The Music of Bees

by Eileen Garvin

  After they put away the groceries, Celia wanted to see the bees again. This time she donned Alice’s full bee suit and walked right up to the hive with Jake, who approached them, as always, bareheaded.

  Noah stayed back by the gate. “You’re gonna get the shit stung out of you, Cece! Don’t come crying to me, sissy.”

  “No soy nena!” Celia called back at him. “You’re the sissy!”

  “I can see one on your shoulder right now. It’s going to bore into your ear and eat your brain!”

  Noah soon tired of heckling and began bouncing a tennis ball against the side of the barn.

  They eased up next to one of the more mature hives, and Jake told Celia to crouch down near the entrance so she could watch the bees flying in and out. She moved slowly like he told her to, and the bees carried on unperturbed. One guard bee buzzed around Jake’s bare face. He closed his eyes and breathed, holding himself still until she decided he was not a threat and went about her business. He heard Celia gasp.

  “Oh my gosh! Look at their legs! So orange! And yellow!”

  Jake smiled. The bees were landing on the hive entrance like tiny planes, one after the other. Their pollen baskets were loaded with exaggerated hues of orange, yellow, and red. Some were dusted from head to toe and sat on the hive board, combing the pollen over their heads and down onto their legs. Jake pointed to one with a bright yellow pair of back legs.

  “That’s called the corbicula. It’s a little compartment she can stash the pollen in. She’ll go in and hand it off to another bee that will pack it away to feed to the babies later. They fill up whole sides of the frame. It almost looks like a painting.”

  “I want to see!” Celia said.

  Jake hesitated before leading Celia over to one of the new hives. He felt a pang of regret that he hadn’t told Alice he’d opened them while she was at work yesterday. He couldn’t keep away from them that morning either. He’d completed inspections of the other half of the new hives that Alice had brought home from Sunnyvale Bee Company—Nos. 19 through 24, which were all still single-level brood boxes and positioned on the east edge of the apiary. He was fascinated by their industry, their beauty, and the mystery of the queen’s music. Now Jake put his hand on the top of No. 17 and closed his eyes. The box hummed, calm and even. He listened longer, envisioning the center of the frames, his breath slowing until he could hear it, the faint sound of that G-sharp—the note that told him the queen was in there and that the hive was “queen right.”

  Jake jimmied the hive tool under the top. He set the top off to the side with the inner cover and pulled out a frame, which was still empty of wax and bees. He slid the other frames over, eased out the center frame, and held it up for Celia to see.

  Jake heard her quick, sharp breath.

  “Amazing!” she whispered, and clasped her hands.

  Jake propped the frame on the arm of his chair. The bees went about their business, unhurried and steady. He pointed out the band of brilliant pollen packed into cells. He showed her where the honey was stored, where the larvae were capped, and which were the uncapped egg cells. In the middle of the moving mass of bodies he saw the elegant body of the queen, still marked with a bright green dot from the breeder.

  “There she is, Cece,” he said. “The lady who makes it all happen.”

  Jake had read about how early beekeepers and scientists assumed that this larger bee was a male and called her the king. It wasn’t until the mid-seventeenth century that a Dutch naturalist dissected the ovaries and discovered this error. Celia thought that was funny too.

  “Typical man thinking. This makes total sense to me, though,” she said, gesturing at the mass of quivering bodies encircling the queen. “This is like Christmas at my house. That’s Abuelita in the middle and all my aunties and mom running around doing whatever she tells them to. She would love this! And the part about the drones hanging around doing nothing—órale!” She snapped her fingers.

  Personally, Jake found the fate of the drones a bit distressing. They lived only to mate once and then died after the act. Those that never mated were kicked out of the hive in the fall because, since they weren’t wired to raise brood or forage, they were excess baggage.

  The sound of the tennis ball ceased.

  “Sorry to ruin the party out there, Neil Armstrong,” Noah called, “but I gotta jet to work!”

  Celia walked toward him in slow motion, breathing through the screened face shield.

  “Luke. I am your father,” she rasped.

