Buzz Off - By Hannah Reed Page 0,15

incoming flights belonged there, ready to turn away any intruders if they smelled different from the hive’s members. Beehives might all look the same to us, but the bees knew the difference.

Honeybees circled my head, curious and harmless.

I closed my eyes and pretended that everything was as it had been before Manny died. I listened to the buzzing, smelling the freshness of the day and its accompanying promise of rain. When I opened my eyes, my loss felt even more pronounced.

Knowing this could be my last time ever in Manny’s beeyard hit me like a ton of bricks. After dark, when the bees were all inside their hives for the night, someone was going to take them away. Manny wouldn’t have wanted just anybody to take the bees. He would have wanted me to have them.

He’d rarely attended bee association meetings because the meetings were mostly social gatherings, beekeepers talking shop, and that wasn’t Manny’s way. Although he knew most of the members, he wasn’t overly friendly with any of them, though if they needed advice, he was right there for them.

I had to talk to Grace before it was too late. What was she thinking to let an outsider have Manny’s bees? Would she even give me a chance to buy some of the equipment, or was that going, too? I felt so helpless.

I approached the honey house. The weathered, graying wood gave it a rustic look, but if it had been mine, I’d have painted it bright yellow with white trim. Yellow was absolutely my favorite color. I slipped a key into the padlock, letting myself in. The smell of honey was strong. I looked around the room at the extracting equipment, then at a stack of frames in the corner. I saw familiar rows of empty honey jars and lids on a tabletop and cases of filled jars everywhere.

Manny and I had packaged some of the honey right from the hives to sell as comb honey, delicious when spread on bread. The rest went into a special machine that spun around and extracted the honey from the combs for bottling. In bee lingo the process is called spinning honey.

After loading two cases of bottled honey into my truck, I selected several honeybee reference books to take with me, ones that I’d purchased myself. Then I decided at the last minute to also take our bee journal.

Well, okay, it wasn’t exactly “our” journal. It had really belonged to Manny, but some of the entries were mine, so I felt a certain ownership. Manny had kept detailed information on his progress against mites and diseases that might come in handy with my two remaining hives. He had also been a great experimenter, testing ways to increase production of different components like royal jelly and propolis.

Honey production wasn’t the only source of income for a beekeeper. Royal jelly was the stuff nurse bees fed to larvae to produce queens. Besides its anti-aging benefits, which made it a favorite ingredient in skin creams, royal jelly had anti-cancer properties, a hot commodity, health-wise. Then there was the propolis, a special glue bees made from trees to seal their homes from extreme temperatures. Scientists, including backyard scientists like Manny, were finding out that it had powerful antibiotic components, and serious beekeepers were keeping track of their results, studying the market.

And he was scientific about his research into colony collapse disorder, something that was threatening honeybees all across the country. Whatever he had been doing seemed to be working, because he had strong hives. Some beekeepers were reporting unexplained hive losses, entire hives dying at the same time. Not Manny.

I planned to read through the journal, make copies of some of the pages, then return it to Grace, if she cared enough to want it back.

Except the journal wasn’t on the table or in the drawer where Manny usually kept it. And it didn’t show up in my search.

Giving up, I locked the honey house, took one last long look at it and at the activity in the beeyard, and drove away. As I left, my thoughts turned criminal. What if I came back after dark but before the association folks came, and loaded as many hives into my truck as possible? Then Grace would think the association had taken them, right? By the time she found out, I’d have them safely hidden away. Besides, what would she care? They would be gone and, as Betty said, good riddance. Right? After that, I’d buy