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

use the money to buy another. With dismay, she saw Bud put up a hand. She didn’t want to participate in the little girl’s sorrow. Bud offered an outrageous sum for the animal, far more than it was worth for breeding stock or meat. When the bidding was over, Luz Quinto handed him the stock ticket with big tears in her dark eyes. Bud leaned down and whispered something in her ear and handed the ticket back. Her face lit with joy. She ran to her parents, the lamb kicking its little hooves behind her.

“You are a big softy,” Alice said.

“It’s just I’m thinking about going vegan,” Bud said, slapping his big belly, and they both laughed.

They spent the afternoon walking through the corrals of cows, goats, and pigs. They sampled pies, jams, chutney, and fresh apples and pears. They avoided the noise and lights of the midway without even talking about it. Bud seemed to understand that Alice wouldn’t like that—the rides, the day-drunk adults, and the crowds of roving children. They strolled through the barns, looking at the heritage chickens, the sows and boars, the enormous bulls that would later be used in the rodeo. On the far side of the stock area, they found the beehives.

Later, Alice would know the names for the different hives she saw that day—Langstroth, top bar, leaf hive. There was even a woven reed and mud in the style of an old-fashioned skep. These demos were set there by the local beekeeping association. They were all empty except for one Langstroth hive that had a Plexiglas viewing window on one side.

Alice sat on the bench in front of the hive, enthralled by what she saw. Thousands of bees crawled over the comb, unhurried, each proceeding single-mindedly in her task. Pollen-laden bees stuffed bright orange powder into cells and packed it down with their legs. She watched one bee feed a clumsy, white larva. She saw a bee emerging from a cell, complete and perfect. What a tiny, amazing, orderly world.

Bud read the sign in front of the hive. “‘This hive, built in the style of American beekeeper Lorenzo Langstroth, contains approximately fifty thousand bees when fully functioning. A healthy hive will produce between five and ten gallons of honey per year. Local honeybee hives are a boon to orchards and farms. Langstroth hives are available at a discount through the Hood River County Beekeeping Association.’”

He sat next to Alice, and they watched in silence for some time. Alice had never been so comfortable with a man. She hadn’t thought it possible. Bud just slipped into her quiet world like that.

“You should get one,” he said after a while. “They would love the orchard at your folks’ house.”

Alice shook her head. “I wouldn’t know the first thing,” she said.

Bud had thought otherwise and showed up at her parents’ barn the following Saturday with an unassembled Langstroth hive in the back of his truck.

“I thought maybe you could help me put it together,” he said, grinning and holding up his big hands. “I’m all thumbs with these little nails and stuff.”

Alice went along with his ruse. Because why not? Together they assembled forty wooden frames, two brood boxes, and two honey supers. They primed the boxes and painted them and built a hive stand. The process took several Saturdays, and Marina invited Bud to join them for dinner every week. By the time the hive was assembled, it was too late to say no to anything Bud Ryan asked of her. This big, laughing man didn’t mind her silence. He didn’t read it, as many did, as unfriendliness. Bud understood her in a way most people didn’t. Alice felt like herself around him. She didn’t even think about things like love or marriage. There was no decision. They just were.

“As it should be,” Marina said three months later, though still irked that her only daughter had gone to the courthouse on a Friday afternoon and gotten married without telling anyone.

But those days were long past. Now Alice gripped the steering wheel and felt her whole body shake. There was a hole inside her gaping open. Dr. Zimmerman said it would take time and hard work for it to grow smaller. She said it would never heal completely. Her grief was part of her life now. She had to name it and learn to regulate it so she wouldn’t feel that panic and loss of control.

Alice clenched her fists and fought for her breath. She thought of the kid back at the farm, and that just made everything worse. She couldn’t handle having another person at the house. Not when she could fall apart like this. Jake would have to go home and soon—that much was clear. The thought calmed her. At least she still had control over her house, her farm. She could be there on Alice Island with her drawbridge up. Her breathing slowed. She wiped her eyes and felt a calm weight settle in her core.

She turned the ignition and drove toward Little Bit to pick up some bales of hay. She needed to make a new windbreak anyway, and the bales would offer a plausible excuse for her hasty departure. She tried to think of the words she would say to let the kid down easy. Even her parents would agree with that plan, surely.

“It’ll be fine, right?” she asked aloud. “He’ll understand that’s just how it’s got to be?”

But her parents’ voices were silent as the grave.

9 Worker Bee

The Workers, or common bees, compose the bulk of the population of a hive . . . It has already been stated, that the workers are all females whose ovaries are too imperfectly developed to admit of their laying eggs.

—L. L. LANGSTROTH

When Alice Holtzman was ten years old, she stood in front of her fourth-grade class and told the story of how Holtzmans had farmed