The Swarms We Caught for Mom

The Route

I drive a hundred and twelve miles a day, six days a week, and I have about four hundred and thirty boxes on my route. I know who gets the seed catalogs and who gets the hospital bills.

In April, I started telling people. Not the whole story. Just one line, at every box where somebody was out in the yard.

“If you see a swarm of bees this spring, call me. I’ll come get it.”

Gertrude, who runs the counter at our post office, typed it up on a half sheet of paper and pinned it to the bulletin board, right between the 4-H dairy show and a lost dog.

People asked why. Mostly they just asked why a mail carrier was catching bees. And when they asked, I told them, once and plainly, that my mother lost her hives to drift the summer before and we were trying to set her up again.

I did not say whose beans. I never said his name, not once. I did not have to. In a county like ours, a story like that only has to be told plain one time.

The First Swarm

The first call came on the ninth of May, at two in the afternoon. It was Ottie, who lives at the end of a gravel road eleven miles east of Mom.

“Paulette,” she said, “there’s a ball of bees in my lilac the size of a football, and my husband says you’re the one to call.”

I finished my route in a hurry, and I picked up Lacy at the school, and we drove out to Mom’s for the box. Mom was waiting on the porch with a cardboard box from the grocery store and an old flat sheet folded over her arm.

“You’re coming,” I said.

“Somebody has to show you how,” she said.

The swarm was right where Ottie said, hanging off a lilac branch about chest high. It was the size of a football, maybe bigger, and it hummed like a refrigerator. You could feel it in your teeth.

Lacy stopped about twenty feet back. “Grandma,” she said. “I don’t think I can.”

Mom looked at her. Then she said, “Wait right there,” and walked back to the car.

She came back with a white hat with a mesh veil sewn around the brim. It was yellowed at the edges, and one of the strings had been tied back together with a knot.

“Your grandpa bought me this in 1986,” she said. “The very first spring. I wore it till the mesh wore through at the seam.”

She settled it on Lacy’s head. She pulled the veil down and smoothed it over her shoulders. Then she tied the strings under Lacy’s chin herself, with her old hands, slow and careful, the way she used to tie my shoes.

“There,” she said. “Now you’re a beekeeper.”

Lacy stood very still. Through the veil, I could see her face, and she was trying hard not to cry, and so was I.