by Meredith May
“You know,” Grandpa said, breaking the silence, “I was forty when I married your grandmother.”
He cleared his throat, and we waited for him to continue.
“So... I never thought I’d have kids.”
I looked up from where I was now pressing Grandpa’s honey labels onto a wet sponge and affixing them to the jars. Grandpa closed the honey gate and stood up, opened his arms wide and pulled us both in close to him. His voice dropped to a whisper.
“Then, lucky for me, you two showed up.”
A feeling of joy burst inside me, carbonating through every pore. I did have a hive, and it was here, inside Grandpa’s honey bus.
“I’ll come home every summer, to help with the honey,” I said.
“You’d better,” Grandpa said, handing me another full jar.
Matthew looked up from his work.
“After I take my driver’s test, maybe I can come up and see you,” he said. “We could go see a concert in San Francisco or something.”
“Rush?” I suggested.
“What’s Rush?” Grandpa said.
As Matthew tutored Grandpa on the genius of his favorite rock band, I dipped a finger into a jar of honey and brought it to my mouth. I tasted wild sage, salt from the sea and a nutty flavor like warm toast that ended with the faintest wisp of something sweet, like coconut. I felt the honey not only on my tongue, but also viscerally...in my memory and in my heart, as familiar to me as the sound of my own voice.
I could continue to define my life by all that it lacked, as my mother had done. Or I could be thankful that I had been rescued in the most profound way. Grandpa and his bees had guided me through a rudderless childhood, keeping me safe and teaching me how to be a good person. He showed me how bees are loyal and brave, how they cooperate and strive, all the things I’d need to be when it was my time to navigate solo. Grandpa had been quietly teaching me that family is a natural resource all around me.
Grandpa saw me helping myself to his honey.
“How much of that can you fit in your suitcase?” he asked.
“All of it,” I teased.
Although I was leaving Grandpa’s side, I would always feel his bees humming around me like an invisible force field, gently leading me to the right path.
They would protect me like they always had. Grandpa’s hive lessons would never end.
EPILOGUE
2015
There is an old beekeeping myth that when a beekeeper dies, their bees mourn. The bees must be told that their caretaker is gone, otherwise they will become dispirited and lose their will to collect honey. They sense a disturbance in the order of things, which can cause them to despair and give up. The next of kin must shroud the hive with a dark cloth and sing to the bees to deliver the news and ask permission to become their new beekeeper.
One afternoon in 2015, Grandpa asked me to look after his bees. He made his request a month before he died.
He must have sensed that he was nearing the end. We had been sitting on his back deck watching his last remaining bee colony dart in and out of a sun-bleached pile of dilapidated hive boxes he’d tossed in a corner of the yard. He was eighty-nine, and no longer had the strength for beekeeping, but swarms kept finding their way into his abandoned equipment. He didn’t inspect the bees anymore, but every afternoon he liked to sit in his deck chair and watch the foragers come home in the fading light.
His hand shook from Parkinson’s disease as he pointed out the flight patterns. The bees were coming in from the south, from a patch of flowering ivy that had grown up the side of the neighbor’s porch. They were feisty bees, he said, probably Russian stock, and hearty enough to make it through winter without any help from him.
“You’ll take care of them for me?” he’d asked.
“Of course,” I’d said, squeezing his hand and steadying the tremor.
I must have sensed a shift in Grandpa, too, because for the past several years I’d been making more of an effort to see him. I was forty-five, and had recently started a few hives of my own in San Francisco. I was finally making my way back to my grandfather, after way too long.
After graduating from college, I’d thrown all my energy into building a career in journalism, and had been so obsessed with chasing stories and switching newspaper jobs that I rarely got back home to Grandpa and the bees. I’d worked for six different Bay Area publications until finally making my way to the San Francisco Chronicle. I loved the symphony of ringing phones on the news desk, the lightning pace of a breaking story, and I kept a “go bag” with clothes, a toothbrush and maps in my trunk, ready to travel to a faraway assignment at a moment’s notice. I was single-minded in my pursuit of a life that was constantly in transit and always on deadline.
