The Honey Bus

by Meredith May

  We had purposely parked the truck several hundred yards away from the apiary and placed empty hive boxes on the tailgate. It’s a little tricky to steal honey from bees, so we devised a system to outsmart them. First Grandpa removed a frame of wax comb solid on both sides with sealed honey, then he gave it one good shake to send the bees tumbling back into the hive. They took offense to this, and many returned to the air searching for their stolen property. The bees zoomed in mad circles around Grandpa’s head as he flicked the returnees off the honeycomb with a crow feather, racing to outmaneuver them in a battle of wills.

  When the frame was as bee-free as possible, he handed it to me and I sprinted to the truck, pursued by a handful of outraged guard bees. Once I reached the tailgate, I checked for stowaways on the honeycomb, and blew on them softly like Grandpa had shown me to irritate them just enough so they flew off. Once the frame was clear of bees, I slid it into the empty hive box and hid it under a sheet. The bees could smell the honey, and they would be back for it if we didn’t keep it concealed. They would cling to it, all the way to Carmel Valley, and that would be their undoing. They could survive the trip, but our house was too many miles away for them to navigate back to their hive, and they would die alone.

  The first two hives couldn’t spare honey. Grandpa removed the top pantry boxes on the third, and then bent down over the box containing the nursery, his mustache practically pressed against the top bars, as if he were trying to dive inside. I came closer, and my nose picked up what he was smelling—a horrible stink like meat gone bad. Grandpa stood up and shook his head.

  “Not good.”

  This hive was different from the others. When I placed my hand on the side of it, the wood was cold to the touch, without the usual warmth emanating from the colony’s collective body heat. I looked down at the hive entrance and noticed very little traffic.

  Grandpa took out a frame of honeycomb that was most definitely the wrong color. The wax was too dark, like coffee, and while it should have been covered with nurse bees tending to the brood nest, there were only a few sluggish nurses pacing over a rotting nursery, desperately looking for a healthy larva to feed. The wax seals over the birthing chambers were sunken and perforated, when they should have been smooth like a taut paper bag.

  Grandpa plucked a foxtail out of the ground, and poked the stiff end into one of the wrinkled brood cells. When he pulled it out, a slimy brown string came with it. He examined the goo on the tip of the weed for a long time, as if he couldn’t believe what he was seeing. He checked a few more cells, and they had all the same snot-like stuff inside where a white bee larva was supposed to be. Somehow the grubs had liquefied before they developed into bees.

  “Foulbrood,” he said. I heard defeat in his voice, and knew it was something bad. Something serious.

  “Foul what?”

  “A disease. Highly contagious. Only way to get rid of it is fire.”

  Grandpa stacked the hive back together, then took a pencil from his back pocket and drew a big X on the cover. I gasped, realizing that meant he’d have to burn it with the bees inside. Grandpa squeezed his forehead like he had a migraine, then ran his hand through his hair and looked off in the distance. He was sorting something out in his mind, so I waited a bit before I asked my question.

  “How’d this happen?”

  “The nurse bees fed food to the larvae that had a nasty bacteria in it. Destroyed their guts.”

  Grandpa could only guess where the bacteria came from. Could be anywhere, he said; a bee can pick up the bacteria from touching another bee, robbing honey from a sick hive, even from landing on a flower where a diseased bee had been. Developing bees get foulbrood when nurse bees feed them bee bread made from a mixture of nectar and pollen that has the bacteria.

  “All I know is, it’s nasty stuff. Can last for up to fifty years.”

  I watched Grandpa dismantle hive after hive and poke the brood cells with a dry weed. He moved methodically, more like a piece of machinery than a human being. By the time he was finished, a dozen hives had been doomed with an X. He would need to build a bonfire and burn them all together to keep the disease from wiping out the whole apiary. I watched him fetch a shovel from the back of his truck and, when he was a good distance away from the hives, begin digging a grave for his bees.

