Al Kol Eleh* (All these)

I would hope that most of you are at least passingly familiar with the Naomi Shemer song  'Al Kol Eleh'.  It's one of those sappy emotional songs that nobody will admit to liking but nearly everyone who hears can't help but sing along (and tear up in the process).

I've known the words for almost half my life, but I had never considered them particularly profound.  However, I learned something new about that song today.  I learned that Naomi Shemer had more than a passing knowledge of beekeeping... and that she knew a thing or two about life as well.

Perhaps I should start at the beginning:

On Friday I was out working with my bees, and was forced to perform one of the more disruptive procedures a beekeeper can inflict on his/her charges; splitting a very large hive into three smaller ones. 

This required that I open and disassemble the hive, isolate the queen, remove several frames of brood comb (those containing developing larvae) and honeycomb (those containing, duh, honey) and put both of these into two smaller hive boxes called 'nucs' (short for nucleus hives).

Then in order to populate the new hives with adult worker bees, I picked up a few more frames of comb and shook the bees into the nuc boxes. 

The bees are never really happy to have me poking around inside their home under the best of circumstances, but when the weather is warm and there is a good strong nectar flow somewhere in the area they allow me to take small liberties with them here and there.

But when I flat out wreck the place and expose them to a cool autumn afternoon when nothing is in bloom... they get downright pissed! 

I was wearing a full bee suit, veil and gloves, but with all the bending and lifting it was inevitable that some bees were going to get into the gap between the cuffs of the bee suite and the tops of my work boots.  Others found the pucker at the edge of the veil... while still others got inadvertently crushed in the folds of the suit itself (while I was bending down) and stung me right through the material.

By the time I had reassembled the hives and introduced the new queens to the nuc boxes, I had been stung almost 40 times.  That's more then four times the number of stings I've gotten all season! 

I guess one could call it an occupational hazard.

The stings themselves are something a beekeeper gets used to fairly quickly, so the pain was minimal.  However, the cumulative effect of so many stings (i.e. mucho bee venom) at once was something I had never experienced before and I sat down for a little while to take stock of what my body was telling me.

I'd read all the literature about what systemic allergic reactions to bee stings would feel like and I had my Epi-pen (something I always have with me when working with the hives) in my pocket just in case.  But thankfully the only lasting effect seemed to be localized itching and a general weariness which could just as easily have been attributed to lifting heavy hives full of bee larvae and honey.

The last chore I had to perform before I was done for the day was to bring the two nuc boxes to a temporary location a couple of kilometers from my bee yard.  This is done because the bees will naturally want to return to their old hive location unless I take them to a new place and force them to memorize a new landscape.  Bee brains work on the same basic prinicpal as an Etcho-Sketch (tm)... in order to draw/learn something new you have to erase the old.

After the nucs were nicely settled in their temporary location I dragged myself home and got undressed and admired my bee suit which was littered with the stingers of bees who had tried to sting me through the thick white canvas. 

Just so you understand the biologics of what happened, when the first bee stings (and loses its stinger) it releases a strong alarm pheromone which directs other bees to the invader (me) and stimulates them to attack as well.  With each successive sting (whether it penetrated the suit or not, the alarm pheromone got stronger and stronger.  This is why beekeepers use smoke when they open a hive... it masks the alarm pheromone and calms the bees.  But sometimes no amount of smoke is enough to keep you from getting the big neon sign painted on you that shouts "INVADER" to every bee in creation!

I made a mental note to wash my bee suite twice in hot water to be sure to get that 'invader stink' off of it.

Once out of my clothes I surveyed the damage. 

I had stings all over my ankles and wrists... a few on the backs of my knees... a few more on the, ahem, back of my upper thighs... and a few really nice ones on the top of my head.  None of them really hurt, but I knew I'd be in for a couple of days of serious itching. 

I rooted around in the medicine cabinet to see if we had any antihistamine in the house, but all I found was a half-full bottle of grape flavored kiddie allergy stuff.  I chugged the contents of the bottle.

The good news is that for almost 8 hours I didn't have any swelling, and only minimal itching.  The bad news is that I was nearly comatose from taking an elephant dose of the kiddie antihistamine. 

I'm sure the doctors out there will have plenty of kind words about my foray into pharmacology.

By Shabbat morning the grape-flavored horse tranquilizer had worn off and I was starting to get little messages from my body that perhaps not everyone had reported to work in my central nervous system. 

It took me about 15 minutes just to get out of bed, and even a gimongous cup of ass-kickingly strong coffee didn't get the elevators to go all the way to the top floor.

I knew I hadn't had an anaphylactic reaction to the stings, but there was sure-as-sunshine something going on with my overall well-being.  The best way to describe it is an achy, flu-like malaise.  Also, my ankles and wrists were a tad swollen.

I ended up coming home early from Shabbat morning services, having failed to stay awake for even two of the seven sections of the Torah reading (much to the amusement of my neighbors)... and promptly went to bed for the rest of the day.

By Sunday morning I was feeling back to normal, but the anticipated itching where I'd been stung had arrived with a vengeance.  I did my morning thing and drove a car full of eager young soldiers and students to Beer Sheva and then went to work. 

I had every intention of picking up some more antihistamine (the grown-up kind thankyewverymuch) at the local drug store, but before I got the chance to run out I got a call from Zahava informing me that one of our closest friends had lost her father.   He had gotten up Sunday morning... gone to the dentist, and had a sudden, fatal heart attack by 9:30 AM. 

The funeral was scheduled for 3:00PM in Natanya, so I'd have to try to fit a day's worth of work into a few short hours before leaving for the drive north. 

While I fidgeted and scratched through an excruciating meeting and saved a few files to take with me for after the funeral, the itching began to reach impossible new heights of agony.  A full body case of poison ivy would have been a welcome vacation from this kind of torture.

But if I was going to make the funeral by 3:00PM there was no way I could stop at a pharmacy.

I arrived at the cemetery just as the first eulogy was about to be delivered, and watched my friend, her brother and her mother say the most difficult good-bye of their lives to a good man who had no idea when he woke up that he'd end the day asleep forever.

Throughout the brief service I tottered between deep despair at having to witness my friend's grief, and the kind of personal agony from my itchy bee stings that could easily have inspired Dante to add a sub-sub-sub-basement to his blueprints for hell.

However, when it came time to actually bury my friend's father I started to feel the first hopeful signs of relief from the itching. 

I'm sure it was simply that the raging histamines had finally run their course, but for those first few moments of blessed relief, I started thinking guiltily of how shallow and self-absorbed a person must be to take a moment as fraught with emotion as the burial of a close friend's father and squander it in a momentary sense of personal deliverance. 

This was the point where the late Naomi Shemer barged in on my thoughts. 

The song 'Al Kol Eleh' (for those who don't know the song) is actually a long list of cherished things that the lyricist beseeches G-d to guard/watch over.  But the more realistic chorus is about not just the cherished things, but also the acceptance of the world as it actually is... with both the honey and the sting... as well as the bitter and the sweet.

As the sun rushed towards its appointment with the west, and the mourners began to disperse to the other three corners of the compass, it came to me that my payment for the honey I take from my bees is having to endure the occasional sting.  But our shared payment for the sweetness of a lifetime of parental love and guidance comes due on the bitter day when their comforting presence is taken from our world.

If you are blessed to have parents... what are you waiting for?  Go call them.

* Here's a really sketchy translation... if anyone has a better one (or would like to take a crack at it themselves) I'll be happy to post it here.