More Newsletters I am grateful for the rumors and cultural stereotypes. They make me sound heroic. One of the main reasons I joined the Peace Corps right after graduating from New York University NYU —though I would never have admitted it to friends and family—was because I felt destined for heroism.
My career prospects as an English major fresh out of college—copyediting trade magazines and ghostwriting fundraising letters—seemed like jobs for nerds. I was fated for something more. My mission in the Peace Corps, teaching beekeeping to subsistence farmers, sounded exotic and noble.
Maybe even heroic. To my chagrin, no one seems even remotely interested in beekeeping except for Felix Tavy, Crazy Felix. Felix is my age—22—though a lifetime of working outside has left him looking much older. He is easy to like, with gentle, squinty green eyes and a quick laugh that reveals a row of missing front teeth. Our first attempts to capture bee colonies from the wild are fiascos, involving long days of getting stung repeatedly in the stifling Paraguayan heat.
We sift through tens of thousands of killer bees looking for the queen. Slightly longer than the rest, sometimes of a deeper hue, she is the key to success: If we fail to capture her in a matchbox, the bees swarm in unison, an amorphous shadow rising in the sky spectacularly punctuating our failure. Felix could pick another way to provide for his family instead of spending long days failing to capture bee colonies.
His faith in me and the whole dubious enterprise of beekeeping as a significant revenue stream seems misplaced or imprudent. But Felix remains undeterred. Eventually we learn the trick for finding the queen: Instead of focusing on individual bees, we must watch the whole colony. The tens of thousands of worker bees behave differently near the queen, creating a discernable order in what seems like total chaos.
