The Hive Beside His Garden

People have asked me since why I did not call the sheriff or find a lawyer. The ground was Marie’s, not mine. I had kept my bees there on a handshake for four years, and you do not drag your husband’s brother into court over bees on land you do not own.

Besides, a judge could not put a single bee back in a box. Whatever I did, I wanted it to be something that fixed more than it broke.

The next morning I was up at four. I drove past the creek corner before my route and saw his pickup and the skid steer parked at the edge of a scraped-off rectangle of dirt, maybe forty by sixty feet, with stakes and string marking the corners.

Joel was out there alone with a laser level on a tripod, shooting grade. He saw me coming across the grass and did not stop working.

“You could have called me,” I said. I kept my voice low. “One phone call. I’d have had them moved in a week.”

“Concrete truck’s booked for Monday,” he said, without looking up. “I didn’t have a week.”

“You had a month. Darrel said Marie told you a month ago.”

He wrote a number on the stake with a carpenter’s pencil. His jaw was tight. “It had to go somewhere, Gretchen. It’s a shop. It doesn’t fit anywhere else on the place.”

“Those were four years of my life.”

“They’re bugs,” he said, and then he stopped and closed his eyes for a second, like he heard himself. But he did not take it back, and he did not say sorry.

I did not yell. I turned around and walked back to the Jeep and went and delivered six hundred pieces of mail to people who had no idea what had happened at the creek.

That night on our back step I added it up on the back of an envelope, the way I add up everything, while the yard light drew moths.

Twelve colonies. If I had to replace them as nucs from Arlo, that was $185 each. Then the boxes, the frames, the foundation, the honey supers I had built up one at a time. I figured about $115 a hive in equipment that was firewood now.

Twelve times three hundred. Thirty-six hundred dollars of bees, and that did not count the honey I would not sell that summer.

Darrel read the envelope over my shoulder and set his hand on my back. “I’ll get it out of him,” he said.

“I don’t want it out of him,” I said. “I want to know why.”

Marie called me the next afternoon. I was parked at a mailbox cluster on the blacktop south of town, and when I saw her name on my phone I almost let it ring.

She was crying. Marie is seventy-one and I had seen her cry twice in eleven years, at her husband Ray’s funeral and at our wedding.

“I told him he could have the corner,” she said. “I told him to talk to you first and give you time to move them. I thought he had. I thought you’d moved them, honey. I would never have said yes to that.”