Reproduced with permission of HighWater Press (Winnipeg),  from The Bee Mother by Hetxw’ms Gyetxw Brett D. Huson and illustrated by Natasha Donovan (©2024). 

A New Queen

Winter’s chill recedes, and the spring salmon return to the fishing holes. It is an exciting time for the Gitxsan as life returns to the lax yip, the territory, and soon the majagalee, flowers, will bloom.

March is the time of Wihlaxs, Black Bear’s Walking Moon. Nox Ap, the bee mother, awakens from her winter slumber along the realm of Xsan, the River of Mists. Nox Ap seems to appear from the great beyond as the bumblebee queen crawls out of her warm hiding space.

Nox Ap is looking for a new home. She searches for a small underground burrow or a hollow decaying tree. Like Nox Ap, a yellow jacket wasp also seeks a new home. The yellow jacket queen needs space to hang her paper hive. Honeybees, more recently introduced to Gitxsan lands by settlers, have found their way into the wild. A swarm of honeybees and their queen have left an overcrowded hive to start a new one.

The yellow jackets build their paper hive—called Anda Ap, bee pouch—on a sturdy tree branch, while the honeybees make a bigger home in the hollow of an old tree trunk. Although their homes look different, the process to build them is similar. They start by creating a series of small cells that will later make up the giant hive. The worker bees will take over as the queen focuses on laying more eggs and growing the hive.

Unlike wasps and honeybees, bumblebees don’t build big hives, looking instead for places to build smaller nests. Nox Ap has found a place to lay her first eggs—in the hollow of a crumbling pine tree close to the pillowy moss floor. In her new nest she weaves her eggs in a cocoon of food and wax. They will pupate and eventually emerge from the cocoon as full-grown worker bees.