The Swarms We Caught for Mom

The Number

That evening at supper, at my house, I did the math on the back of a feed store envelope.

A package of bees, three pounds and a queen, runs about two hundred dollars now if you can get one. Thirty of them is six thousand dollars, before you buy one sheet of new foundation or one bag of sugar.

Mom lives on Dad’s pension from the county road crew and her Social Security. She does not have six thousand dollars lying around for bees. She would never have let me pay it, either.

“She could ask him for it,” Wade said.

“She won’t,” I said.

“Then I’ll ask him.”

Mervin set his fork down. “No, you won’t,” he said, gently. “That’s your grandma’s to decide. Not ours.”

Wade looked at his plate. He knew his dad was right. That did not make him like it.

Lacy had been quiet. Then she said, “Where do bees come from? I mean, wild ones. Before anybody buys them.”

I looked at her. And I remembered something Mom told me years ago, standing in the yard with a dish towel over her shoulder, watching a cloud of bees pour out of one of her hives and go up into the cottonwood.

“They swarm,” I said. “In the spring, when a hive gets crowded, half of them leave with the old queen and go looking for a new home. They hang on a branch somewhere while scouts go looking.”

“Can you catch them?”

“Your grandma used to,” I said. “With a cardboard box and a bedsheet.”

Lacy put her fork down. “Then let’s catch some,” she said.

The Waiting

The trouble was the calendar. In southern Minnesota, swarm season is mostly May and June. By the end of July it is all but over. There was nothing to catch until the next spring.

So we waited. And while we waited, we got ready.

Mom did not want to talk about it at first. When I brought it up in August, she just shook her head and said she was too old to start over from nothing.

I did not push. I went out to the machine shed every Saturday that fall with the kids and we went through the boxes, one at a time. We scraped them. We patched the ones that needed it.

By Thanksgiving, Mom was coming out to the shed to watch. By Christmas she was telling Wade he was nailing the frames wrong. By February, she was at her kitchen table with us, wiring new foundation, humming the way she always did when she worked.

She hummed “In the Garden.” She always hummed that one with the bees. I asked her once why, and she said it was the only hymn she knew all the verses to without the book.

Mervin built a set of hive stands out of treated lumber and old cement blocks. He measured everything twice and leveled every one with the four-foot level from his truck.

And I did the one thing a mail carrier can do better than anybody in the county. I talked.