  I had no idea that bees could get sick. In my mind bees were unstoppable balls of energy. Most died of exhaustion after six weeks, so they put every minute to use. Each day they visited thousands of flowers in a five-mile radius of their hive, stopping only when their tattered wings finally grounded them. Old bees were easy to spot; their bodies were thinner and balding, giving them a polished look. Now that I realized how vulnerable bees could be, I felt responsible for not protecting them. A good beekeeper was supposed to keep bees, not lose them.

  Grandpa’s pit was a foot deep, and he was standing in it when I finally approached.

  “Are you going to do it today?”

  “I’ll have to come back tomorrow with gasoline,” he said, as he stepped on the spade and plunged it into the earth. He yanked the handle toward himself to loosen the ground, then bent over and heaved a scoop of dirt off to the side.

  I’d never heard Grandpa’s voice sound so thin, and I wasn’t sure how to be around him. I sat on the edge of the pit and waited until he’d spent himself digging. He took a seat beside me and dropped his head in his hands. I leaned into him and felt the warmth of his exertion. We stayed that way for quite a while, keeping each other company without talking.

  “Well, that’s that,” he finally said.

  “Are you going to lose a lot of money?”

  Grandpa was looking out toward the horizon, and I wasn’t sure if he had heard me.

  “Money? You think I do this for money?”

  His question made me feel like I was in trouble, but I couldn’t figure out what it was I had done. I had disappointed him again with my wrong thinking, despite all his efforts to raise me right.

  “Honey isn’t what’s important,” he said.

  I opened my mouth to protest but couldn’t assemble a sentence. Why have a honey bus if he didn’t care about honey? Everyone knows that honey is the absolute most important thing about bees. That’s why they are called honeybees.

  “Do you think the only thing a bee does is make honey?”

  I knew a trick question when I heard one. So I carefully answered with a question.

  “Yes?”

  “Wrong. Bees make food grow,” he said. “All the fruits and nuts on our trees. The vegetables in our garden.”

  Grandpa’s grief must have been making him sentimental. I’d seen his artichoke bushes push up stalks taller than me and produce an artichoke with a punk rock head of purple hair on top—unassisted. The almond tree in our front yard made white flowers that eventually turned into green fuzzy pods, and then I watched those pods shed and leave behind woody husks with nuts inside. The tree did all the work.

  “Plants make food,” I tried to clarify.

  “Not without bees, they don’t,” Grandpa corrected. “Flowers need to exchange pollen with other flowers to become food. Because flowers don’t have legs, they need bees to carry their pollen for them. Pollen sticks on the bee when it flies from flower to flower, and there you have it. Pollination.”

  Without bees making pollen deliveries, Grandpa explained, many of the things in the produce section of the grocery store would vanish. I would lose my beloved cucumbers and blackberries. No more pumpkins at Halloween. Summers without watermelon. The cherries Granny likes in her Manhattans—gone. The world would be bland, and boring, and flowerless without bees, he warned.

  Now it made sense why Grandpa was so distraught. Losing his hives was so much more than a personal disaster; it was a setback to nature itself. Not only would we lose produce, Grandpa said, but other animals would be in trouble, too. We needed bees to
pollinate alfalfa and other grasses so cows and horses could eat. Mother Nature knit a careful plan in place, and if you pulled one thread of it loose, the whole thing could unravel. These insects that made most people run in fear were the invisible glue of the earth that held us all together.

  Grandpa had just revealed a hidden staircase in my mind, showing me that there were so many things to learn, beyond what I could see with my own eyes. Before, when I looked inside a hive, all I saw were bees going about their chores, never imagining that their labors had anything to do with me. It was astounding to realize that every creature, no matter how small, helped keep everyone else alive in a hidden organization. If something as seemingly insignificant as a bee was silently taking care of us, what about an ant, or a worm or a minnow? What else didn’t I know about the unseen contributions that nature was making all around me? It made me think that the universe had a plan for me, and although I couldn’t always see it or feel it, I had to trust that it was there. It just might be that my life wasn’t random, or unlucky, after all. I considered this possibility for a moment, and for the first time in as long as I could remember, I felt a trickle of worry slip away.

