The Swarms We Caught for Mom

The Combine

In October, Lowell combined the beans on the east side of his place. I was on my route that day, and I could see the dust from the county road.

He came over a week later. It was a Saturday afternoon, warm for October, and we were out at the hives putting the entrance reducers in for winter.

He had a piece of paper folded in his shirt pocket. He unfolded it at the fence and held it across the wire to Mom.

It was a printout off his combine’s yield monitor. It was a map of the whole field, colored in stripes, with the yield for every pass.

“Look at the east side,” he said. He put his finger on it. “Right along your fence. That’s the best strip in the field. Six bushels better than anywhere else.”

Mom took the paper and held it out at arm’s length, the way she reads everything now. She studied it a long time.

“Well,” she said. “Would you look at that.”

“Every man at the co-op wants to know how I did it,” Lowell said. He almost smiled. “I told them it was Ione’s bees.”

“It was,” Mom said. And she handed the paper back over the wire to him, and she did not say one other word about it. She did not have to.

Winter

Mom told the bees about it that same afternoon. I mean that. She went out before supper, with the sun still well up, and knocked on each lid and told them.

She has always done that. It is an old custom her grandmother brought over. When Dad died, she went out and told every hive, so they would not leave. When I was born, she told them that, too.

I went out with her and stood by the windbreak and listened. She told them Lowell was sorry. She told them Lacy had her own hive coming. She told them they had done good work.

Then she hummed the first verse of “In the Garden,” and she walked back to the house, and I walked with her.

All nine hives came through the winter. Lacy’s new hive came through, too. Lowell had bought her the best boxes the bee supply catalog sold, and she painted them herself.

The Call

The next July, on a bright still morning, the phone rang on Mom’s kitchen wall at seven o’clock.

I was there. I had stopped in for coffee before my route. Mom wiped her hands on her apron and picked it up.

She listened a minute. Then she smiled, and she covered the phone with her hand, and she whispered to me.

“It’s Curtis,” she said. “The sprayer. He wants to know what hour suits my bees.”