and young bees eat the stored pollen that has been poisoned by the chemical and die. By Entomologist Roy Barker's reckoning, just a few capsules may be enough to devastate a colony of 50,000 bees...
...every spring all the fans in Boston stand in lines that stretch sometimes for blocks. They needle through thickening mobs of vendors, salesmen, religious prophets, politicians and pushers which gather around Fenway Park like bees to a hive...