The Hive Beside His Garden

Joel got a furnace in by September and put in his bid. He did not get the full county contract. He got a piece of it, the plow trucks for the north half of the county, which was enough to keep the doors open.

Lauren picked up nights as a nurse aide at the care center in Eldora. Joel took on farm trucks and pickups and anything else that came in the door. It was a lean winter for them, and they made it.

Meanwhile, Mindy kept her bees.

Every Saturday that summer, I drove down the gravel and the two of us opened that hive together. She lit Ray’s smoker with burlap and dry pine needles, the way I taught her, and she never once let it go out.

The queen was released from her cage on the fourth day and accepted, and by the second week she was laying in a tight, beautiful pattern. Mindy found her every time. She named her Grandma Marie, which made Marie laugh until she had to sit down.

Lauren’s squash set fruit in July like it had been waiting years for permission. Zucchini, butternut, acorn, more than they could eat. Lauren left boxes of it on the post office loading dock for anyone who wanted it.

Joel watched Mindy work that hive every Saturday from the garden fence. He never put on a veil. He just leaned on the rail with his arms crossed and watched her, and once in a while he asked a question.

In late August I helped Mindy take one medium super of honey off. First-year splits usually do not make much extra, and I did not want to take what they needed for winter. We left them the rest.

In October we wrapped the hive together for winter. Tar paper around the outside, a moisture box with wood shavings on top, a mouse guard over the entrance. Joel built her a windbreak out of scrap steel siding from the shop, without being asked.

Iowa winters are hard on bees. You do everything right and you still lose some. All winter Mindy would put her ear against the side of the box when the weather broke above freezing, listening for the hum.

On the first warm day in March, she called me at six in the morning. I was already up, getting ready for my route.

“They’re flying,” she said. She was out of breath. “Aunt Gretchen. They’re flying. They made it.”

I could hear Joel in the background, laughing. Not the broken laugh from the garden fence. A real one.

That spring, with Joel’s thirty-six hundred dollars, I bought eight nucs from Arlo up by Ackley and split my survivor again. By June I had eleven hives back on the creek corner, sitting on new stands Joel had welded out of steel pipe.

Arlo came down to look at them. He walked the row slowly, the way old beekeepers do, and he stopped at the end where the survivor stood.

“That’s the one that made it,” he said.

“That’s the one.”

“Well,” he said. “It’s a good line. You keep splitting from that one.”