‘It makes you happy that something like that exists,’ says Devente, a young beekeeper from Hackney as he emerges from his protective suit in a halo of smoke, having just checked that all is well in the colony.
‘It makes you happy that something like that exists,’ says Devente, a young beekeeper from Hackney as he emerges from his protective suit in a halo of smoke, having just checked that all is well in the colony. You could almost hear the puffs of smoke. ‘Once you understand the bee,’ he says, ‘then your perspective changes from swatting to staying still.’ Devente has been keeping bees for a while now, with the help of a social enterprise foundation called the Golden Company. ‘The bees are more or less the only things around here that are good…’ He adds, ‘Enlightenment.’
Spirit of the Beehive (Radio 4, Friday) was such an inspiring programme. I had to listen to it because the title reminded me of that haunting, sad, evocative Victor Erice film. Nina Perry has created a radio experience, not something you hear very often these days, recording the voices of some very different bee enthusiasts and weaving them together with the sounds of brawling bees, the wind rustling through the leaves, a bee-like ripple on the violin. ‘You don’t see much hate in the beehive,’ observes Devente, ‘because there’s nothing to hate in the beehive. They’re extraordinary creatures.’
His passion for the bees was intercut with the scientific approach of a professor of apiculture and social insects at Sussex University who has been observing and decoding life in the beehive. There may be as many as 10,000 worker bees in the colony but no one is in charge, he reminded us. They all work together, each playing their part, to achieve a single purpose: to collect enough food to survive through the winter.
His research team has fathomed the mystery of the waggle dance, which worker bees use to tell each other where to find the best pollen. If you study bee behaviour in the hive, you can see them waggling their abdomens, movements which vary according to the information being conveyed. As the researchers explained the two-second waggle, the figure of eight, the 95-degrees-from-vertical, their words were so carefully edited that it was almost as if they, too, were dancing. Who needs visual aids at such moments? Go listen (before it disappears from iPlayer) to discover what a bee gavotte might sound like.
Just as inspiring was the Radio 2 profile, The Amazing Mavis Staples (Monday), presented by Ricky Ross and produced by Richard Murdoch. Mavis and her sisters have been singing since the early Sixties, encouraged by their father, Pops Staples, whose rippling, rhythmic guitar was always the pulse, the life-force of their music. He played the electric guitar as if it was a banjo. The Staple Singers, with Mavis as their lead, began by singing gospel songs in church but when Pops met Martin Luther King in 1961 he decided they should devote their music to the movement. ‘I really like this man’s message,’ Pops told his daughters. ‘If he can preach it, we can sing it.’ Songs like ‘Freedom Highway’ and ‘Why? (Am I Treated So Bad)’ followed. Driven by a powerful beat, full of message, they’re not angry, or even sorrowful, just so true and steady they cut across the heart.
Ross’s interview with Mavis, whose power as a singer comes not just from her extraordinary range but also from the way she suddenly opens up her voice, blasting out her message, so bold and so direct, was intercut with archive footage. We heard clips from those big moments in the march towards civil rights in America: Robert Kennedy telling the nation of the assassination of Martin Luther King, Barack Obama speaking in Grant Park, Chicago, after the presidential election of 2008, Sister Mahalia Jackson singing ‘Precious Lord’ at the funeral of Dr King 40 years earlier. Ross asked Mavis whether back in 1961 she would ever have guessed that there would be a black president of America. ‘Things are happening today because of Dr King,’ she said, her reverence for the freedom-fighter still keenly felt. It was striking how she always referred to him as ‘Dr King’ and to his wife as ‘Miss Coretta’.
Mavis told us that she didn’t go out to Grant Park to join the celebratory crowds in 2008 (she belonged to the same church in Chicago as Obama, although she never met him). She watched it on TV and shed ‘a bucket of tears’. ‘I talked to Dr King. I talked to Pops’ (in her mind; they were both long dead). And, she added, ‘If I could have done a cartwheel I would have done a cartwheel.’
In less than a hour we lived, with Mavis, through 50 years of American history, feeling something of those turbulent years through the power of her memories and the music, which we heard in satisfying bursts of song, not the annoyingly short clips too often used by documentary-makers: ‘If you’re ready’, ‘The struggle’s still alive’, ‘Will the circle be unbroken’.
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