But I felt my priorities shift as Grandpa started to decline. I stopped rushing around the globe, and spent my weekends sitting with him to watch the bees. Each time I visited, he gifted me another piece of his beekeeping equipment. I inherited his veils, his battered 1917 copy of ABC and XYZ of Bee Culture, the redwood jig he made to string wire in honeycomb frames.
By 2011, he’d cleared out most of his inventory and announced his reluctant retirement. It broke his heart to walk away from his bees after seventy years, and the bees must have felt the loss, as well.
But there was a way I could bring bees back to Grandpa. The same year, an editor and I installed two beehives on the roof of the San Francisco Chronicle building, convincing our bosses that it would be a unique way to report on the disappearing honeybee epidemic while trying our luck at urban beekeeping.
When the new bees arrived, I’d felt the vibration of their wings travel from my palms to my heart again, and I wept. I had not held bees in twenty-four years and their smell, their sound, their mannerisms were all so familiar—so personal—that I was overcome with a forgotten feeling of protection. My coworkers surely thought I was mad to cry over bugs, but how could I explain all that had passed between these tiny creatures and me?
Returning to beekeeping, I came to realize that I had a kid’s knowledge of bees and needed to enlist Grandpa to mentor me in the finer aspects of colony nutrition, pest management, and especially swarm prevention because our hives were above one of the city’s busiest intersections, crowded with bus stops, parking garages, bars and restaurants. I heard a new vibrancy return to Grandpa’s voice as he advised me where to place the hives on the roof, or explained how to shake powdered sugar over the bees as a way to combat parasitic mites. We became a team again, and under his guidance, in four years I’d grown from a bumbling beekeeper into a halfway decent one.
The day he’d asked me to look after his bees in 2015 turned out to be one of our last conversations. Not long after, he fell and broke his hip. Surgeons said it was inoperable, and five days later, Grandpa died.
I kept my promise to watch over his bees. That meant fetching his last hive and bringing it home with me.
Hives must be moved in the dark, when all the bees are huddled together inside keeping warm, otherwise some might get stranded in the field. I approached Grandpa’s last hive in the predawn. I didn’t have a funeral shroud, so I grabbed a dark blue dog towel from the back of my truck and draped it over the hive box. Then I tried to think of a song. I should have picked one in advance, because the Murphy’s Law of singing is that when you try to recall lyrics they always elude you. Instead I knelt down next to the hive and placed my hand on the shroud, readying myself to just tell it straight to the bees.
To my left, there was an empty space where the honey bus once stood. A relative had torn it down for scrap, and the yard looked forlorn without it. It pierced my heart to see the deserted spot where it once stood, and I quickly looked away. I cleared my throat a few times, getting up my nerve to deliver the sad news to the bees.
“He’s gone.”
I waited, for what, I wasn’t sure, some sort of s
ound or acknowledgment from the bees that they’d understood. I stayed crouched, listening in the early-morning quiet for a sign. A car started up somewhere in the neighborhood. A breeze rustled the leaves in the walnut trees. Life went on, just like it always did.
I lifted the shroud from the hive box, and still no bees came out. Maybe they weren’t even inside anymore; maybe they’d died out or swarmed to a better location. Maybe those bees Grandpa and I liked to watch coming and going in the afternoon had only been robbers stealing abandoned honey or wax to use for their own hives. Maybe I just knocked on an empty house.
I took off the lid and peered inside with a flashlight. I saw four rotting frames, the honeycomb blackened with age and infested with white webs spun by wax moths. Ants ran amok, and a mouse had spent some time inside, judging by its paw-sized scrape marks in the honeycomb and the scat left behind.
But there was life, barely. There were about a thousand bees, a fifth the size of a starter package of new bees sold through the mail. The poor bees were trying to make a go of it, clinging to this small bit of rotted comb. They were pitiful, and clearly stressed out, zinging into my veil rapid-fire with a kamikaze anger I’d never seen before in a colony.
