The Music of Bees

by Eileen Garvin

  “Five of my hives died overnight. Two others are ailing. They were strong, healthy hives. I’m almost positive it was the result of pesticide drift from Doug Ransom’s orchard.”

  Mutters rose, and she put up her hands.

  “Now, Doug is a friend of mine. He’s been really good about working with me—timing his spraying dates with low wind or east wind, and it has worked out fine. He sprayed on Monday, which was windless, so it should have been okay. Only this year, Doug used a new product on his trees. It was a SupraGro sample given to him as a free demo.”

  The room was utterly silent now. Other orchardists shifted in their chairs, looking at each other.

  “I’m sure Doug doesn’t know this, but SupraGro’s pesticides have been linked to large-scale hive devastation in Nebraska, North Dakota, and Northern California, as well as far-reaching destruction of watersheds and riparian systems. I’m having my dead hives tested at the extension service for residue, and I’m certain we will find SupraGro neonicotinoids in there.”

  “Chin up, dearie,” Al’s voice said. “They’re listening.”

  Alice pulled her shoulders back and lifted her gaze.

  “In the meantime, I propose that the Hood River County Beekeeping Association request a temporary ban on the use of SupraGro in the Hood River Valley until we determine if it is harmful to local bee populations. Can I get a second?”

  A hand shot up at the side of the room.

  “I second!” a man called. “Mr. President, can we get a vote, please?”

  Everyone started talking at once. Chuck stood and tried to call the room to order, but voices continued to rise.

  “Be quiet!” he yelled, and banged on the table with his clipboard.

  The room settled to a murmur.

  “Now,” Chuck growled through his mustache, glaring at Alice, “since we’ve had a motion and a second, we are obligated by our bylaws to have a discussion. I know that some of you want to get home. Anyone who leaves now is free to do so, but remember you will forfeit your right to vote on the issue. If you need to go, go now,” he said.

  Nobody left. Chairs creaked. Chuck sighed, sat down, and waved a hand.

  “The issue is officially open for discussion,” he said. “One at a time, please. And state your name.”

  Many people rose to speak. The room was full of old men, and old men have strong opinions. Some of them were worried that the county would impose regulations on them if they rocked the boat. Some of them had received free samples from SupraGro. Of course, they didn’t want to hurt their bees, but they made a living from the orchards. SupraGro was cheaper, and the science said it was more effective than the pesticides they’d been using. How could they say no to that? Others said they had read that the idea of pesticides hurting bees was a hoax. Some said they should only ban the use on large orchards, not small operations. After the bee club members had spoken, Stan stood.

  “My name is Stan Hinatsu. I’m the executive director of the Hood River Watershed Alliance—”

  “No nonmembers are allowed to participate in official debate,” Chuck interrupted with a snarl.

  Alice stood and waved her phone. “Nonmembers are allowed if they are called as experts by another member. I asked Stan to come,” she said. “The bylaws say—”

  “Fine!” Chuck hissed. “Proceed.”

  “Thank you,” Stan said.

  “. . . Uppity hippy,” someone in the back mumbled, and Stan pretended not to hear.

  “Name and affiliation, please,” Chuck said with a sigh.

  “My name is Stan Hinatsu. I’m the executive director of the Hood River Watershed Alliance. During the past week I’ve been conferring with other watershed groups and agriculture associations around the West, and I can tell you, unequivocally, that SupraGro is responsible for devastating the bee populations across the western United States.”

  He told them about the science behind it, how the extra strength of the SupraGro pesticide was nothing more than a double dose of neonicotinoids.

  “I won’t even get into the rest of it. What it does to the watershed and to the salmon,” Stan said.

  “. . . Going to want to take out the dams next,” someone grumbled.

  Stan waited till it was quiet again.

  “Look, I understand that many of you have orchards or your neighbors do. The orchard economy is the lifeblood of this community. This is not an anti-farming issue.”

  He paused.

