The Boy and the Glass Hive

It was 8:35 when we pulled back into the village square.

The market was running. A line of folding tables circled the green, and there were shoppers everywhere, carrying paper sacks and coffee, with a bluegrass trio playing on the library steps. And in the gazebo lot, at a card table next to a dumpster, my son stood alone.

Arlo had brought him a folding chair. Dustin had not sat in it.

He had sold six jars since eight o’clock.

Rob carried the hive across the asphalt on his shoulder like a sack of seed, and Dustin ran to meet us.

“You got it,” he said.

“We got it.”

“Is Queenie okay?”

“She’s got a blue dot and she’s walking around like she owns the place,” Rob said. “She’s fine.”

We set it on the card table, with two of the totes under it to bring it up to eye level. Dustin straightened the legs. He ran the clear tube out through the end of the gazebo railing, so the foragers could come and go over the grass. I got the cash box from the truck and a stack of paper sacks and a pair of scissors.

Then my son did something I had not expected.

He pulled the wooden box of jars to the front, took one out, and unscrewed the lid of a sample jar. Then he set out a box of wooden stir sticks, the little ones, and a small paper cup of honey, and a handwritten card.

It said, in his square printing: Taste it. Then watch them make it.

“Dad helped me write it,” he said. “Last night. I wasn’t going to use it.”

“Why not?”

“I thought it sounded like bragging.”

I looked at that card for a long time. A boy who thinks the truth sounds like bragging has been raised by good people, and I was proud to be a part of it, and I was afraid for him at the same time. I have been both of those things more than once.

“Put it out,” I said.

He did.

The first person to stop was a little girl about six years old, with a pink backpack and a missing front tooth.

She did not look at the honey. She looked at the glass. Her whole face went still, and she put both hands flat on the table and whispered to her father, “Daddy, they’re working.”

Her father was a tall man in navy coveralls, with a Hartzler Feed patch over the pocket. I knew him from the mill. He bent down to see.

“Well, I’ll be,” he said. “Look at that. Which one’s the boss?”

“The one with the blue dot,” Dustin said. He had stepped up beside the table without being asked. “That’s the queen. She lays about a thousand eggs a day. See the ones with their heads down in the cells? They’re the nurse bees. They’re feeding the babies.”

“And the honey?”

“The shiny part at the top, where the cells are capped with white wax. That’s finished honey. Those bees over there are fanning their wings to dry it out.” He pointed. “It has to be under eighteen percent water. That’s how you know it’s honey and not syrup.”

The father looked at his daughter. The daughter looked at the glass. Neither one of them moved for a good minute.

“Can I try some?” the man asked.