The Boy and the Glass Hive

The honey is the pay. He has been saving for a used truck, a 1999 Ford Ranger with a five-speed and a rust spot on the left rocker that a man in Orrville is holding for him at twenty-eight hundred dollars. Dustin had sixteen hundred and forty saved. He had counted it on a legal pad in his room, and he had written 1,160 to go, circled twice.

One hundred and twenty jars, at nine dollars each, was ten hundred and eighty. That was almost all of it.

I left Dustin with Arlo and drove home at a speed I will not confess to.

Our house is on Township Road 14, eight miles out. Rob’s pickup was already in the driveway when I pulled in, with the engine ticking and the driver’s door standing open. He had left the mill without telling anyone. He told me later that he handed the scale-house keys to a boy named Corey, said “family,” and walked out.

He was in the garage with the hive on the workbench, wrapping a ratchet strap around it, when I came in.

“Tell me again,” he said.

I told him again. I told him all of it, in the order it happened, and I watched him swallow twice.

Rob Bowman is a quiet man. He is six feet two and weighs two hundred and thirty pounds, and in sixteen years of marriage I have heard him raise his voice exactly twice, both times at a cow. He stood there with his hand flat on the glass of that hive and I saw him decide something.

“I’ll go talk to her,” he said.

“No.”

“Dana.”

“If you go over there and say something to your sister in front of that crowd, it becomes about you and Gwen. It becomes a family fight.” I put my hand on his forearm. “He asked me not to. I told him I wouldn’t. I need you to help me carry the bees.”

He looked at me for a good five seconds. Then he let out a breath and picked up the strap.

“I’ll talk to her Sunday. At her house. With nobody around.”

“That’s the right place.”

“Then I’ll carry the bees,” Rob said, and he did.

The observation hive is a wooden box about the size of a small suitcase, standing on two legs, with a pane of glass on each side and room inside for two frames of comb. It had won Dustin a blue ribbon at the Wayne County Fair in July, in the beekeeping project.

A clear plastic tube ran out the front of it. At a market it would let the foragers fly out to the clover along the village green and come home again. Dustin had worked that out himself.

Inside, behind the glass, about two thousand bees were building comb on a single frame. You could see the queen, a fat gold bee with a blue dot of paint on her back, moving through the crowd with her attendants around her like ladies in waiting.

That got a small laugh out of him, and then we loaded the bees into the truck, and I buckled them in. I am not ashamed of that. I put the seat belt across a box of honeybees, because I was doing thirty-eight miles an hour on a gravel road and had never been so careful with anything.