  “The most recent data to come out of the University of California shows that in the communities where hives failed, the following spring showed a forty-five percent drop in fruit production due to the absence of local pollinators. In addition, research showed an acceleration in diseased fruit trees and outright tree loss. This is not some left-wing conspiracy. This is information from scientists at the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Here’s all the information we have to date.”

  Stan passed photocopies around the room. Voices rose as the members talked among themselves. Stan fielded questions about data and research sources. Most questions were respectful, but one man, sneering, asked if the watershed group saw itself as impartial.

  “Absolutely not,” Stan answered. “We are one hundred percent on the side of the wildlife and plant life of the valley and uninterested in supporting big businesses like SupraGro. Thank you for asking.”

  The man huffed and sat down. Someone asked Chuck how binding their request could be for the county.

  “Legally not binding at all,” Chuck said slowly, and tugged on his mustache. “But in the past, they have offered a two-week period as a courtesy for topics we’d like to research. I imagine we could ask for that while the extension service looks into this.”

  Chuck sounded decidedly less grouchy now. He had been a research biologist at Oregon State University before he retired, Alice recalled.

  “I don’t know about the rest of you, but I’ve heard enough,” Chuck said. “The science behind this and Ms. Holtzman’s hives seem enough reason to take this issue to the county. I motion that we put it to a vote.”

  “I second!” someone yelled.

  “All in favor?”

  About two-thirds of the hands went up.

  “Against?”

  Less than one-third rose this time, and some people kept their hands in their laps.

  “Motion passed,” Chuck said. He turned to the club secretary, Matt Garcia, and asked him to draft a statement for city council.

  “Meeting adjourned!” Chuck hollered, and rose to his feet, gathering his things. He nodded at Alice as he left.

  “Thank you, Ms. Holtzman,” he said.

  Alice exhaled. It was a start.

  Jake grinned at her. “Nice work, Alice. For an old lady, I mean.”

  She laughed and stood when she saw Stan approaching.

  “Thank you so much for coming, Stan. That was, well, just what we needed.”

  “Happy to be here, Alice,” he said. He sat down next to Jake, and Alice realized what a simple courtesy that was.

  “I don’t think we’ve met. I’m Stan,” he said, grasping Jake’s hand.

  “I’m Jake,” he said, and smiled. “Alice’s apprentice.”

  Alice laughed and shoved her hands into her back pockets. “I think it’s the other way around. Stan, you would not believe what this kid can do.”

  Someone tapped her on the shoulder, and she turned to see the line of beekeepers waiting to say hello, shake her hand, and thank her. Looking at that queue of friendly faces, well, it felt like some sort of homecoming.

  Stan offered to take the hive waste to the extension service for testing.

  “I have to meet with Michaels tomorrow anyway,” he said.

  So they transferred the bins into his car. He waved as he drove away.

  As Alice drove through town on the way
home, Jake riffled through the tape collection. He popped in a cassette and Tom Petty’s voice streamed out into the spring evening: “Time to move on. Time to get goin’. What lies ahead, I have no way of knowin’.”

  Jake rolled down the window and surfed his hand on the evening breeze.

  “Who was that great big guy you were talking to at the door?” he asked.

  “Tiny Castañares,” Alice said. “An old friend of my dad’s. And mine,” she added.

  Jake looked out the window at their little town flashing past.

  “You’ve got nice friends, Alice.”

  She nodded, and her heart swelled. She did have nice friends, and remembering that made her see she was coming back to her life. She felt that container inside her. She felt her grief, and around the edges of that grief she felt the rest of her life and everything in it growing like a fine wax comb to buffer her sorrow. She drove south toward the mountain as the sun set over the river and the wind died off. The bees went into their hives, and the people of the valley slept.

  19

  Into the Hive

  Place yourself before a hive, and see the indefatigable energy of these industrious veterans, toiling along with their heavy burdens, side by side with their more youthful compeers . . . Let the cheerful hum of their busy old age inspire you with better resolutions, and teach you how much nobler it is to die with harness on, in the active discharge of the duties of life.

