The Music of Bees

by Eileen Garvin

Sometimes being by yourself was better than keeping the wrong company.

Alice explained the difference between a brood box and a honey super, which was really just a question of location. Honey supers went on top of the brood boxes, which were baby bee nurseries or brood nests. She talked about how the bees built their comb out and the way a hive developed with its brood nest in the middle and honey and pollen around the edges as food stores. The excess honey in the supers was what she could harvest because it meant the bees had ample stores for the winter when they clustered up and couldn’t fly.

As long as she made it to the county planning department by 8:30 a.m. five days a week, no one had to know that Alice Holtzman was made of a million tiny broken pieces held together by cookies, solitary driving, and the sheer determination not to go crazy in public.

Disrupt old patterns. Find a path out of the old way of doing things to forge a new one. It might feel uncomfortable, but the only way out was through. Things needed to feel different to become different,

“You have to ask yourself, What is the wind doing and how can I capture it? How can I move within that? What is my place within this beautiful atmospheric moment? Just this one. Right here. Right now. You have to listen to the universe and hear what it is telling you.”

No, too afraid to say no. Afraid to stand up for herself and speak her mind. Afraid of being herself.

Alice was deeply angry at having pretended to be someone she wasn’t for so long.

Sorrow released a person from common constraints, and in their grief they could be their true, bald selves. If others chose to witness that, to truly see others, well, it changed everything.

Place yourself before a hive, and see the indefatigable energy of these industrious veterans, toiling along with their heavy burdens, side by side with their more youthful compeers . . . Let the cheerful hum of their busy old age inspire you with better resolutions, and teach you how much nobler it is to die with harness on, in the active discharge of the duties of life.

In his studying, Jake had learned all kinds of things about bees. He’d come across many interesting and archaic traditions in his reading—like if you got married, you had to introduce the bride to the hives. And if a beekeeper died, his friends had to tell the bees. One thing that really struck him was this idea of tending to the bees “absent of vice.” He read that they didn’t like the smell of onions or garlic. Beekeepers were urged not be “rude or drunken.” He’d jotted down, “Tend the hives with cleanliness and sobriety.”

“People here think global warming is a hoax made up by Portland yuppies who want to turn the interstate into a giant bike lane and dismantle capitalism in favor of socialist communes and replant all the wheat farms with marijuana.”

It was a gift Harry had never expected to receive—being responsible for someone else’s joy.