My grandfather kept bees and I was terrified of them until I was about eleven.

He never made a thing of it. He'd just hand me the smoker and let me stand ten feet back and eventually five feet back and one summer I was standing right at the hive in one of his old veils that smelled like pipe tobacco, holding a frame heavy with honey and thirty thousand bees, and I wasn't scared anymore. I don't remember the day it flipped. There wasn't one. That's the thing about it.

He died when I was in college. The hives went to a neighbor because nobody in the family knew what to do with them and my grandmother wasn't going to keep them going at eighty-one.

Last month I bought a nuc. Five frames, a mated queen, from a guy two towns over who talked to me for forty minutes in his driveway about mite treatments. I have no idea what I'm doing. The first inspection I did, I got the frames back in the wrong order and probably rolled some bees, which is the thing you're not supposed to do, and I felt like I'd let the old man down somehow, which is ridiculous, he's been gone eleven years.

The bees don't care about any of that. They're just building comb, filling it, capping it. Doing the thing. I go out at dusk sometimes and put my ear near the box and it hums like a transformer.
