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

“Man, this is actually really good. No, I’m serious!” he said when Jake scoffed.

Celia and Jake pored over the new cooking app he was using. It linked to a grocery list, which he texted to Noah and Celia so they could food shop for him. It pained him to ask for their help, but he knew he couldn’t handle that right now. The idea of rolling through Little Bit Grocery and Ranch Supply for the first time in over a year—well, he might as well do it naked, he thought. All those people staring at him and wanting to stop and talk to him. No way. Not yet. He’d made a troubled peace with the fact that depending on his friends allowed him to contribute to Alice’s household and gave him some value as a guest.

After they put away the groceries, Celia wanted to see the bees again. This time she donned Alice’s full bee suit and walked right up to the hive with Jake, who approached them, as always, bareheaded.

Noah stayed back by the gate. “You’re gonna get the shit stung out of you, Cece! Don’t come crying to me, sissy.”

“No soy nena!” Celia called back at him. “You’re the sissy!”

“I can see one on your shoulder right now. It’s going to bore into your ear and eat your brain!”

Noah soon tired of heckling and began bouncing a tennis ball against the side of the barn.

They eased up next to one of the more mature hives, and Jake told Celia to crouch down near the entrance so she could watch the bees flying in and out. She moved slowly like he told her to, and the bees carried on unperturbed. One guard bee buzzed around Jake’s bare face. He closed his eyes and breathed, holding himself still until she decided he was not a threat and went about her business. He heard Celia gasp.

“Oh my gosh! Look at their legs! So orange! And yellow!”

Jake smiled. The bees were landing on the hive entrance like tiny planes, one after the other. Their pollen baskets were loaded with exaggerated hues of orange, yellow, and red. Some were dusted from head to toe and sat on the hive board, combing the pollen over their heads and down onto their legs. Jake pointed to one with a bright yellow pair of back legs.

“That’s called the corbicula. It’s a little compartment she can stash the pollen in. She’ll go in and hand it off to another bee that will pack it away to feed to the babies later. They fill up whole sides of the frame. It almost looks like a painting.”

“I want to see!” Celia said.

Jake hesitated before leading Celia over to one of the new hives. He felt a pang of regret that he hadn’t told Alice he’d opened them while she was at work yesterday. He couldn’t keep away from them that morning either. He’d completed inspections of the other half of the new hives that Alice had brought home from Sunnyvale Bee Company—Nos. 19 through 24, which were all still single-level brood boxes and positioned on the east edge of the apiary. He was fascinated by their industry, their beauty, and the mystery of the queen’s music. Now Jake put his hand on the top of No. 17 and closed his eyes. The box hummed, calm and even. He listened longer, envisioning the center of the frames, his breath slowing until he could hear it, the faint sound of that G-sharp—the note that told him the queen was in there and that the hive was “queen right.”

Jake jimmied the hive tool under the top. He set the top off to the side with the inner cover and pulled out a frame, which was still empty of wax and bees. He slid the other frames over, eased out the center frame, and held it up for Celia to see.

Jake heard her quick, sharp breath.

“Amazing!” she whispered, and clasped her hands.

Jake propped the frame on the arm of his chair. The bees went about their business, unhurried and steady. He pointed out the band of brilliant pollen packed into cells. He showed her where the honey was stored, where the larvae were capped, and which were the uncapped egg cells. In the middle of the moving mass of bodies he saw the elegant body of the queen, still marked with a bright green dot from the breeder.

“There she is, Cece,” he said. “The lady who makes it all happen.”

Jake had read about how early beekeepers and scientists assumed that this larger bee was a male and called her the king. It wasn’t until the mid-seventeenth century that a Dutch naturalist dissected the ovaries and discovered this error. Celia thought that was funny too.

“Typical man thinking. This makes total sense to me, though,” she said, gesturing at the mass of quivering bodies encircling the queen. “This is like Christmas at my house. That’s Abuelita in the middle and all my aunties and mom running around doing whatever she tells them to. She would love this! And the part about the drones hanging around doing nothing—órale!” She snapped her fingers.

Personally, Jake found the fate of the drones a bit distressing. They lived only to mate once and then died after the act. Those that never mated were kicked out of the hive in the fall because, since they weren’t wired to raise brood or forage, they were excess baggage.

The sound of the tennis ball ceased.

“Sorry to ruin the party out there, Neil Armstrong,” Noah called, “but I gotta jet to work!”

Celia walked toward him in slow motion, breathing through the screened face shield.

“Luke. I am your father,” she rasped.

“Wrong color, Cece! Vader’s black, not white,” Noah said.

Jake helped Celia take off the bee suit and followed his friends to the truck, not wanting them to leave. He dreaded the arrival of Alice’s new hire, Harry, that evening.

Noah leaned against the door and scrolled through his phone. “We’re jamming at Pomeroy’s this weekend. You should