The Swarms We Caught for Mom

Lowell’s Reason

The reason came around about a week later. That is how reasons travel out here. Somebody tells somebody at the elevator, and by Friday it is in the line at the post office.

The soybean aphids were bad that summer, the worst in years. Lowell’s field man counted some plants with better than four hundred on them. The threshold for spraying is two hundred fifty.

Every custom applicator in the county was booked solid. The one Lowell hires, a man named Curtis who runs a big self-propelled rig, told him the only time he had open that week was Tuesday at noon.

Lowell could have said no. He could have waited a day. He could have called Mom the night before and told her to close up her hives, the way some beekeepers do when they know a spray is coming.

He did none of those things. He told Curtis to come at noon, wind or no wind.

I want to be fair to him, because my mother always was. Four hundred aphids on a plant can cost a man a lot of beans, and a lot of beans is a lot of money on eight hundred acres.

But that was his reason. It was not an excuse. It did not bring back one bee, and it did not explain why he told a widow of seventy-six to keep her bugs in town.

Cleaning Up

We spent the next two Saturdays cleaning out thirty hives. It was the saddest work I have ever done outside of a funeral.

The comb had to go. Once poison gets into the wax and the pollen, you cannot trust it for new bees. Mom said so, and the extension bulletin she pulled out of her desk drawer said the same.

So we pulled every frame and cut the comb out into the burn barrel behind the shed. We did it in the daytime with the hose right there. The wax smoked black and smelled like a candle the size of a house.

My kids came both days. Wade was seventeen that summer, all elbows and appetite. Lacy was fourteen and still young enough to cry in front of her grandma without being embarrassed about it.

Lacy cried the first morning. She had been coming out to watch Mom’s bees since she was in a car seat. She knew which hive was the meanest and which one made the darkest honey.

Mom let her cry. Then she handed her a hive tool and showed her how to scrape the propolis off the edge of a box, and Lacy scraped until her arms were tired.

Wade did not say much. Wade never does. But on the second Saturday, I saw him walk out to the fence line by himself and stand there looking across at Lowell’s beans for a long time.

My husband, Mervin, works rotating shifts at the ethanol plant, so he missed the first Saturday. The second, he came straight out after a night shift and hauled the empty boxes into the machine shed. He stacked them in perfect rows.

“These are good boxes,” he told Mom. “Cypress. They’ll last another twenty years.”

“They will if there’s something to put in them,” she said.

When the last box was stacked, she stood in the shed doorway and counted them under her breath. Thirty deeps. Sixty-some supers. All of it empty.