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

watched him navigate it. The chickens clucked an alarm at their approach and scattered. Red Head Ned stalked out in front of Alice, and glared at them, reminding her that he was on duty. Alice pointed at him and smiled.

“Watch out for that guy. He’s a real hothead.”

The barn was divided into the shop area and the bunkroom. In the shop Alice showed Jake an empty hive and took out the frames to show him what the foundation looked like before the bees built out the honeycomb. Bits of old beeswax clung to them, and Jake took one of them from her and put it to his nose, breathing in the ghost of honey.

Alice explained the difference between a brood box and a honey super, which was really just a question of location. Honey supers went on top of the brood boxes, which were baby bee nurseries or brood nests. She talked about how the bees built their comb out and the way a hive developed with its brood nest in the middle and honey and pollen around the edges as food stores. The excess honey in the supers was what she could harvest because it meant the bees had ample stores for the winter when they clustered up and couldn’t fly.

Jake put his finger on some sticky brown residue. “Is this honey?”

Alice shook her head. “No. That’s called propolis. They gather it from trees around here and use it to plug up any cracks or holes. Kind of like natural caulk.”

“They go get it and bring it back to the hive?”

She nodded. Propolis, which bees used to secure every gap in a hive, was just one of many dazzling bee miracles.

The kid actually seemed interested, so she checked the wind reading on her phone and decided it didn’t seem too strong after all. She grabbed her hat and gloves and looked squarely at Jake.

“If you’re game, I can open up a hive so you can see the girls at work. I have a full bee suit if you want to put that on. I also have a jacket and another hat and veil. That might be easier, but your legs won’t be protected. They aren’t aggressive, but they might sting you if they are feeling protective. It just depends on how comfortable you think you’ll be.”

“Jacket’s fine, Alice,” he said, smiling.

“You sure?”

He nodded. “I can’t feel my legs anyway, so if they start stinging the shit out of me, I won’t notice,” he said.

Alice looked at him closely, seeing a glint in his eye. Mischievous or bitter? She couldn’t tell, and she didn’t know what to say.

He waved a hand at her. “I’m not allergic. I promise,” he said.

Alice handed him the hat and jacket.

“At least my hair fits under this thing today,” he said with a chuckle, pulling the hat on his head and deftly zipping the jacket.

She grabbed her tool bag and led the way into the yard. The ground was flatter there, and Jake seemed to have an easier time rolling over it.

The apiary was surrounded by a fence to deter raccoons, which were everywhere, and bears, which were less frequent but occasional visitors. Alice opened the gate to the enclosure in which the white wooden hives were set in orderly rows. Twelve of them—the oldest hives—were two boxes high. The twelve new hives, inhabited by the newcomers Alice had brought home from Sunnyvale, were single boxes. The air was full of zinging bees, but they were too busy to take much notice of the two humans.

Alice stopped next to one of the two-level hives. “Italians, 2013, No. 11” was scrawled on the side in black grease pen. A warm buzz emanated from its core, a steady pulse like a heartbeat or a small engine. Golden bees crawled in and out of a slot entrance a few at a time. Alice pointed out how they each paused for a moment, and then headed off in more or less the same direction. The kid watched them catch the wind and disappear.

Alice took a small metal can out of her bag and tucked pieces of paper and burlap into it.

“This is called a smoker,” she said, lighting the paper and pumping the can’s small leather bellows. “I use just a little bit to calm them down.”

She used a metal hive tool to loosen the top of the hive and then eased it off to one side along with the inner cover. The buzzing went up a notch. A couple of bees drifted out from the front of the hive and hovered around Alice’s veiled face.

“Good morning, girls,” she said almost under her breath. “Just coming in to have a look. No need to worry.”

She pumped cool smoke into the hive in three short bursts. The bees climbed down inside and out of view. Alice set the smoker aside and used the tool to loosen one end of a wooden frame and then the other. She maneuvered it out of the box and held it in her gloved fingertips for Jake to see. In a quiet voice she explained what he was looking at—capped honey, uncapped honey, pollen, worker larvae cells, and a sprinkling of drone cells. If he looked closely, she said, he would see tiny bee eggs at the bottom in some open cells like grains of rice. Climbing around on all that material was a murmuring mass of black-and-gold bodies. Each diligent to her task, the bees moved around the frame with purpose.

Alice took his silence for nervousness and moved to slide the frame back into the box.

He reached out with his gloved hands. “Can I hold it?” he asked. “I’ll be really careful.”

Surprised, she nodded and transferred the frame from her gloved hands to his. Jake held it in front of his face and looked at the workers, some scent fanning, some oblivious.

Not a scaredy-cat, anyway, Alice thought.

After they had examined every single frame from that brood box, after Alice had shown him the difference