One Pound of Bees

800 years ago, when leathery wings flapped in the sky, I was a Medieval Studies undergrad at an agricultural college. Why? That's what I was into. I didn't even really care where I went to college, except that I needed to get away from my parents and my boyfriend. So I went to the college that smelled like alfalfa (bonus) and contained the fewest people who were like me (not a bonus).

Once I got to the point in my studies where I actually had to write research papers, I combined things that I liked (say, entomology and history) with things that my advisor said I should write about (Norway. I went to college on a Norwegian scholarship). That really led me in some fun directions.

The college itself was at the age in which its 75 years of physical library collections going back to the late 1800s still fit in the library, and I spent many happy hours in the bowels of that library reviewing decades worth of beekeeping journals for a paper on beekeeping and bee-based remedies in the Middle Ages. So fun. I made oxymel (Medieval Persian honey-and-lemon cure-all which we are still using to this day). And I made something (can't recall) that required actual bees. Was it perhaps the poultice for baldness in the beard that called for ground up bees and the excrement of shrew mice? Either of these ingredients could be easily obtained on campus but I only pursued one of them.

I called up the Bee Biology department, and talked to the professor who had given the gripping lecture on bees earlier that quarter to my entomology class. He asked me a stumper of a question: "How many bees do you need?" "I dunno. A pound?" So on a very rainy day I rode my bike out to Bee Biology and met up with the apiologist. He went to his freezer and pulled out a baggie with one pound of frozen bees in it. I guess that's how you dispatch bees. Poor little fellas. I remember toasting the bees on a baking sheet in the oven at our dorm, then grinding them using a hammer and a Dr. Scholl's sandal (who has equipment when they're a sophomore?). We presented our papers at an end-of-quarter open house, and I recall wearing some of my Medieval reenactment clothes. And when I came home for the semester the bees came with me. It seemed wasteful and disrespectful not to do something with them.

Occasionally over the next few years my mom would complain about the bees that lived in a danish cookie tin in her chest freezer. She'd open the tin from time to time thinking that there was something delicious inside, only to find dead bees. At some point we decided the bees needed to go. 

Thank you, bees, for your service.