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

the measuring tape between them and then measured the width of the brood box.

“—Times two. Yeah, that’ll work,” he said to himself. He straightened up and smiled at Jake. “You just need a workbench, man.”

He measured the height of Jake’s chair from the armrests and Jake’s natural reach, and in half an hour, Harry had manufactured a portable table that could hold two brood boxes, side by side, over Jake’s lap. Jake rolled his chair under the table and laughed.

“You’re a fucking genius, Stokes!”

The older boy flushed with pleasure. “It’s no big deal. Just some wood and nails.”

“Dude, you’re talking to someone who flunked shop class.”

Now Harry laughed, incredulous. “Seriously? How does anyone flunk shop?”

Jake leaned his bald head back, looked up at the ceiling, and counted on his fingers. “Let’s see: Don’t show up. Show up super baked. Show up late and fail to complete the assignment. Oh, and superglue a girl’s books to the desk.”

That last one had been Noah’s idea, but Jake was the one who did it. It had somehow seemed hilarious that day. He laughed, but Harry wasn’t smiling.

“Wow. That’s weird, man. I just . . . that doesn’t seem like something you would do,” Harry said.

Jake cocked his head. “Which part?”

“Well, any of it,” Harry said. “I mean, you’re so solid with everything around here.”

Jake realized it was true. He wouldn’t fuck around like that at Alice’s. Not with the bees or anything at the farm.

“That was before,” he said quietly.

Harry nodded and eyed the chair. “But you graduated, right?”

Jake barked a laugh. “Well, I have a diploma! They can’t take it back.”

He shook his head and looked at the brood boxes, then out at the apiary. This was his new life, he reminded himself. He was assistant to the beekeeper. He knew what to do.

“Listen, Harry. I think I can do this pretty quickly. But I’m going to need some help.”

Jake told him to go wash his hands and face, brush his teeth, and change into a clean shirt.

“Just trust me,” he said.

When Harry reappeared, Jake pointed to the full bee suit, and Harry donned it without protest.

“Tuck your pants into your boots. Here.” Jake handed him a pair of gloves. Harry pulled them on with shaking hands.

“Sit down, man.”

Harry sat, breathing sharp, shallow breaths.

“Breathe, Harry.”

The older boy inhaled a quivering breath and let it out in a puff.

“Listen. If you are calm, they will be calm. If you freak out and slap at them like you did before, they will release a stress hormone and come after you. And you cannot drop the brood box or put it down fast, okay?”

Harry blinked and nodded.

“Good. I’m going to tell you what to do at each step. You just have to listen to me. Pretend you are in slo-mo. Like you are underwater, like Tai Chi. No joke. Can you do that?”

“Yeah. I can do that.”

Jake made him take ten slow breaths, and then he zipped the screened hood over Harry’s head.

Cheney lay panting in the sunny grass and watched the two young men enter the apiary—one dressed like an astronaut and the other in an orange T-shirt and jeans, his bald head shining in the sun. Jake guided Harry through prying the first brood box from its stand using the hive tool. Then Harry slowly lifted the box up onto the makeshift workstation over Jake’s lap next to the empty brood box. Harry hurried to a safer distance and unzipped his hood. Jake sat with his eyes closed, breathing slowly and thinking through the steps he would take. When he opened his eyes, he saw Harry watching him. He loosened the top of the hive and gently lifted if off. Two or three bees buzzed out and hovered near Jake’s face, then around his shirt. One landed on his newly bald head, and he smiled.

“Hello, ladies,” he murmured. “The movers are here. Everything is going to be just fine.”

One by one, he loosened and transferred the frames into the flipped brood box with the entrance now at the top, and then he replaced the lid. He waved at Harry.

“Okay, Stokes. This one is done. Take ’er back!”

Watching Jake’s quiet engagement with the bees seemed to have emboldened him, and Harry was calmer then. The six brood boxes were transferred in an hour. They could see that the foraging bees were finding their way through the top entrances into the new hives. Jake slapped his palms together.

“Shit, we’re done for the day,” he said.

He glanced up at the big pines on the edge of the meadow, which were tossing their shaggy branches in the westerly wind.

“Wind’s up! I say we hit the kite beach!”

20 Bee Dance

Bees when on the wing intercommunicate with such surprising rapidity, that telegraphic signals are scarcely more instantaneous.

—L. L. LANGSTROTH

Each member of a honeybee colony is united by a common bond—the pheromone of their mother and queen, a scent that spreads through the hive as a mark of belonging. That lemony pheromone is a constant reassurance to each of the fifty thousand murmuring bees that she is home. Humans have no such obvious interconnections, at least outside of their families. And Jake, of course, did not feel a sense of belonging even within his family home. Instead, home was something he yearned to escape, along with the entire town of Hood River.

During his first weeks in the hospital, he’d drawn the map of Hood River over and over again in his mind. The Heights neighborhood where the locals lived and shopped. Downtown’s three square blocks of boutiques, bars, and restaurants, where tourists strolled along, coffees in hand, blocking traffic as they meandered through the crosswalks. The waterfront where locals and visitors converged. This last was Jake’s playground—the skate park next to the kite beach and the giant sandbar that spilled out into the Columbia. There he had run with Cheney and felt the