The Music of Bees by Eileen Garvin (free ereaders txt) 📗

Garcia was a nice man and he had four little kids. He’d been in the hospital with a herniated disk. How Al learned these things was a mystery. Her unassuming father knew the intricacies of so many lives.

“What can you do for the boy, anyway, Alice my dear?”

Unless there was a clear answer, there was no reason to consider the question any further. That was Al’s clear counsel, even from the grave.

Alice sighed. “Nothing I can think of, Dad.”

She shook some Raisin Bran into a bowl and ate standing over the sink. She spooned sugar into another cup of coffee. She knew her eating habits were terrible, but she didn’t care. She’d finished off the Chips Ahoy! the night before, one by one, like it was work. She knew the emptiness she felt all the time was not hunger, but sugar was a short-term solution.

Alice took her notebook out to the bee yard to plan her day, grateful that it was Saturday and she didn’t have to go into the office. The wind had ceased scuttling, and the morning was glorious. Sunlight streamed through the branches of the cottonwoods by the creek. It warmed the white sides of her hives so that the girls were out in full force, their golden bodies flitting over the clover and into Doug Ransom’s orchard, then beyond that to who knew where. They could forage more than three miles. Alice wished there was a way to follow them and learn their bee secrets. Little web cams, she thought, which made her think about Jake’s joke about the tiny cattle dogs and lassoes.

She sat on a stump and looked at her notes from yesterday, when she had installed the nucs early before going into work.

Friday, April 11, 2014 Sunrise: 6:27 a.m., Temp: 63F/43F, Wind speeds 10–18 MPH, Precipitation: 0 inches, Sunset: 7:47 p.m. Hive totals to date: 24. Notes: Installed 12 Russian nucs in northeast side of the bee yard. Each hive with five frames of brood, pollen, and honey. Hives dated and marked No. 13–24. Transition without incident.

She smiled wryly at that last part. The nuc transfer had gone fine, but she felt there should be some way to note the unusual episode of running a teenager in a wheelchair off the road the night before she installed the bees. She put an asterisk after the word “incident” and wrote “(Jake Stevenson*)” as a footnote at the bottom of the page and then turned to the work for this day.

“Saturday, April 12, 2014,” she wrote. She jotted down the time of sunrise, the forecast high and low temperatures, and wind speeds. Then she wrote, “Tasks: complete regular inspection of hives No. 1–12.” That would keep her busy for hours.

Alice donned her veiled hat and gloves and began the careful work of inspecting her original twelve hives, which were each two brood boxes tall. She cracked the first top open with her hive tool, set it aside, and removed the inner cover. She loosened a frame and eased it out. Holding it up she looked for eggs, larvae, and capped brood. She checked for pollen and honey stores. She set that frame aside and pulled out the next one. As the sun climbed in the sky, she completed this action for all ten frames in the top and bottom brood boxes of the twelve hives. Only two weren’t thriving. Probably their queens hadn’t made it through the winter. In those she saw lots of drone brood, which was the sign of a laying worker, but no queen cells had been created. Alice decided to add frames from healthier hives to give them a boost.

She looked through her notes and identified two of the strongest hives. In the first she found frames ringed with capped honey, bands of golden and orange pollen under that, and row after row of healthy brood cells. Alice breathed in the sweet scent of wax and honey. This would do quite nicely. If the queens in the ailing hives had died, robust workers like these could produce another one within three weeks. She made a note to check for queen cells in five days and then set to work, humming to herself, transferring healthy frames into the two fragile hives.

Alice had always enjoyed the problem-solving part of beekeeping. Each hive was a living organism with different needs. The bees fascinated her, these single-minded creatures that each worked tirelessly for the whole. And they created such beauty—the honey stores, yes, but also the wax foundation and the brilliant caches of pollen, which ranged in color from lemon to pumpkin to ruby. She marveled that her simple hobby had grown from one hive to twenty-four. She stood in the sunlight with bees buzzing around her veiled head as the number sank in. Twenty-four was almost halfway to fifty. It felt like a tipping point. She pulled off her hat, sat in the noon shade, and looked out at the bee yard, chewing on her pencil. There was plenty of room to grow here. She could get to fifty hives by the end of the summer if she was methodical about splits and capturing swarms.

The idea excited her in a way she couldn’t remember being excited in a very long time. Practical by nature, and prone to consider obstacles first, now she just thought, Why not? She paged back through her notebook to last summer, where she had noted the details from the honey harvest that had yielded seven to ten gallons from each of the twelve hives. She’d sold it for $20 per quart at the fair and netted $6,000 after expenses. A tidy little sum. Her excitement grew. What might she do with more hives, more honey? The thought came immediately: she could afford to put in an orchard. She scanned her field where the land was flat and sunny. Something small, nothing like the historic Holtzman family orchard. But hers. Yes. Why not?

She would need help. That was certain. The