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As Paolina and Julian
(Leccese and Taffel, founders of the Leorosa label, editor's note)
Called me these days to talk about uniforms and their new collection, I immediately thought of bees.
Why bees of all places?
In any case, it couldn't be because of my surroundings (I was sitting in a London taxi, the breathing masks swaying monotonously up and down Euston Road like ominous little sails on the Styx), nor because of my mental state (I had neither eaten honey nor was I was bitten by an insect that day or the days before), and apparently it wasn’t even the subject that was at stake (after all, uniforms evoke the rather unpleasant memory of the dreary look of youth in Middlesex, chubby , teenage pancake faces sticking out of nylon collars with black mourning ties in memoriam of a monarch who died long ago).
Said bees were honey bees, namely the honey bees that have settled near my parents' house in recent years.
During the summer, we harvest honey from the beehives at different times, and we are helped by Anargyros, a beekeeper with a handsome mustache.
We fill the honey in jars, which we then stack in cupboards and which, if they're lucky, travel halfway around the world with friends.
Anargyros is actually a guy with a stented voice.
But if you ask him about bees, he gets into raptures about his loved ones (i.e. the bees).
I ran into him once by chance at four in the morning outside a nightclub.
He in a honeycomb shark collar shirt, behind him on the scooter, his girlfriend snuggled close to him.
And then he spontaneously began to argue about the relative merits of sage and thyme honey.
In my cottage by the sea there is a shelf overflowing with honey from all regions of Greece: large jars, small jars, produced from the flower nectar of pine, heather, sage, thyme, (a purple flowering thyme-like herb, which in German pretty much has boring name summer savory and its aroma allegedly makes the islanders quite sex-obsessed).
Wherever I go while traveling, I look for honey.
In my collection there are glasses that come from the descendants of the mountain robbers in Mani, from the monks on the holy Mount Athos and from anarcho-communists on the mountainous island of Ikaria.
How honey captures the legendary summer light
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Greeks are crazy about honey.
It is in almost all Greek desserts, we like to spoon it into yogurt for breakfast, but there is also something downright mythical about it.
A friend recently bought 14 kilos of the stuff for his mother on the island of Sikinos from a priest who is stung by bees every day in winter in order to maintain his immunity against stinging pain until the summer harvest.
This friend told me that when he left the island the taxi driver had put his things in the trunk of the car and asked him what was in the heavy box.
The driver smiled at the explanation: "Ah, so all your gold is in there."
Gold how true.
Perhaps it has something to do with the way honey catches the light, that legendary summer light that the Greeks have praised at least since Homer and why year after year people flock to the country to bathe in it.
Light, trapped in amber-colored liquid, the sweetness of which is the energy of the sun, transformed by means of plants and insects and the endless hum and buzz between the two.
But I've drifted away from my original topic of “uniform”.
So where is the uniformity now in this rampant consideration of honey?
And what do all the bees have to do with it?
"The uniform of the bee jacket?" Came Julian's question when we were on the phone that day.
Yes, but.
There is a certain imaginative space in which I see the bees, neatly in a row next to each other, perhaps in a factory, working precisely on their product.
The uniformity of bee jackets is more of an illusion
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Cartoon bees that I draw in my mind, like from Angela Banner's “Ant and Bee,” a popular children's book series (at least in the UK between the 50s and 70s) in which two characters, an ant named Ant and a bee named - you guessed it - Bee, have all kinds of adventures.
Bee, with an umbrella and a little red pilgrim hat, is the sensible counter figure to the somewhat silly Ant. Bee also often flies with Ant on her back from place to place, from where they start their various activities.
When my mother read from these books to me as a child, I could hardly hide my excitement at the idea of flying on the back of a bee, clinging to her black and yellow striped jacket.
But it really doesn't work that way.
I drifted back into the fantasy world and am actually talking about flying around on the back of a bee.
I think my point is that the uniformity of bee jackets is more of an illusion.
When I peered into the beehive with Anargyros in mid-July of this year, the contrast between the accurate yellow and black stripes of the cartoon bees of my imagination and the scurrying heaving masses of brown and deep brown beings was very clear.
Again and again Anargyros turned over a teeming honeycomb frame in the sun, and then we found the queen, taller and set apart from the others by a glossier, darker uniform.
Aha!
One point for me!
Because here we have the uniform and one of its functions.
The difference in clothing (maybe drawing is the better word here) is highlighted - and I don't say this until after looking up the encyclopedia - the polyandric dominant female.
In other words, this is the one that all drones want, although the fate of the drone is ultimately a sad one: if the male has successfully delivered his sperm to the queen, it will fall from the whole vitality of the Swarm was filled, freezes to the ground and dies.
A beekeeper at work
Source: Getty Images / Anthony Lee
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We are often bombarded with information about the imminent demise of bees, which has nothing to do with post-coital death.
In the subway we meet urban beekeepers who use their elbows to make space for their honeycomb frames, from which the honey will soon drip, and on the evening news we sometimes hear of bees being misled by radio waves or being poisoned by pesticides .
I once spent a particularly happy couple of hours as a budding journalist in the botanical gardens of Kew Gardens in south London and made a short film about a reintroduction program for bees.
The scientists I interviewed shook their heads gray and anxiously announced the demise of this rare species.
On an online list of the best books on bees, the top five include books about the disappearance of the furry honey-maker.
It would be a sad world if all the bees died
As you may already know, it says, life as we know it would change irrevocably if the bees disappeared.
An article on the Encyclopaedia Britannica website puts it this way: "The availability and diversity of fresh produce would decrease considerably," and many species would have problems finding food if the 20,000 or so bee species died out.
It is noteworthy that the author of the article (with the title: "What Would Happen If All The Bees Died?", If you are interested) asserts that there will be no mass starvation in the case of a bee armageddon.
Others I spoke to prophesied an impending apocalypse.
Whatever happens, it would be a sad world if all the bees died.
I was thinking about that when Anargyros pulled the honeycomb frames out of the beehives that July morning.
It was certainly not a uniform crowd - to get back to our topic - but when Anargyros smoked them with smoke (and by "they", I repeat, I mean a teeming indefinable mass of brown life) I watched through the veil The unbelievable uniformity of my beekeeping clothing that the seething mass of insects had hidden: a waxy network of hexagonal severity stretched over the frame.
For me, this shape is one of the most regular and beautiful objects on this planet, the sheer simplicity of which we only hint at in the works of the most skilled human artists and architects.
Anargyros ran a finger over a series of thick and brown encrusted hexagons.
Then he motioned for me to do the same.
I did.
The crust cracked sweet and moist, and I licked the fresh honey off my finger.
When I suggested to Paolina and Julian that they write about bees, I probably originally thought that this uniform structure, this network, this always delicious honey emerges from a mass that is diverse and changeable.
Form out of chaos.
This oscillation between the two poles - uniformity and cacophony, color, light - is the context of creation, the change in which creative genius can take place.
In the case of bees, it is the honey that drips from their frames.
And with Leorosa - yes, exactly!
- there are explosions of color and joy that adorn their classically inspired designs.
It occurs to me: Back then in Middlesex I wore a black waffle tie to school, just to show the deviation.
Uniform, here and there undermined by detours, now and then flooded with eruptions of otherness.
What I'm going to say: I think that's the best kind of uniform.
Niarchos is a journalist for the US magazine "New Yorker".
This text appeared in the magazine "Leorosaworld" of the fashion label Leorosa, founded by Paolina Leccese and Julian Taffel.
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