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

was always like this when he hit a dead end. He couldn’t move ahead in the way he had planned, and that was that. His shoulders slumped, and he started to turn away. But then he thought of what Yogi had said to Autumn about relaunching the kite. Attitude is everything, he’d said. You gotta believe you can make it happen.

Harry turned back toward the clerk and smiled tentatively. “Ma’am,” he said, “I’m sorry to inconvenience you.”

He explained he’d been living with Mr. Goodwin, who was his great-uncle. He was picking up the ashes for his mother because she was in Florida. Maybe he could call Dr. Chimosky at Skyline and ask him to confirm all this for her. Would that work? Or was there a form he could email to his mom to have her release the ashes to Harry?

There must be some process, he thought. He just needed to be patient and follow through.

As he spoke, the woman’s face softened. “Chimosky was his doc, huh? Yeah, I think that could work.”

Harry produced the number he’d been carrying around in his wallet. She picked up the phone, peered at the paper, and punched the number.

“Thanks,” she said, sounding almost friendly.

A few minutes later, she was handing him a small plastic container. Harry signed the release she gave him and thanked her. She smiled, and Harry realized whatever made her so grouchy had nothing to do with him.

“I’m sorry for your loss,” she said. “And for your family.”

He nodded and thanked her again. He left feeling tremendously pleased with himself. He had honored his uncle. He would call his mother. Harry Stokes was a man who could solve his own problems. He walked out into the May sunshine and back to the truck, where his new friend Jake waited for him. Whatever was coming next, Harry was ready.

24 Hive Splitting

The plan of multiplying colonies by dividing a full hive into two parts, and adding an empty half to each, will be found to require a degree of skill and knowledge, far in advance of what can be expected of ordinary bee-keepers.

—L. L. LANGSTROTH

The Schmidt sting pain index was first published in the 1980s by the entomologist Justin Schmidt in an attempt to catalog and compare the pain inflicted by various stinging insects. The Western honeybee rated level 2 out of a possible 4 and with a typical duration of ten minutes. Alice could not have said for certain where the honeybee sting landed on the scale (somewhere between the tropical fire ant and the red paper wasp), but she did know that the usually gentle Apis mellifera only stung as a last resort because it was a fatal act. Once a honeybee inserted her tiny barbed lancet under the skin of an offending creature, she was unable to withdraw it without tearing her body apart in the process. As she released the apitoxin venom through the stinger, she simultaneously emitted a pheromone to raise the alarm among her sisters. More bees would join the fight and bombard the enemy with increasing fury as their own suicidal stings ratcheted up the message that the colony was under attack.

Later, Alice would recall that she smelled the classic banana fragrance of the pheromone that acted as a call to arms. But Jake told her that the thing he noticed was the sound. He heard the contented murmur of the colony shoot up into a pitch of defense. And a moment later, he felt the first of those level 2 stings.

Alice could tell he didn’t take it personally. She had run to the farthest edge of the apiary as the bees descended in an angry cloud. She watched Jake slowly turn his chair around and move calmly out of the apiary. By the time he reached the house, he was enveloped in a swirl of buzzing bodies but never once swatted at them. He just took it. She’d never seen anything like it.

Sitting at the kitchen table, Alice dug gingerly at the soft skin under his eye with a tweezer. The area had swelled up considerably while she’d been busy pulling stingers out of his scalp. She swore under her breath as she grasped the tiny barb and finally eased it out. “I think that’s the last one.”

She handed him an ice pack and sat back to look at him. “Dammit, Jake. I’m so sorry. That was a stupid mistake.”

Jake prodded the puffy area under his eye with his index finger. “No, it’s all good, Alice. At least now I know I’m not allergic.”

She glanced at her watch. “We’re not out of the woods yet. I pulled at least twenty stingers out of you. You just sit tight and let me know if you’re feeling dizzy or having trouble breathing. You took that Benadryl, right?”

He nodded.

She had wanted to use the EpiPen, but he insisted the ice pack and Benadryl were enough.

They had managed to split two hives before things fell apart. As they started the third, Jake sat, bareheaded and unveiled as usual, waiting for Alice to hand him a full frame. It was swollen with capped brood and loaded with bees. Alice extended it to him, lost her grip, and dropped it next to the wheelchair. It hit the ground, and the bees exploded upward.

Looking at the kid’s swollen face, she felt a wave of anger at herself. She felt terrible for hurting the bees and for getting Jake stung. She knew better than to work the hives when she was distracted. She’d been thinking about what Fred Paris said. Arrogant, pink-faced Fred. What had she expected? Even her father hadn’t had anything nice to say about Fred Paris, and Al Holtzman had liked almost everyone.

Earlier that day, after her talk with Doug Ransom, Alice had visited Victor Bello and Dennis Yasui, both of whom were on Doug’s list of allies. They