The Hive Beside His Garden

Darrel helped me make the split on Friday evening. He does not keep bees, but he will wear a veil and hold a smoker and not complain, which is all I have ever asked of him.

We opened the survivor and went through it frame by frame. I pulled two frames of capped brood, one frame of open brood with eggs, two frames of honey and pollen. I checked each one twice to be sure the old queen was not riding along.

I shook one more frame of nurse bees into the new box, closed it, and stuffed a handful of green grass into the entrance. By the time the bees chewed their way out the next day, they would come out slow and look around before they flew.

I wedged the queen cage between two of the brood frames, candy end up. In three or four days the workers would eat through the candy and let her out, and by then they would know her smell.

Saturday morning we set the box in the back of the pickup on a feed sack, strapped it down, and drove it slow down the gravel to Joel and Lauren’s.

Lauren met us at the end of the drive in her garden clogs. She showed us where she wanted it, at the east end of the garden by the fence, where it would get the first morning sun and the cedars would break the north wind.

Darrel set two cinder blocks and a pair of treated two-by-fours across them for a stand, and checked it with a level from his toolbox. I set the hive on it, facing southeast, and pulled the grass out of the entrance a little ways.

Mindy came running across the yard before we finished. She had been watching from the porch. She stopped at the fence and looked at the box and then at me.

“Is it mine?”

“It’s your garden’s,” I said. “And you’re going to keep it. Every Saturday, the two of us.”

I took my veil off and put it on her head. It was too big and the brim sat down on her ears. She did not care.

That was when the back door banged.

Joel came across the yard. He had been out on the pad since before daylight and was dusty to the knees. He stopped at the garden fence, on the other side from us, and looked at the hive.

Then he looked at Mindy in my veil. Then at me. Then at his brother.

Nobody said a word. The bees were starting to work their way out past the grass in the entrance, a few at a time, lifting off and circling in front of the box.

One flew out over the squash rows, then another. Joel watched them go. His hands were on the top rail of the fence and I saw his knuckles go white.

“Gretchen,” he said. His voice cracked on my name. “There’s something I haven’t told anybody. Not Lauren. Not Mom.”

Lauren had come up behind him without his noticing. She stood at his elbow with her garden gloves still on.