  —L. L. LANGSTROTH

  Jake jolted awake to the sound of someone yelling. He looked at the ceiling, unsure of where he was and feeling a tightness in his throat. In the dream, he’d been skating along the waterfront with Cheney running alongside him. The dog had cantered into the road and been hit by a car. Relief flooded him then. He was at Alice’s, and Cheney was alive. Cheney was right there, stuffing his big wet nose into Jake’s hand.

  The dream had felt so real, the sensation of speed and movement as he flowed along on his board. He could almost feel the warm spring air on his bare arms and the swing of his hips as he shifted his weight to carve a line. He’d felt so free. As the dream receded, he remembered things were different now. He didn’t longboard anymore. He used a wheelchair. His eyes settled on the chair next to his bed, waiting for him like his forever escort. This was who he was now. Instead of a boy with limitless possibility, he was a person with very specific limitations.

  But this morning, perhaps for the first time, he understood distinctly that an entirely new world had opened itself to him. In the weeks since he’d landed at Alice’s, his sense of who he was and how he operated in the world had shifted, imperceptibly at first but undeniably now. Yes, there were things he couldn’t do anymore and he would never walk again. But he had something precious he had never even imagined before—this life with honeybees. He lived with hundreds of thousands of bees. He was learning to be a beekeeper, and he was good at it, better than average. Most amazing of all, he could do something most beekeepers could not. For some reason he had been gifted with the ability to distinguish the bell-like tone of the lovely queen bees, the uber mothers. It rushed into him, the color and texture of his new life. He stretched his arms over his head and smiled.

  Cheney thumped his front paws on the bed and pushed himself up in a slow-motion stretch. Then he cocked his ears and wiggled his rump as he eyed the mattress next to the boy.

  Jake sat up, grabbed his big ears, and laughed. “Don’t push your luck, dude.”

  Jake shoved the big dog off the bed, transferred into his chair, and rolled into the bathroom. He used a new single-use catheter to empty his bladder, flushed, and washed his hands and his face. The dream still hung over him—the joy of movement and the devastation of losing Cheney again. He shook it off. It was just a dream.

  Jake looked at himself in the mirror. He had showered the night before, and his hair hung loose over his shoulders. The blue-black color was fading, and he could see his natural brown bleeding through. It reminded him of those first days in the hospital, when the nurse had tried to cut his hair and he threw a fit. He was all doped up, but conscious enough to fight for it, and his mom backed him up.

  The nurse sighed and narrowed her eyes. “Really, Mrs. Stevenson. It’s going to be hard enough to manage his care. It’s just easier this way.”

  His mother had insisted, politely but firmly, Jake recalled, and pulled it back in a ponytail. It was a matted and tangled mess. When he was finally able to sit up, it took hours to comb out, and he wouldn’t let his mother or the nurses help. He yanked a comb through the snarls an inch at a time. It was weeks before he’d been able to dye it again and months before he could style it upright into that sixteen-and-a-half-inch record-breaking mast.

  Now he grabbed the new bottle of Midnight Blue #47. He glanced at the clock and turned on the faucet. He had time to let the dye set before breakfast. He held one hand under the stream of water, waiting for it to warm, and read the ingredients, which he had never noticed before: ammonia, lead acetate, bismuth citrate, intermediate p-phenylenediamine. Jake opened the bottle and sniffed, and the bitter tang of ammonia hit the back of his throat. He’d always loved the smell, which was part of the ritual of his hairstyle. But now it made him think of the days they sprayed out in the orchard, that metallic taste of chemicals in the air.

  In his studying, Jake had learned all kinds of things about bees. He’d come across many interesting and archaic traditions in his reading—like if you got married, you had to introduce the bride to the hives. And if a beekeeper died, his friends had to tell the bees. One thing that really struck him was this idea of tending to the bees “absent of vice.” He read that they didn’t like the smell of onions or garlic. Beekeepers were urged not be “rude or drunken.” He’d jotted down, “Tend the hives with cleanliness and sobriety.” He noticed that Alice always washed her hands before putting on her gloves and veil, and he suspected she brushed her teeth too.

