The Swarms We Caught for Mom

The Fence Line

Mom decided where they would go. I did not tell her. She told me.

She walked out past the windbreak, past the old spot where the thirty had been, all the way to the east edge of her ten acres. Right up against Lowell’s barbed wire. His beans were just coming up green on the other side.

“Here,” she said.

“Mom,” I said. “Right on his fence?”

“There’s clover in the ditch on the road end,” she said. “There’s basswood in the grove across the section line. And soybean blooms make good honey, if a man lets the bees have them.”

Then she looked at the field for a while. “Bees don’t read property lines,” she said.

So Mervin leveled the stands right there, nine of them in a row, about eight feet in from the wire. We set every hive on its stand facing east, into the morning sun, toward the beans.

You could see that row of white boxes from the county road. You could see it from Lowell’s yard. You could see it from the cab of his tractor every time he made a pass.

I did not set them there to shame anybody. I want that understood. My mother set them there because it was the best spot for bees. But I will not pretend I did not know he would see them every single day.

The County

Something happened that summer that I did not plan on.

The calls kept coming even after we had nine. People called from the north end of the county and from over the line in the next one. A man who farms a section near the river drove forty minutes to bring Mom a bee box his grandfather had built.

Irvin, at the feed store, set back two fifty-pound bags of sugar for Mom’s syrup and would not let her pay for them. “It’s on the house,” he said. “Tell the bees it’s from me.”

Ladies Mom had not seen since she quit the church circle came out to her place just to look at the row of hives. They brought rhubarb bread. They sat on her porch.

And every one of them knew why there was a new row of hives on that fence. I never told them whose spray it was. I never had to. They knew whose beans were on the other side.

I heard later, from Gertrude, that Lowell walked into the co-op one morning in June for coffee. And the table where the men sit, where he had sat every morning for twenty years, went quiet when he came in.

Nobody said anything ugly. Nobody said anything at all. They just looked at their coffee. That is how it is done out here, and it is worse than anything you can say.

I did not feel good when I heard that. I want to be honest. I did not feel bad, either. I just felt like the world was going on the way it was supposed to.