The Bee or The Hive?
Inside a one-bedroom stone loft passed down for three generations, Elisabet invites visitors to step into her world - the bee hive. Her collection of random items found around Ikaria bring a cooky personality to the earthen room. I walked over goat skins and traditional woven fabrics layered on the floor to inspect a deep green vintage trunk filled with jars of honey. Every corner of the space had an oddity to discover. A bee made out of gold and jewels, a wooden wheel that looked a thousand years old, vintage bee-keeping tools. The centerpiece of the room was a yellow refrigerator from the 1950s with delicately painted wildflowers and dainty bees. I imagined that she curated her space like a pollinator, carrying home little findings.
We sat around a small table donned with yellow flowers as Elisabet dove into to the magic of bee alchemy while a nice Irish lady translated her raspy Greek into English. She explained that the process follows a queen that can live for up to seven years. The queen rules her hive to the beat of a biological clock that’s been repeated in cycles for millions of years into the past. As a bee-keeper, she’s in sync with this ancient song. She can read its rhythms and follow along like it were the circular dance of the Icarian panigiri. A queen keeps the tempo between laying eggs to grow her hive, and letting the hatched workers fill the hexagonal pockets with pollen to make honey.
Each hive is a kingdom stored in a wooden box containing multiple panels which the bees use as a frame to build their perfect combs. Elisabet moves her hives around the island following the bloom of each season’s flower - from thyme in the summer to heather in the winter. Each one yields a distinctly tasting honey. Her main role is hunting the blooms. On her back, she carries each of her 50 hive boxes into the hills, placing them lovingly in the right spot at the right time. Pulled insatiably by the pollen, the bees work tirelessly collecting, crossing gorges and valleys bursting with blooms, traveling up to eight kilometers a day but always returning back to the hive. I asked how long the worker bees live, and she explained that in the summer, they work so hard it causes them to die after one month. But in the calm of the winter, when they work far less, they live up to six months.
Ikaria is a “Blue Zone” - an area with a high concentration of people who live to be over 100 years old. Elizabet mentioned earlier that “Here, we aren’t slaves to time. The work gets done but on our own terms.” Just like the bees, the relaxed pace of life lets their bodies last longer.
Once the kingdom gets a little overcrowded, the queen lays her princesses. When they hatch, the queen will take part of the population and leave the hive, forming a swarm of worker bees that surround her like a buzzing armor.
Elisabet showed us a video of how she scoops up handfuls of bee with her bare hand, digging through the swarm until she can find the queen and collect her into a wicker basket shaped like a waffle cone. It’s the same kind of basket her grandfather used, and probably his grandfather. Once she’s coaxed the queen into her basket, the rest of the swarm willingly follows. She said this is her favorite part of the process. It’s the only moment where she gets to physically connect with her bees, to feel their thousands of warm buzzing bodies that together form one collective conscious. I could feel her love for the hives. She rules her tiny kingdoms as a servant to them.
As we sat eating an apricot pie made with yogurt and summer honey, Elizabet told me that she recognized the symbol on my necklace. It’s a gold circular charm with a sun that also kind of looks like a compass, which I assumed was meaningless. She held up her phone to show me an ancient Greek symbol, the flag of a fallen empire. Exactly the same as my necklace. I told her that I wore this necklace every day not knowing it was a Greek symbol. She said, “There’s no coincidences, everything happens for a reason.”
Maybe there was something mystical at play. Something deep in the collective Jungian conscious. Maybe it’s the universe reminding me that I am not the bee but the hive. Not the one, but the many. And I too cycle to the beat of a biological clock that’s been repeated millions of years into the past.
Now it was my turn to meet them. She had me pull on a white jumpsuit and a netted hat to cover my face but oddly left my hands bare. We walked over to a nearby hillside dotted with wildflowers looking like clumsy astronauts and approached a buzzing wooden box. Pumping a device that seemed older than me, we wafted puffs of smoke into an opening on the side. The buzzing quieted a bit. She gently opened the lid to reveal panels of dripping honeycomb, each covered with fuzzy bees. Then, Elizabet told me to softly place the palm of my hand on the bees themselves. Hesitantly, I felt their little bodies vibrating, a warmth that was surprising. I felt for a moment the magic of a hive, the many acting as one. She pointed out the queen, which was much larger than the rest, her every tiny step followed by league of loyal body guards. I watched her move from one hexagon to the next, inspecting her empire. Keeping time. Conducting an ecological symphony.
