She said the words with an ease and confidence that she didn’t feel, and it did the trick. The kid smiled and rolled back to the table. He rifled through a copy of yesterday’s Hood River News while Alice made breakfast.
Over scrambled eggs and toast, she explained the apiary, which was currently at twenty-four hives and which she hoped to grow to fifty or more over the course of the summer. She explained the bee year, which started in spring and ran into fall. Her hives were all Langstroth hives, which were designed by Lorenzo Langstroth in the mid-1800s and had revolutionized beekeeping in America. Because they had removable frames, they were the easiest for beginning beekeepers, Alice said.
Jake said she didn’t seem like such a beginner with twenty-four hives, but she just shrugged. It still felt that way to her. When they went out to the barn after breakfast, Alice walked more slowly than usual and tried to act like she wasn’t. Unlike the house, the yard had not been modified for a wheelchair, and it seemed suddenly bumpy and rough to her as she watched him navigate it. The chickens clucked an alarm at their approach and scattered. Red Head Ned stalked out in front of Alice, and glared at them, reminding her that he was on duty. Alice pointed at him and smiled.
“Watch out for that guy. He’s a real hothead.”
The barn was divided into the shop area and the bunkroom. In the shop Alice showed Jake an empty hive and took out the frames to show him what the foundation looked like before the bees built out the honeycomb. Bits of old beeswax clung to them, and Jake took one of them from her and put it to his nose, breathing in the ghost of honey.
Alice explained the difference between a brood box and a honey super, which was really just a question of location. Honey supers went on top of the brood boxes, which were baby bee nurseries or brood nests. She talked about how the bees built their comb out and the way a hive developed with its brood nest in the middle and honey and pollen around the edges as food stores. The excess honey in the supers was what she could harvest because it meant the bees had ample stores for the winter when they clustered up and couldn’t fly.
Jake put his finger on some sticky brown residue. “Is this honey?”
Alice shook her head. “No. That’s called propolis. They gather it from trees around here and use it to plug up any cracks or holes. Kind of like natural caulk.”
“They go get it and bring it back to the hive?”
She nodded. Propolis, which bees used to secure every gap in a hive, was just one of many dazzling bee miracles.
The kid actually seemed interested, so she checked the wind reading on her phone and decided it didn’t seem too strong after all. She grabbed her hat and gloves and looked squarely at Jake.
“If you’re game, I can open up a hive so you can see the girls at work. I have a full bee suit if you want to put that on. I also have a jacket and another hat and veil. That might be easier, but your legs won’t be protected. They aren’t aggressive, but they might sting you if they are feeling protective. It just depends on how comfortable you think you’ll be.”
“Jacket’s fine, Alice,” he said, smiling.
“You sure?”
He nodded. “I can’t feel my legs anyway, so if they start stinging the shit out of me, I won’t notice,” he said.
Alice looked at him closely, seeing a glint in his eye. Mischievous or bitter? She couldn’t tell, and she didn’t know what to say.
He waved a hand at her. “I’m not allergic. I promise,” he said.
Alice handed him the hat and jacket.
“At least my hair fits under this thing today,” he said with a chuckle, pulling the hat on his head and deftly zipping the jacket.
She grabbed her tool bag and led the way into the yard. The ground was flatter there, and Jake seemed to have an easier time rolling over it.
The apiary was surrounded by a fence to deter raccoons, which were everywhere, and bears, which were less frequent but occasional visitors. Alice opened the gate to the enclosure in which the white wooden hives were set in orderly rows. Twelve of them—the oldest hives—were two boxes high. The twelve new hives, inhabited by the newcomers Alice had brought home from Sunnyvale, were single boxes. The air was full of zinging bees, but they were too busy to take much notice of the two humans.
Alice stopped next to one of the two-level hives. “Italians, 2013, No. 11” was scrawled on the side in black grease pen. A warm buzz emanated from its core, a steady pulse like a heartbeat or a small engine. Golden bees crawled in and out of a slot entrance a few at a time. Alice pointed out how they each paused for a moment, and then headed off in more or less the same direction. The kid watched them catch the wind and disappear.
Alice took a small metal can out of her bag and tucked pieces of paper and burlap into it.
“This is called a smoker,” she said, lighting the paper and pumping the can’s small leather bellows. “I use just a little bit to calm them down.”
She used a metal hive tool to loosen the top of the hive and then eased it off to one side along with the inner cover. The buzzing went up a notch. A couple of bees drifted out from the front of the hive and hovered around Alice’s veiled face.
“Good morning, girls,” she said almost under her breath. “Just coming in to have a look. No need to worry.”
She pumped cool smoke into the hive in three short bursts. The bees climbed down inside and out of view. Alice set the smoker aside and used the tool to loosen one end of a wooden frame and then the other. She maneuvered it out of the box and held it in her gloved fingertips for Jake to see. In a quiet voice she explained what he was looking at—capped honey, uncapped honey, pollen, worker larvae cells, and a sprinkling of drone cells. If he looked closely, she said, he would see tiny bee eggs at the bottom in some open cells like grains of rice. Climbing around on all that material was a murmuring mass of black-and-gold bodies. Each diligent to her task, the bees moved around the frame with purpose.
Alice took his silence for nervousness and moved to slide the frame back into the box.
He reached out with his gloved hands. “Can I hold it?” he asked. “I’ll be really careful.”