  “Wrong color, Cece! Vader’s black, not white,” Noah said.

  Jake helped Celia take off the bee suit and followed his friends to the truck, not wanting them to leave. He dreaded the arrival of Alice’s new hire, Harry, that evening.

  Noah leaned against the door and scrolled through his phone. “We’re jamming at Pomeroy’s this weekend. You should come hang out, man. Everyone wants to see you.”

  Pomeroy’s garage was the perfect man cave, with two old couches, a Ping-Pong table, a beer fridge, and a beefy sound system. His mother let him take it over after she divorced his father. Jake’s heart rose as he remembered being there. Shooting the shit, drinking beer, and taking leads on his trumpet.

  “I’m sure I could still kick your ass at Ping-Pong, Stevenson.”

  Jake shrugged.

  “I’ll give you a handicap,” Noah teased, bumping Jake’s chair with his knee. “Just to be fair.”

  Jake tried to smile, knowing his friend didn’t mean to be unkind. But then he said, “Dude, you know that isn’t really funny, right?”

  Noah flushed red to the tips of his ears and looked stricken. “Fuck, Stevenson. I’m sorry. I just—”

  Jake punched him in his side to cut him off. “I know,” he said. “I just don’t want to have to kick your ass.”

  Relief flooded his friend’s face.

  “I’ll think about Pomeroy’s,” Jake said.

  Celia leaned across the seat and poked Noah in the side. “I thought you were in a big hurry, wey!” she said.

  “Text me if you want a ride, bro,” Noah said. He bumped Jake’s fist and folded his big body behind the wheel and left.

  Jake sat at the kitchen window watching the golden bodies flit toward the neighbor’s orchard. He thought about hanging out in Pomeroy’s garage. All the guys staring and pretending not to. It was too much. Never mind that he hadn’t picked up his trumpet in forever.

  He put in his earbuds and scrolled through the music on his phone. There was nothing he wanted to listen to there, so he took them out again. He realized how often he’d been blocking out the sound of his parents moving around the house. It was so quiet at Alice’s, and there was so much more to listen to. Just sitting there he could hear the wind in the trees, the cluck of the chickens. A bee buzzed past the screen door and flew away.

  He opened the recipe app on his phone and pulled the kale out of the fridge and set it on the cutting board.

  “Sissy,” Celia had called over her shoulder at Noah.

  “Sissy,” Ed hissed in his mind.

  His father would not be impressed that Jake was learning to cook. Ed hated everything that didn’t seem outwardly masculine in the most redneck sense. Men drove trucks, drank beer, ruled the roost, and hunted in the fall. Manual labor was a thing to be admired, but only if it took place outside the walls of the house. As for his wife’s daily cooking, cleaning, and managing of the household, that was simply expected, even though she worked full time too. Jake had never once heard his father thank her for making dinner or offer to clean up.

  “Sissy,” his father said when he had come home to find twelve-year-old Jake practicing an ollie in the driveway on his new skateboard.

  He had lit a cigarette. “You should be playing football, not messing around on that stupid thing.”

  Jake didn’t tell his father that there w
as no football team in seventh grade. Nor did he mention that some of the best Olympic snowboarders, like Shaun White, had started out on skateboards. His father probably thought snowboarding was stupid too.

  By the time he was in high school, he was riding a longboard, the one his mom had brought over, and it had been his freedom. It got him to school, the skate park, and Katz’s house. That board was still precious to him, even though he couldn’t ride it now. It sat in the corner of his room at Alice’s. Would that make Ed happy?

  He put the chili on low to simmer. With the afternoon ahead of him, he decided to go through the new hives again. And when Alice got home that evening, he would confess.

  The inspection took him the better part of the afternoon. As he worked, he reflected that his time with them was growing short. The bees had already built out these first brood boxes almost to capacity. Soon Alice would add another brood box to each so the bees could make more wax comb for the brood. Then the hives would be too tall for him to open while sitting in his chair. He was becoming adept at spotting eggs, uncapped larvae, capped larvae, and drone and worker brood. The art of locating the queen was like a game. Listen, find the G-sharp sound, open the hive, and find the queen. His chest swelled with pride each time he managed to locate her.