  She wouldn’t give him a straight answer when he asked. “Everyone has their own rituals, kid. You’ll have yours.”

  He looked at the ingredients on the back of the bottle again. Whatever intermediate p-phenylenediamine was, it probably wasn’t free of vice. Jake screwed the cap back on the bottle and dropped it in the trash.

  Just like that, he was done with his hair, his record-breaking mohawk, his freak flag, his brand. Jacob Stevenson, who’d had the tallest mohawk in the history of Hood River Valley High School, had moved on. At the very least it seemed silly to invest hours fixing his hair now that he had so many other things to do. He looked at his reflection and reached for his scissors.

  An hour later, Harry banged into the house for breakfast to find Jake flipping pancakes and smiling under his shiny, egg-bald pate.

  “Wow! Whoa! Did you— How did you— Why did you . . . I mean, no, it looks fine . . .”

  Jake grinned and ran his hand over his skull. “I know. Now I look like a cancer patient. But it was time. Want to feel it?”

  Harry passed his palm over Jake’s skull, shivered, and dropped his hand.

  “Badass, man,” he said.

  They sat down to breakfast, and Cheney bumped around under the table like a small horse until Jake let him out the slider door.

  “Go on, Cheney! Squirrel!”

  The big dog took off in the wide galloping arc that was his morning ritual. When Jake returned to the table, Harry was wolfing down his breakfast like he was afraid someone would take his plate.

  “Slow down, man! There’s plenty more,” he said, laughing, and Harry reddened.

  Harry had really grown on him. Though he was six years younger, Jake felt almost protective of the guy. That day right after Harry got hired, when they were cleaning out the hives for Alice, he felt his envy leave him. Harry just couldn’t say anything right to Alice. He had asked that stupid question about her son and then went silent as Alice left the barn. A dead bee fell and grazed the back of
his hand. He yelped and dropped the frame with a clatter.

  Jake chuckled. “Dude. You need to chill out,” he said, holding his hands out, palms down. “Seriously.”

  Harry swore under his breath and picked up the frame. He scraped the bees into the plastic bin as Alice had asked. Some of them missed and fell onto the floor. Harry scooped them up with gloved hands, grimacing.

  Jake nudged the bin closer to the workbench.

  “How old are you, Harry?” he asked.

  “Twenty-four,” Harry muttered.

  “Well, Alice is forty-four, so technically she’s old enough to be your mom. But not that guy’s mom,” he said, gesturing to the photo of Bud and Alice.

  “I see that now,” Harry said with a sigh, scraping the frame.

  Jake leaned back in his chair and watched Harry work. He was an awkward guy. But he had brought Cheney back, hadn’t he? Jake looked at the dog, sprawled out and snoring in the shop doorway, and his heart flipped over. Jake decided he was going to help him.

  “Hand me those frames. I’ll brush the bees, and you can do the wax,” Jake said.

  While they worked, Jake told Harry what he knew about Alice, her job, and her family. Jake told him how she wanted to grow the apiary. Harry listened, alert but not speaking. His eyes widened as Jake described how they had met, truck nearly colliding with chair. Jake glossed over her fight with Ed Stevenson, saying only that Alice had offered to let him come stay at the farm for a little while. He didn’t know how long.

  “She’s cool, Harry. She’ll give you a chance if you work hard. Just stop saying stupid shit and try to relax, okay?”

  Harry nodded. The two worked side by side through the first brood box. Harry retrieved the second one from the doorway, where Alice had parked them on the cart.

  “That your longboard on the porch?” Harry asked.

  Jake looked surprised. He hadn’t pegged Harry for a skater. He nodded. “Haven’t ridden it much lately.”

  Harry paused, as if trying to decide if that was a joke. Then he said, “I rode a pintail cruiser in high school.”