Surprised, she nodded and transferred the frame from her gloved hands to his. Jake held it in front of his face and looked at the workers, some scent fanning, some oblivious.
Not a scaredy-cat, anyway, Alice thought.
After they had examined every single frame from that brood box, after Alice had shown him the difference between a drone and a worker bee, and after they had identified the long, slender body of the queen bee in the middle of the box, Jake had a hundred questions.
Why was the queen in the middle, and why did she live longer than the others? Why did she have a green dot on her? How did the workers know what their jobs were? What happened to them in winter? What about the drones? Where do the bees get the pollen and nectar, and what was the difference between nectar and honey? How did they know where to fly? Where did the wax come from? Why did only the queen lay eggs?
Most people restricted their questions to stings and honey. A few asked about winter. Jake’s interest pleased Alice. She talked, and the boy listened. Really listened. The sun climbed over the field as they sat at a picnic table under the big cottonwood and watched the dance of the bees. Alice told him about royal jelly, gestation periods, bee space, and drone congregating areas. They talked for a long time.
Alice went back to the house and brought iced tea. They sat in a companionable silence, watching the honeybees stream from their hives into the forest and fields. Alice was surprised to feel easy sitting there with the boy. As a woman without children, Alice was not accustomed to teenagers, who, as a rule, made her uncomfortable. The only ones she saw regularly were the sullen progeny of her co-workers, who barely looked up from their phones to address her when prodded by their parents.
“You started with just the one hive, then?” Jake asked.
Alice nodded and smiled. She pulled her hair off her neck and wrapped it in a rubber band. She pointed out Hive No. 1 near the west fence line. “That one was my very first. I never thought I’d have twenty-four.”
“And you want to have fifty by the end of the summer?”
“Yep. If I don’t take as much honey and split the strong hives, I think it could work. Most of them are doing really well because we’ve had a good spring. I can probably capture some wild swarms to make new hives too.”
As long as no unseasonably hot spring days shriveled the delicate blossoms, she was thinking. As long as no big storms blew through the orchard, decimating the blossoms. She thought the kid would ask her next about how to catch a swarm. Instead he asked the one question she hadn’t seen coming, the most obvious question someone would ask.
“How did you get your first hive?”
There was a long pause, and Alice set down her glass with a bang. She couldn’t speak. Stalling, she looked back across the field and then up to the house. He was waiting for her to answer. The weight of her not answering sagged between them like a line of wet laundry. Alice felt her breath grow shallow and her chest tighten. Not here. Not now. She could not freak out in front of this kid, and she could not answer his question without freaking out. She punted.
“Damn!” she said, jumping up. “I forgot I was supposed to—Listen, I’ll be back in an hour. I’ve got to run into town. Sorry!”
Without a backward glance, she hustled over to the truck, picked the keys off the seat, and disappeared up the long driveway.
As soon as the house was out of sight, she pulled over and turned off the engine. She leaned her head back and tried to slow her breathing. Her heart hammered like mad, and a high-pitched tone rang in her ears.
Follow the thread, Dr. Zimmerman had said. Her laugh was a sob. No problem this time. An innocent question was a booby trap of memory. That was why it was easier to avoid talking to people. Invariably someone would blindside her with a simple question like Jake’s.
Alice had seen her first hive at the Hood River County Fair on a date with Bud Ryan more than ten years ago. It was not the first time Bud had asked her out, after months of flirting with her at the John Deere store. He had worked in the maintenance department then and befriended her dad, who had taken the tractor in to get the belt replaced. Tall, handsome Bud Ryan. What he saw in her, she never understood. Al couldn’t understand why she wouldn’t go out with him.
“It’s just lunch, Alice!” her father railed at her. “Just have lunch with the man, for the love of Pete!”
She said no. She said she worked during lunch. She said she had plans with her parents. She said she had a work thing. She was helping Al with the pruning. Finally, Bud invited her to the county fair.
“The 4-H awards are tomorrow, Ms. Holtzman. It’s a big day for all of our future farmers. Do it for the children, won’t you?”
She had laughed at that, happily defeated, and said yes. What was the big deal anyway? Her unease returned while she waited for him to pick her up that morning. She should be spending the day helping her dad in the orchard, she thought. They had so much to do. She reached for the phone to cancel, and then stopped. When he stepped out of his truck, smiling, she felt glad. Bud was kind and easy to be around. He was at home in his own skin and made her feel that way too.
Alice had always loved the county fair and was pleased when Bud steered her toward the animal competitions. At the lamb judging, they applauded for a tiny girl named Luz Quinto, who won a blue ribbon for her perfectly behaved little lamb. She led it around the circle on a loose rope, and anyone could tell the animal adored her. When the bidding started, Alice’s heart sank. It was part of it, but she hated the idea of seeing that little girl separated from her pet, though Alice knew she would 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 clenc
hed 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 her family’s orchard for three generations. She recounted how her great-grandparents had come to the Hood River Valley from Germany and planted the first trees. She explained how they passed the orchard to her grandparents, who passed it to Al and Marina. Colorful drawings went along with her presentation as she explained the seasons of pruning, irrigation, and harvest. She detailed annual crop tonnages and the Holtzmans’ prize varieties of heirloom fruit, including Pippins, Gravensteins, and Braeburns. For the last picture, Alice had drawn herself in overalls driving the green tractor between the rows of apple trees. This was how she imagined herself as a grown-up, taking over for her parents as the fourth generation of Holtzman family farmers.
The Music of Bees Page 10