  The sound was the same with every hive. Last night he had found a reference on the Internet to explain it. A researcher at Washington State University had verified that queens had a tone all their own—G-sharp/A-flat. Why that same tone? he wondered. Was she singing to her children or to herself, and what was she saying?

  He worked his way through the hives without issue, and then something weird happened when he got to Hive No. 23. He had to strain to find the sound. And when he opened the hive and looked inside, his stomach dropped. The queen was on the fifth frame, but she seemed lethargic. Her attendants were circling her, cleaning her body and her wings. Her buzz was intermittent and weak. Jake shut the hive with a cold feeling in his gut. No. 24 was worse. There was no queen sound, and he could not find her long, tapered figure among the vibrating mass of workers.

  A layer of sweat sprang up on his scalp and upper lip. What had he done? He should have just left them alone. Fuck. Alice was going to be so pissed. Without the queens, these two new hives were doomed.

  She had patted No. 23 the first day she had shown him the hives.

  “You girls are the future,” Jake had heard her say. “You just do your thing and I’ll keep you safe.”

  Jake spent the next couple of hours online looking at bee forums, but everything he read made him feel worse. When he heard Alice’s truck descend the driveway, his stomach flipped over. He’d briefly considered not saying anything to her about the stricken queens. He didn’t know how long it would take her to notice—probably a few days. But he had quickly dismissed that thought. The longer he waited, the more likely the hives wouldn’t survive.

  Alice banged through the door and threw her bag on the couch. “Hey, kid,” she said. “It smells great in here. I guess I’m off the hook for dinner again, huh?”

  She smiled, and Jake hated himself for what he was about to tell her. “Hey, Alice. Good day?”

  She gave him a crooked smile. “Yeah, you could say that. In a weird way,” she said.

  When she came back into the living room in her overalls, Jake pulled out her beekeeping diary and put it on the table.

  “Alice, I need to tell you something,” he said. “You’d better sit down.”

  Quickly and succinctly, he told her about going into the new hives.

  “Jesus! You what? How did you—” Her voice rose, and she gestured at his chair.

  “Using a wheelchair doesn’t make me helpless, Alice,” he said quietly. “Now, if you would just hear me out.”

  Her face grew red, and she apologized and nodded. Jake told her about hearing the queens in her new hives. He handed her the hive diary with his notes. He’d been as detailed as he could be, using her entries as a model: date, temperature, time of day, queen sightings, egg sightings. He had also drawn pictures to document what he’d seen—drone comb, pollen patterns, emerging larvae.

  She nodded as she looked at the pages and turned them slowly. She put the notebook down.

  “This is good work, Jake. The drawings are impressive too,” she said, and smiled ruefully. “I’m sorry I lost my temper. I didn’t mean to insult you. I just didn’t expect this. It’s really helpful, actually. Your records are amazing.”

  Jake felt his shoulders relax. “You’re not mad?”

  She shook her head. “No, I’m not mad,” she said. “I think I’m replaced.”

  She pushed the notebook across the table at him. “From now on, you’re in charge of the hive diaries.”

  Jake glowed with joy and momentarily couldn’t speak. He didn’t know how to explain what he felt—that the bees were drawing him toward something new and wonderful. That feeling, that golden thrum in his core when he watched them, was something he’d never expected.

  “There’s something else,” he said.

  He told her about the G-sharp sound that he had distinguished over the tone of the rest of the hive. Alice looked confused and then astonished. He told her about the WSU researcher and showed her his notes on the topic in the diary. He felt like he was sharing his most precious secret with the one person who might understand.

  “Ain’t that something?” she murmured, glancing at the pages and then looking up at him. “I wonder why they do that. You heard it every time, huh?”

  Jake’s smile faded then. He looked out the window, then back to Alice, and told her about the ailing queens.

  Alice’s face fell. She sighed and rose from her chair. “Let’s go check it out.”

