The mysterious bee swarm on the grave of Josephine Danis

On ground-dwelling bees and the forgotten dead.

Insect Coloration, study folder for book Concealing Coloration in the Animal Kingdom (Smithsonian American Art Museum and its Renwick Gallery)

Kaskaskia Island exists outside of time. Go, and imagine it’s 1923, 1952, 1985, 2003, or 2035, and they all seem like possibilities. Isolated in the middle of the Mississippi river, maps say it’s Illinois, but geographically it’s not quite in Missouri, not quite Illinois. It’s been called the Versailles of the West, the American Atlantis, the cursed village of Kaskaskia, perpetually doomed to wash away, piece by piece, in the floodwaters. And its dead have been moved more than once when the waters came.

But that curse’s half-life must be decaying, because Kaskaskia’s dead have been in the same spot for a while, surrounded by cornfields and bordered on one side by a tiny, looping canal. You won’t find all the graves from the settlers of Old Kaskaskia, but you’ll definitely see the names of their descendants, including the DeRousses, Cassoutts, and Danises.

A turtle suns itself near the grave of Josephine Danis, July 2023.

One woman who married into that last clan is Josephine Danis, “kind and affectionate wife” to Frank Danis and “Friend to all,” who died in 1902 at the age of 47. Like a lot of the older headstones at Kaskaskia, hers fell and shattered. Broken into three pieces, it’s reassembled on a concrete plinth. And it’s covered in bees.

Kaskaskia’s vibe is already otherworldly, so finding a flat, broken headstone swarmed with bees seems like a completely natural occurrence there. These bees are likely a ground-nesting species, of which there are many, including the Silver-Sided Nomad Bee, Hairy-Footed Flower Bee, Shrill Carder Bee, Red-Thighed Cuckoo Mining Bee, Square-Spotted Mourning Bee, Cryptic Bumblebee, Square-Headed Furrow Bee, Furry-Bellied Blood Bee, Violet-Winged Mining Bee, Large Shaggy Bee, Sea Aster Bee, White-Jawed Yellow Face Bee, Pantaloon Bee, Small Scissor Bee, Large Scissor Bee, Gold-Fringed Mason Bee, Dull-Vented Sharp-Tailed Bee. Most of these burrowing bees are solitary, though. So their identity will remain a mystery.

Josephine’s past remains a mystery, too —  the only record I could find of her was documentation of her plot on Find-a-Grave. She doesn’t turn up in Census records, and neither does Frank. They are probably somewhere in the Randolph County parish records, but the only ones I know how to access online stop in the early 19th century, long before Josephine was born in 1855. I don’t know her maiden name, don’t know if she had kids. The only thing I know is that in Kaskaskia, Danis was pronounced “Dan-ee.”

But I can tell you Josephine lived in Kaskaksia during a very odd time, when the old, original village was washing away and falling into ruin; a newer, diminished Kaskaskia was taking its place. This erased woman lived in a village that was experiencing erasure. It began a few years before her birth and continued after her death.

Maude Crisler French wrote about a visit to Old Kaskaskia in the late 1890s, not long before Josephine died; she and her sister, Rose, rowed out to Kaskaskia Island from Chester, Illinois and spent the day there, making sketches and exploring what was left of the village. In 1944, The Journal of the Illinois State Historical Society reprinted French’s account. The editor, in his preface, noted that "Kaskaskia, at the time this account was written, was obviously close to its end. The Mississippi broke through the channel of the Kaskaskia River north of the town in 1881; every year thereafter, it nibbled at the old village. By 1910, every original structure except the Menard home was gone."

French wrote:

As we looked about us at the old dilapitated houses and stone buildings clustered around the mill, decayed and falling to pieces, we thought them also fit habitation for ghostly visitors. An uncanny air prevaded the place, weird and lifeless indeed, were it not for the golden sunshine, the birds singing in the gorgeously robed trees as though it were springtime, and the little crystal rill bubbling and sparkling as merrily as in "ye olden time." With exception not and then of a poor family living in a room or two of some rambling house not fallen to decay, the place is entirely deserted.

Bees have been associated with death for centuries. Planet Bee notes that in the Greco-Roman world, bees were associated with the souls of the dead “because wild hives are often located in cracks in rock walls or caves, which were imagined to be entrances to the Underworld.” The practice of telling the bees, paying a visit to the family hives to tell the colony about important life events, including deaths, stretches back at least that far. And it’s still being practiced in Europe — when Queen Elizabeth died, the royal beekeeper informed the million-plus palace bees that their mistress had passed, and they were now under Charles’ stewardship.

Strict materialists and Cartesians will say that’s nonsense. But who knows? In 1957, a Massachussetts beekeeper, John Zepka, died. The North Adams Transcript ran his obituary, and right above it, a curious account of his funeral:

“Throughout his long life, the late John Zepka of 21 Victory street had raised, worked with and loved bees and was widely known in this section as a man who ‘had a way with them.’ This morning it appeared that as though the bees had taken their own way of paying a final tribute to him,” it wrote. “When his funeral cortege reached the grave in St. Stanislaus cemetery they found the funeral tent literally swarming with bees. They were all over the tent ceiling and clinging to the profuse funeral sprays. They made no attempt to annoy the mourners, just remained almost immoble. Persons who saw the spectacle declared they had never seen anything like it before.”

Beehives have their own dedicated undertakers and bury their dead. If you are not a strict materialist, maybe you believe bees experience grief, just like we do. That they went to say goodbye to John Zepka. And that they homesteaded under the grave of the forgotten Josephine Danis to keep her ghost company, and shock us into remembering the forgotten life of this good wife and friend to all.

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Pointing a dotted arrow over to Thomas’s Substack — plz note he had four (four!!) alt-weekly cover stories this week. That’d be three on micronations (in the Riverfront Times, Cleveland Scene and Cincy CityBeat) and one for Salt Lake City Weekly on the ABCs of the UFC. As I mentioned last week, he’s got a new project page too, Silver Tray, with new music content going up on the regular, like this fine convo with STL’s late Spinning Jenny.

Thanks to new subscribers agazes, aamehs, and Jennifer H.. Nice to see you here; thanks for hopping on board. As always, I appreciate all subscribers, paid or unpaid.

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