I leaned in closer. Bees pelted my veil like rain.
“It’s okay, shhhh. You’re okay.”
I gently lifted a frame out and the colony practically shrieked. They were terrified, I’m sure, having never had their home invaded. Inside the hexagon cells I spied a miracle: white eggs. They had a queen. With a little care and feeding, this colony just might bounce back. I took out a second crumbling frame and carefully turned it to scan both sides until I found her—an all-black queen. She was the most striking matriarch I’d ever seen. Her abdomen lacked the usual stripes, each segment ink-black, and her thorax was dimpled by a single vertical line and ringed with a halo of yellow fuzz.
I transferred the three decaying frames of bees into a new hive box I’d brought with me. I centered the old honeycombs in the middle, between frames of fresh wax comb, so the colony had a clean place to put down honey and the queen had more room to lay eggs. I secured the lid with a ratchet strap, and duct-taped mesh screen over the hive entrance to keep the bees inside for the journey.
Grandpa’s last wishes, which I had discovered typed on a sheet of yellowed paper buried in his sock drawer, requested that he be scattered at sea. I drove from Grandpa’s house to meet Matthew at the Grimes Ranch in Big Sur, where Grandpa’s cousin Singy unlocked the cattle gate to the pasture overlooking the Pacific. The emerging sun stage-lit miles of rocky coastline as my brother and I navigated quietly among the Herefords, admiring their deep red coats and white faces as they gnawed at the scrub, while being careful not to look the bull in the eye. We walked to the bluff, where seagulls extended their wings and soared in place, buffeted by the wind. I set down a wooden toolbox with a leather handle that Grandpa had made. Inside was a plastic bag from the mortuary containing his ashes.
We stood at the precipice of a twenty-foot drop where a thin tributary of Palo Colorado Creek cascaded into the sea. The waves barreled toward shore, smashing into the headlands and exploding through keyhole cliff arches carved by the sea. The ocean fizzed like seltzer shaken from a bottle, so angry that even the harbor seals had had enough and huddled on the few rocks remaining above the waterline, waiting for the ocean’s mood to pass.
I opened the toolbox, untied the plastic bag inside and filled two of Grandpa’s mason honey jars with his powdery ashes. Matthew let out a warbled sigh, and I wrapped my arms around his shoulders and clung so fiercely that I could feel the different rhythms of our heartbeats. It was just us now; we were a family of two. I wanted him to know in his bones that I would never leave him. The wind whipped our shirts and the sea howled as I whispered in his ear.
“I love you so much.”
He sniffed, but didn’t answer. I pulled apart slightly to look into his eyes, but he was staring at the ground. I tried again.
“You know that, right?”
Matthew looked at me for a brief moment, and then flicked his gaze downward once more. He nodded to let me know he’d heard, but also to move past my embarrassing outburst. Not his thing.
“Okay, on three?” he said.
We flung the ash from our jars in unison and the wind carried Grandpa into a dust comet over the waves. His particles hung there for a split second, and then vanished into the froth.
I suddenly remembered a conversation I’d had with Grandpa inside the honey bus when I was small. I’d asked him if he thought people went to heaven when they died.
“That’s a buncha bull. You go into the ground and turn back into dirt,” he’d said. It was a little shocking to find out that most adults had been lying to me; that there were no soft clouds, no angels with harps. Now, taking in the beauty of his final resting place, I appreciated how he had always been honest with me. I silently thanked him for giving me the respect of real answers.
Grandpa had returned to his ancestors. He was now part of these jagged mountains and that unruly sea. He was the pasture we were standing in and all the wildflowers in it, all the arrowheads buried under it, and every bee flying over it. He was the smell of wild Mexican sage blowing in the wind, and the cries of a baby sea otter that was bobbing on the waves and calling for its mother each time she dove in search of food. Grandpa was everywhere, so in one sense he was never gone.