  In the apiary, Alice donned her hat, veil, and gloves. She looked surprised when Jake said he didn’t use them or the smoker.

  “Okay. Whatever you say, kid.”

  She gestured for him to open No. 23. His hands trembled at first, but he closed his eyes, took a few steady breaths, and went in as carefully as always. It didn’t take long to confirm what he had said. The queen in No. 23 wasn’t even moving anymore, and they couldn’t find the queen in No. 24.

  “Dammit,” Alice said.

  She thrust the notebook at him. “Queen failure. Write it down, just like that,” she said tersely. “For Hives Twenty-three and Twenty- four and the date.”

  Jake felt sick as he wrote the notes.

  “Those two will have to be re-queened right away, and the hives might fail anyway. They’re too young to make their own queen, so I’ll need to order a couple,” Alice said.

  She took off her gloves, sat on the windbreak, and looked at him closely. “Hey, kid, don’t take it so hard. Sometimes that happens. My wrecking the truck couldn’t have helped. These two hives are young and will probably be just fine with new queens.”

  Jake looked at her, his stomach in a knot. “So, I didn’t— You don’t think I did it? Hurt them, I mean.”

  “Oh, no. Uh-uh,” she said, shaking her head. “No—you didn’t hurt anything. I can see how careful you are. You have real talent with beekeeping. Going in bareheaded like that? And that sound thing? Damn, I’ve been doing this for years. I’m jealous, to be honest.”

  Jake felt his body relax as his worry left him. He felt that golden buzz in his chest cavity, like he was a hollowed-out tree filled with a honeybee colony. This feeling had been growing in him, and he finally remembered what it was. He’d felt it the first day he woke up with Cheney in his room. He felt it when his mother bought him his first skateboard and when Noah had showed up to help him at Alice’s with no questions. And now with the bees. That feeling was just love. It was just everything. He held that knowledge in his heart, and he didn’t speak.

  Alice glanced at her watch. “Harry should be here soon,” she said.

  They moved along the west side o
f the bee yard past the older, well-established hives that were two or three brood boxes high. Though Jake had not been able to go into these hives, he had been monitoring the sounds of the queens. Now he was disturbed by what he didn’t hear. He stopped and put his hand on the closest hive.

  “Alice,” he said. “I think we’d better check these.”

  What they found inside those hives was a shocking and complete devastation. In five of Alice’s oldest hives, all the bees were dead or dying. The bodies of workers were piled up on top of each other, a still mass of once-golden creatures desiccating and turning brown. In one hive, bees were in the final throes of dying. They spun in circles and buzzed on and off like they were short-circuiting as they crawled over the bodies of their dead sisters.

  “No!” Alice said. “No, no, no, no!”

  She grew more frantic the deeper she moved into the hives, swearing under her breath. No. 6 was still healthy, still queen right. She put the top back on and sat, staring at the dead hives. Jake didn’t say anything. He gripped the notebook and waited for her to explain how an entire hive could die at once—or five, for that matter.

  “. . . Doesn’t make sense . . . never even read about that in the normal spring cycle . . . ,” she was saying to herself. Her eyes ran along the western border of the bee yard, across her field, and into the neighbor’s orchard. The west wind had picked up as it did on these warming spring days, and the apple trees in the neighbor’s orchard tossed their blossomed branches. Alice took a deep breath, smelling the air.

  “Drift,” she said. “Shit.”

  She paced the field to the far western edge, and Jake followed. She inhaled, and Jake did too, recognizing the acrid tang of pesticide. He remembered seeing workers out there just days before but assumed they were pruning the trees.

  Alice dug out her phone and called her neighbor, Doug Ransom. She put her phone on speaker. Jake listened to her patiently wading through neighborly pleasantries until she could ask her question. Why yes, Doug had recently finished his spring spraying and he hoped the smell wasn’t bothering her. He had changed products this year. He got a free sample from his farm rep, and everyone seemed to think it was a superior product. Alice should come by and see him. He sure missed seeing her and Buddy. Come by any time, Doug said.