  All this time I thought Grandpa and I were the ones taking care of the bees. When all along, the bees were the ones taking care of us.

  “I’m sorry you lost your bees,” I offered.

  Grandpa stood, put his fingers in his mouth and a piercing whistle ricocheted up Palo Colorado Canyon. He sat back down, and within seconds, Rita came bolting out of nowhere, hopped into his lap and licked his chin.

  “Sometimes things get taken away from you,” he said. “But you can’t let it get to you too much.”

  The good thing about bees, he said, is that they multiply quickly. If we were careful and attentive to the remaining hives, he could build his apiary back up to size within a year or two. Bees can take many hits, but they tend to always come back, he said.

  I climbed into the truck and sat Rita on my lap to wait for Grandpa as he loaded honey supers in the back bed. Given the late season and the foulbrood fiasco, the yield was paltry, only a handful of boxes to take home. I heard the tailgate slam and when he sat next to me, I was struck by how tired he looked, with wilted cheeks and worry lines forming deep grooves across his forehead. He took one glance over his shoulder at the apiary and the awful chore that awaited him, and we pulled away.

  The sun was directly over the ocean now, glinting like diamonds bobbing on the surface. This time there were no stories for the ride home. Grandpa was somber, lost in his own thoughts. Rita left my lap and curled up in his, as if she, too, could sense he needed cheering up. She nudged his belly a few times, and then rested her head on it and yawned.

  “I’ll help you,” I said.

  “What’s that?”

  “I’ll help you get your bees back,” I said.

  Grandpa broke into a wide smile, and his face was suddenly familiar again. He reached over and patted my knee.

  “Thank you,” he said.

  I reached over and turned on the radio, twisting the dial until the air came to life with a Johnny Cash song I’d heard Granny play on the record player.

  Grandpa started to sing, and leaned over to ask me how high the water was, Momma. I knew the answer: two feet high and risin’.

  Grandpa sang the question again, and again, louder each time and I responded in kind, yelling out, three feet! four feet! We shouted along with Johnny when he sang that his hives were gone and he lost his bees and his chickens were all up in the willow trees.

  I heard the sadness in that song for the first time, but in a strange way it made us both feel better. We weren’t the only ones at the mercy of nature.

  11

  Parents Without Partners

  1980

  Matthew and I were still in our pajamas, sprawled on our bellies shouting prices at the television. Our weekend ritual was to watch The Price Is Right or Let’s Make a Deal to witness regular people like us win prizes that would bring them never-ending happiness. We memorized the games so that one day when we were old enough to drive, we’d gun it all the way to Hollywood, get on the show and Make It Big—so big we could buy a mansion with so many rooms we’d lose track of them all. Every room would have a waterbed, too.

  After several years of dedicated study, I could recite within pennies the going price for almost anything, from a Corvette to a bottle of Clorox. On the screen a schoolteacher was trying to guess the combined cost of a trip to Hawaii and a Jeep, and despite my vigorous coaching from the sidelines, she was way overshooting it. I was so focused on the television that I didn’t hear Mom walk into the living room.

  “Who wants to go bowling?”

  We peeled our eyes away from the Showcase Showdown. Mom impatiently shifted her white faux leather purse from one shoulder to the other. It was discombobulating to see her out of bed during the day.

  “What? Why are you looking at me funny?”

  We were in the middle of our sixth year of living with Granny and Grandpa, and by now Mom had become more like an older sister, tolerating us when she had to, but mainly avoiding everyone with a restless impatience. Our father had held true to his promise, and flew my brother and me out every summer for visits, but Granny had taken over as our full-time caretaker, and in that way Mom was insulated from the drudgery of adulthood. She was still without work, without friends, without motivation to get out of bed. My brother and I were so unaccustomed to taking direction from our mother that at first it didn’t register that she was inviting us somewhere.

