Honey Hunters
Cuevas de la Araña (Spider Caves), Valencia, Spain, circa 6,000 BCE
Two silhouettes scale a ladder to harvest honeycomb. Men.
The Cutter, at the top, plunges an arm into the nest, hauls
out a screaming slab. The Holder, below, braces as wax lumps
high above. The Cutter reaches again, until the grass bag is full,
oozing. His descent is a raging mass, face upturned, blood
and stings blistering the soles of his feet, trusting the Holder
is ready to receive him.
Two honey hunters. Wife at the top taking instructions from
Husband on the ground. Throats scorched with smoke. The
bottom figure is a stick. Straight lines, circular head. Talking
mouth. Faded. The top figure has shape. Waist, triangles, hips,
tapered legs. Wife moves slowly, knows these bees, bone-knife
flashing in the heat. Her foot locks in: hook, wrap, twist of rope.
She takes just enough. Cannot hear husband above the roar.
Two sisters. Performing the ceremony before the climb.
Incense and flowers for the cliff gods. The first wrestles a sheep,
grips it tight between her thighs. The second makes the cut,
deep in the throat, flow of hot blood. They take turns on the
rope, agonising dance, seething bees, fingers fat with venom.
She squats by the fire,
eyes swollen shut; sucks honey
from huge grins of comb.
• The prehistoric paintings in the Cuevas de la Araña provide one of the oldest records of ancient beekeeping. There has been much debate about the gender of the figures.
When I first received Rachel Bower’s beautiful pamphlet, Bee, I skimmed quickly through it in search of an essay suitable for a reader as bee-ignorant as myself. It was only when I slowed down and concentrated on the poems that I realised Bower had already transformed the nectar of her knowledge, practical and theoretical, into poetry-honey, adding only occasional minimal footnotes – which somehow read as a coda to the poem rather than an information byte.
Honey Hunters, the opening piece, cross pollinates poetry and prose through its conception of line-length and line-break: it’s a flexible mix of the genres rather than simply “a poem” or “a prose-poem”. Additionally, it concludes with a haiku, which calls up another gracefully mixed medium, the Japanese haibun. Before reciting Honey Hunter in a recording on her publisher’s webpage, Bower briefly discusses her technique, mentioning Aimee Nezhukumathil, a poet who has written about her personal engagement with haibun.
Bower’s poem succeeds as a kind of translation into three dimensions and at least five senses of a particular painting in the Cuevas de la Araña in Valencia in Spain. The construction in each of its three main sections takes the form of note-like jottings without a main verb, and simple sentences. It’s a device that gives the reader a deep dive into the physical experience of “blood and stings”, “hook, wrap, twist of rope” and its accompanying emotions: the courage, pain and pleasure, and the sheer expertise of those honey hunters.
Bower also explores the socio-sexual hierarchy, in a way that introduces the feminist leitmotif of Bee. The balance of power and labour is differently distributed, but there’s a fundamental perception that the women have a quicker understanding of their task. There are two men only at work in the first section. A woman is the active hunter in the second, but her orders are given by the “Husband”. In the third, briefer segment, two sisters perform the initial bloody sacrifice required by the “cliff gods”, and go on to do the tough climbing and foraging for themselves.
After the collective cooperation, the focus of the haiku is on a single individual’s gorging on the hard-won honeycomb. Her “eyes swollen shut” with bee venom, the woman nevertheless is able to suck “honey / from huge grins of comb”. Discussing the poem, Bower suggests there’s a sinister implication in the “huge grins”. I didn’t immediately see it that way: while the image could suggest the triumph of predation, I felt the emphasis was on the deliciousness of the honeycomb. But of course the two are intrinsically connected. Perhaps contemporary humans need to cut out the honey? At least, we need to control some of our deep-rooted mythologising about it.
Bower’s collection is dotted with further examples of the care of bees as women’s work. In her complex weaving of themes, there are jokes, dialogue, personal experiences, to give the reader a spectrum of experiences, as if we were privileged bees, let loose to explore many scents and colours. But Bower doesn’t shirk ugly realities. In Tell the bees / fifteen million, for example, she imagines with almost unbearable vividness the destruction of hives in New South Wales, conducted in the attempted eradication of a bee parasite, the Varroa mite. “The first step is pouring gasoline into the beehive. Then it’s time to wait,” Bower writes, quoting a report by Karen Deep Singh in the New York Times. Then she shows us what happens during that wait.
Climate change is another bee-killer. I was interested to read about the June Gap, having recently “rescued” a honey bee that had got indoors, and had ended up dazed-seeming and unmoving on the window-sill. I carried it gently outside and put it in a crowd of white clover growing not far from a pot of lavender, hoping there was warmth enough in the day by then, and nutriment enough in the flowers, to revive the bee. Although the advice is too late for 2025, here’s Bower’s note to her poem June Gap: we are currently in “a period of sudden and significant reduction in the availability of pollen and nectar for honey bees … a phenomenon of recent decades.” UK readers might like to store the advice for future years, should summer and honey bees still be available.
