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

graduate students on a tour of the valley. Four students had proposed a study to look at the relationship between local orchard production and honeybee populations. Understanding the symbiotic value of the two ecosystems was a silver lining, Jake supposed.

On this April day, he sat outside May Street Elementary in the butterfly garden where he and the teacher had decided to establish the hives. The garden was part of the new science building, which was state-of-the-art in terms of accessibility inside and on the grounds. Noah had dropped him off and helped him unload the nucs. Jake wanted to drive himself, but his adaptive conversion Subaru, paid for with a sweet grant from the Mobility Resource, wouldn’t be ready for another week. He couldn’t wait to be behind the wheel of his own car.

His mentor, Chris, had let him practice in his car, a tricked-out Honda Pilot, after Jake had passed his driver’s test. Jake had driven them both to Portland for a meeting with his support group. When he pulled onto the highway and accelerated up to speed, he felt a rush of adrenaline and screamed at the top of his lungs.

Chris laughed and punched him in the shoulder. “Don’t wreck my ride, little man!” he said.

He knew he was early, but he was happy to sit in the sunshine and wait for the kids from Ms. Unalitin’s class. He put a hand on both of the wooden nuc boxes he’d brought and felt the quiet vibration of the bees within. Each nuc contained five frames of drawn comb, honeybees, healthy brood, and a big fat queen. They were already a happy family unit, so transferring the frames would be a quiet affair. Jake could show the kids the capped brood, the uncapped larvae, and the eggs on the frames before he transferred them into the newly painted hives. If they had enough time, Jake would have them look for the queen. Most of the kids would be too nervous to handle the frames, but if any wanted to give it a try, he would show them how to work slowly and carefully, just like Alice had taught him last year.

And just as he’d taught Amri. More cautious than he, she wore a full bee suit the first three or four times and just sat and watched him work. Remembering Harry’s introduction to the bees, Jake didn’t pressure her. She asked him questions while he examined the frames and documented the development of each new hive. She hadn’t fallen in love with them immediately like Jake had, which was like her. Amri felt things deeply, but it took her a while to show her feelings.

In that way she was different from her parents. Like Ken, his wife, Olivia, was a social justice lawyer, but she had been a yoga teacher when she was pregnant with Amrita, whose name meant “nectar” in Sanskrit. The younger children had more earthly names—River, Sage, and Tierra—but Amri’s parents were still big on communication and sharing their feelings. The first time they invited Jake over, Olivia had called ahead to tell him the house had a ramp and would be navigable in his chair. Even though Amri had already told him, he thought it was really nice of her. As they sat around the table, they took turns saying what they were grateful for before they ate. Amri rolled her eyes. The younger kids had an easier time with it. Ice cream, tricycles, and unicorn underwear topped the list for Tierra, who had recently been potty-trained and was in love with her little-girl undies. For Jake, whose family had stopped eating dinner together when he was twelve and who didn’t have siblings, it was cool. He said he was grateful for honeybees, good friends, and his dog, not necessarily in that order. Still, he understood that Amri seemed reserved on the outside while she felt things intensely. And once he got that about her, he could easily read her affection for him. She loved him, he knew. The thought still made him dizzy.

Last night at the farm she said she wanted to ditch class and come with him that morning, but Jake wouldn’t let her.

“Don’t be a fool! Stay in school!” he said in his best imitation of Mr. T. “You can come help me after.”

She shrugged and leaned down to kiss him before climbing into her car.

“See you, handsome,” she said, her green eyes bright under her dark hair.

There goes my girlfriend, he thought. It had been almost a year, but the words still made his heart pound. They weren’t rushing anything, but he could tell Dr. Gunheim at his next checkup that everything seemed to be working.

After Amri left, Jake rolled out to the yard to watch the sunset. He pulled out his trumpet. The weight of the polished brass felt familiar and comforting in his hands. He ran through his scales for a while, which always aroused the suspicion of Red Head Ned. The little bantam stalked toward Jake and then patrolled the line between the boy and the chicken coop for a few minutes, as if to remind him who was boss. Jake finished his scales and played “Up Jumped Spring,” a piece he’d worked on over the winter. It felt like an appropriate song for the season and for the bees. The phrasing mirrored the quick, graceful motion of the bees and their contented, busy flight patterns up and over the field. Could the queen bees hear it? he wondered. He hoped so. Maybe they would understand what it was—a love song, an offering, a hymn of gratitude for his new life and the unexpected joys it brought forth.

Now Jake looked at the two hives the third- and fourth-grade classes had built to house these two nucs. The third-grade hive was a traditional Langstroth like the ones he first saw at Alice’s. The fourth-grade hive was essentially a Langstroth hive laid out horizontally. It had the same number of