BOHDANIVKA, Ukraine – As the weather warms up after a cold spring, the sunflower fields where Petro Fedorovych’s bees collect nectar for decades to make amber nectar are barely grown. cultivated and abandoned.
War has crept across the steppes of eastern Ukraine after Invasion of Russia in February. The city of Sievierodonetsk fell, then Lysychansk. The front lines moved until incessant explosions and artillery bursts around the small beekeeper’s village, Bohdanivka, with heat.
But his bees still leave their hive like every summer. Petro Fedorovych, 71, has watched them fly beyond their familiar fields. They flew towards the roads and shell craters, getting closer and closer way forward where Russian and Ukrainian armies are killing each other with guns, grenades and rockets.
Millions of Ukrainians have fled their home since the war began more than six months ago. But many stayed behind, sheltering in basements and other places, determined to brave the onslaught for various reasons: nowhere else to go, no money, family members disabled, pro-Russian sentiments. The list goes on and on.
But Petro Fedorovych’s decision to stay in his home with the bees and his wife, Ira, and their goat, Flower, was simple: It was their home. It was a world unto itself, where even slowly encroaching devastation felt more advantageous than the unknown cities and towns beyond the reach of Russian artillery.
“I built this house with my own hands,” he said late last month, his gray hair disheveled and the sweat from a morning beekeeping settled on his forehead. “I will never leave.”
All wars are terrible, but the war in Ukraine stands out for its brutal methodology. Artillery can turn villages like Bohdanivka into the cemetery almost overnight. If the Russians wanted to move forward, they would do so slowly, munching almost everything in their path with so many weapons and equipment that moments of uninterrupted silence made anxiety tighten. stomach becomes the complement to the next horror.
Bohdanivka, with a population of about 150, lies between where the Russian army is now and where it wants to go: the remains of the Donbas, an area of rolling fields, mining towns and hundreds of thousands of bees of Petro Fedorovych .
For Petro Fedorovych, who served in the Soviet Army at the height of the Cold War, Russia’s invasion was neither aggression nor war; it’s just “it.” The war didn’t begin,”it has begun,” he said.
“They are abusing the people, and that’s all,” he said, without naming Ukraine or Russia. The crackling sound of firecrackers rang out nearby.
After leaving the army, he moved to Bohdanivka in 1972, where he worked long hours as a veterinarian on a collective dairy farm. Ira was a nurse in the nearby city called Artemivsk, now Bakhmut. They met soon after, though it took a while for him to muster up the courage to talk to her.
They married on June 19, 1976 and had two daughters and a son. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, Petro Fedorovych built his family a two-story brick house on the outskirts of Bohdanivka. They are surrounded by quiet fields and near a reservoir where the Ukrainian Army has now stationed troops and vehicles.
For his bees, he built blue-painted wooden beehives that dot his backyard like lighthouses among tall grass, their inhabitants pacing furiously among the bees. chicken, a dilapidated white Volga sedan and clouds of phacelia, viper’s bugloss and cabbage. The iron fence facing the street used to be lined with roses, Ira says, but this season they are gone.
Bees have been a part of Petro Fedorovych’s life since he was a child in what is now western Russia. His father fought with the Soviet Army during the Second World War and participated in some of its fiercest battles, including the Battle of Brest in 1941.
According to him, the bees were his father’s way of adjusting to civilian life and leaving the war behind when he started beekeeping in the 1950s.
Now, another war is approaching, after a war that has dragged on for nearly a decade, after Ukrainian forces fought back Russian-backed separatists from nearby villages and the city of Bakhmut on Wednesday. year 2014.
“When it all started eight years ago, the nearby village, Klishchiivka, was heavily vandalized,” he said. “I have a lot of bees in the winter, and our windows creak. And the bees have dispersed in winter because of the rumble. “
The bee population never fully recovered from that winter, he said. This summer, about two dozen of his bee families are much angrier than before. His wife, Ira, dared not venture near the hive for fear of being stung, and the beekeeper had a small suction flask filled with firewood that he used to repel insects.
“The bees have become different,” he said, referring to the shelling. “Ira won’t enter the garden, they won’t let her rest for a minute. It’s because of the noise. “
“Bees,” Ira noted, “like silence.”
“They need it.”
There is no more silence in Bohdanivka, famous for its solitude, where people can spend quiet weekends away from Bakhmut or other cities in the Donbas such as Kramatorsk and Sloviansk.
Now, Bohdanivka is becoming a front-of-house town. And, Petro Fedorovych’s bees, he said with a sad smile, have become “frontline bees”.
After flying several miles toward skirmishes during the summer, prime honey-making months, the bees returned with about 650 pounds of honey. It’s been a good run by any season’s standards.
“I thought I was going to get nothing,” he said, noting that the bees were most likely drawn forward because the sunflowers were planted quickly there earlier in the year.
As the fighting drew near, many beekeepers from nearby Bohdanivka and Bakhmut fled, leaving fewer colleagues to share notes in an already somewhat solitary profession.
However, even with rockets shrill overhead, the beekeeper still looks after some of the last few honeycombs of his season. He scraped off the wax, placed the frames in a centrifuge and spun, until the rich harvest drained all the way to the bottom and, finally, into a beaker.
“It’s amber, isn’t it?” he said proudly. “See how it comes and folds like this?”
Sunflower honey is still his favorite after decades of beekeeping. But now, when he was in his late afternoon, there was no one left to shoulder the life’s work and take care of the bees that he would rather die than abandon.
The family’s youngest daughter, Lilia, who was sitting in a restaurant hundreds of miles away in Kyiv, said: “Of course, I dream that someone in the family will inherit this profession, but until Now the nieces are all growing up” and showing little interest, Lilia, the youngest daughter of the family. Ukrainian capital.
Lilia watched in fear as the war approached her parents’ home. A nurse like her mother, Lilia sells honey that her father mailed to neighbors; a pound costs about a dollar. Two years ago, Lilia, 45, bought her father a new beekeeping suit, which was featured on the front pages of newspapers, on the internet.
Lilia tried again and again to get her parents to leave Bohdanivka, but to no avail.
“It is especially heartbreaking when our friends and acquaintances take their parents away,” she said. “But they are taking them out. And I, no matter how I approach the subject, they won’t agree. “
“Dad won’t leave his children behind,” she added, referring to the bees. His other children had long since left home.
Dimitry Yatsenko contribution report.
