The Swarms We Caught for Mom

The First Jar

By August, the hives were heavy. Mom could tip a box back and feel it. She was out there every morning at seven, before the heat, with her smoker and her coffee and her old hymn.

We pulled the first supers of capped honey on the second Friday in August. Mom said swarms that strong do not always make extra honey their first year. These did. It was a good flow.

We extracted it in Mom’s kitchen with her old hand-crank extractor, the one Dad found at a farm sale in 1991. Lacy turned the crank. The honey came out pale gold and smelled like clover.

Lacy filled the first jar herself, a quart jar, right to the shoulder. She wiped the rim with a damp cloth the way Mom showed her and screwed on the ring.

Mom took the jar from her. She held it up to the kitchen window, and the light came right through it.

“Take this one to Lowell,” she said.

Nobody said anything for a minute. Wade put down the uncapping knife.

“Grandma,” he said. “After what he did?”

“After what he did,” Mom said, “his beans fed these bees. That is his share.”

She wrote on a strip of masking tape and pressed it onto the lid. It said, “From the fence line. Ione.”

Lacy carried it across. She went the next morning, a little before eight, on foot, along the fence and up his field road to his back step. She set it on the top step where he would see it when he came out to his truck.

Then she walked home along the fence line and did not look back.

The Morning

An hour later, we were all back out at the hives. Wade had gone to his summer job at the elevator, so it was just the three of us.

It was a bright morning, sunny and already warm. The beans on the other side of the wire were thick and green and starting to bloom. The bees were working them. You could hear it from the house.

Mom had her veil pushed back off her face, the way she does when the bees are calm. She had a frame of capped comb up in both hands, holding it to the light. I had the smoker going beside her.

Lacy stood on her other side in that old veil, watching. She wore it every time now. She had stopped being scared somewhere around the third swarm.

Then Lacy said, “Grandma.”

Lowell was walking down the fence line toward us, on his side of the wire. He had the quart jar in one hand.

He came slow. He did not hurry and he did not stop. When he got to the wire, two hives down from Mom, he stood there.

Mom set her frame back down into the box, gently, so as not to roll any bees. She did not move toward him. She just turned and looked at him.

“Ione,” he said.

He stood there a long time. I think he had come over with something ready to say, and now that he was at the fence, it had gone out of him.

“I got your honey,” he said finally.

“I see that,” Mom said.