Matthew and I waited for the mother sea otter to surface, to be sure she hadn’t abandoned her pup, and then made our way back to my truck in silence.
I like to think Grandpa left on his own terms, much the same way a honeybee will abandon its hive to die alone if it is sick, to save the health of the colony. I believe that he didn’t want to become a burden to his family, so he chose to remove himself as the ultimate act of sacrifice for the people he loved. The one saving grace was that Granny’s heartbreak was softened by her dementia; she had a hard time remembering that her husband was gone.
Ten months later, she died in her sleep.
Mom’s health plummeted after Granny passed away. Within a year, she was living in a care home where hospice nurses could monitor her adult-onset diabetes, and alleviate her chronic breathing problems with oxygen tubes. Each time Matthew and I visited, she seemed smaller, as if she were shrinking. When doctors used the term actively dying in the fall of 2017, Mom embraced the inevitable with a calm acceptance; seventy-three years of life had never been that good to her anyway, she reasoned.
Until the very end, I never knew what she was really thinking, if she was scared, if she had regrets, if she loved or despised me.
The last time she phoned me, she was exquisitely herself.
“I’m going to die soon,” she’d said by way of opening, “and we’ve never had a good relationship. I want to know what you can say to me to make me feel better about that.”
In her own way, I think she was expressing a need to make things right. She just wanted someone else to do it.
“We’re okay, Mom,” I said. “There’s nothing to worry about anymore.”
“You mean that?”
“Yes, Mom. Just rest.”
I think I meant it. It was difficult to sort through the mixed emotions of losing the person who I’d wished all my life I could love. What kind of mourning is that, exactly? But the last thing I wanted to do was break my broken mother even further.
“I miss Granny,” she said.
“I know, Mom. I know.”
The last time I saw Mom was two weeks before she died. She was in a morphine haze, and Matthew and I were standing by her bedside, not certain if she knew we were there. Then all of a sudden her eyes flicked open and she seized my hand with the strength of a hawk’s talons.
“I’m glad you’re here,” she mumbled before slipping back into sleep and letting go.
I was glad, too. I was glad that she could die kn
owing her children came to her, in the end. That she could feel some love in her life, even if it was so faint that it was sometimes hard to see. Ultimately, we are all social insects that thrive together or suffer alone.
When Grandpa asked me to watch over his bees, he didn’t mean only his last colony; he was extracting a promise to care for all bees, for nature, for all beings. In short, he was asking me to see everything through the eyes of a beekeeper, to be gentle with all I encounter, even those things that can sting me.
I relocated Grandpa’s last hive to a community garden in a postcard-perfect San Francisco neighborhood of pastel Victorians, where the streets were named after states and the air had a yeasty smell from the Anchor Steam Brewery.
It was an ideal honeybee sanctuary: a terraced urban farm at the dead end of a residential street. Behind a locked gate, there were two dozen individual plots and an elevated bee yard so the gardeners barely noticed the bees flying overhead. The hives received full sun, with heat radiating off a neighboring wall to provide ample warmth and a windbreak. All the bees had to do was exit the hive and descend directly over their private farmer’s market, crowded with vegetables, citrus trees, lavender bushes and one beer maker’s hop flowers. I imagine Grandpa would’ve approved.
Today, I think of him every time I open the hive, every time I harvest honey, every time I hear another apocalyptic news story about disappearing honeybees. I’m keeping my promise to him, and also repaying a debt by protecting the tiny creatures that protected me when I needed it most.
One morning, a class of preschoolers from the nearby bilingual school paid a visit to my apiary. The kids dressed in bright yellow safety vests and held hands as they walked together chittering in two languages about abejas and honeybees. They gathered around me under the shade of an apple tree, and once their teachers got them to stop wiggling, I knelt down to tell them a story.
“When I was not much bigger than you, I had lots of bees at my house,” I said. “Bees are very special. Who can tell me why?”