  “Bowling?” I repeated, still stunned.

  She let out an exasperated sigh. Her skin was so pale that blue veins showed through at her temples and wrists. She was wearing polyester yellow pants with an elastic band to accommodate her waistline, which had expanded considerably since we’d moved in.

  “That’s what I said. I don’t have all day, here. You kids coming or not?”

  I felt like we should be asking Granny for permission first, or perhaps Granny should come along as chaperone in case anything went wrong. I was dubious, but too curious to say no.

  The closest bowling alley was an hour away in Salinas, and during the drive Mom explained that she had recently joined something called Parents Without Partners, and we were going to a bowling party for people like her.

  “Ladies without husbands?” Matthew asked.

  Mom rolled down her window a crack and let the wind suck the ash off her cigarette. “Men without wives, too,” she corrected.

  I wiggled my eyebrows at Matthew and leaned toward him. “Dating,” I whispered. I pretended to make out with the palm of my hand, kissing it ferociously until he broke into a spasm of giggles.

  “What’s so funny back there?”

  Mom’s eyes snapped at us in the rearview mirror. All she saw were two cherubs sitting on the back seat of the Gremlin. I discreetly pinched my nose to stifle a laugh from slipping out. “I need you both to be on your best behavior. Don’t do anything to embarrass me.”

  We promised to be good, although I didn’t understand how we could embarrass her by throwing a ball at some pins. I looked out the window and saw rows of spinach and strawberries flicker past, blurring together like someone was shuffling a deck of green cards. Salinas was flat, and the fields lined up in military formation, as if God had first drawn the city on graph paper before creating it.

  When we got out of the car, the air smelled of manure fertilizer, overpowering Mom’s Charlie perfume. Her hoop earrings bounced as she hustled Matthew and me toward the entrance, but as we got closer she slowed her pace. She stood before the glass door as if she had had a change of heart. Mom fixed her lipstick in the reflection and tucked a few wisps of hair behind her ears. She adjusted the waistband of her pants. She had started dieting recently, eating mostly grapefruits and cottage cheese following the advice of a celebrity doctor named Scarsda
le.

  “Do I look fat?” she asked, turning sideways in the window.

  Her tummy pooched out, but her legs and her arms were still regular size so she looked a little like she was pregnant. Matthew and I did not say any of this. We assured her that she was skinny.

  “You really think so?” She looked over her shoulder to try to see her backside in the glass.

  We nodded enthusiastically.

  She bit her lip and looked back at the Gremlin, like she was trying to choose between curtain number one and curtain number two. One choice held diamonds; the other a donkey. She sucked in her stomach and held her breath. Then she let it out again and frowned.

  “You’re not just saying that? You really think I look okay?”

  Other kids were running into the bowling alley, swinging the door open wide and letting out a heady smell of french fries and greasy pepperoni pizza. She grabbed our hands and squeezed. “Now listen, you two, don’t ask me to buy things because you know I can’t afford it,” she said.

  Matthew and I promised. She pushed open the door, and I heard the hollow clatter of crashing pins followed by jubilant cheers. My mouth watered at the smell of cotton candy, and a bank of pinball machines called to me with blinking lights and perky chimes. After the clerk handed us our leather bowling shoes, Mom walked Matthew and me to a lane where a group of sullen kids sat on a curved bench made of molded orange plastic. These were the sons and daughters of all the partnerless parents, forced to play together and clearly wishing they were someplace else.

  “I’ll be over there,” Mom said, indicating four lanes over where the adults were mingling. Her purse bobbed on her hip as she speed-walked away from us. A strike boomed from the neighboring lane, and a group of men cheered and raised their beer mugs. The player who had just thrown the ball did a little air guitar move and stuck his tongue out like KISS.