Buzz Off - By Hannah Reed Page 0,51

Grams or Mom even knowing. Here’s why:• They both go to bed incredibly early.

• Mom uses earplugs because Grams can take down the roof with her snoring.

• Grams has refused to give up any of the family’s old farmland to developers, thus I had a significant area on which to hide the hives.

• She rents out some of the land to a farmer who planted corn this year (next year will be alfalfa), and he wouldn’t be out in the fields again until harvest time next month. Even if he did see them, he wouldn’t think anything of them.

• The green corn stalks had ripened to a beautiful fall yellow and would effectively camouflage the hives, since I had painted them yellow to match my house. Yellow corn, yellow stalks, yellow hive boxes.

I backed my truck into my driveway, and then dressed in coveralls, boots, a veil, and gloves, taking care to tuck in all my loose ends where a bee might wander in. Tight pant cuffs and sleeves work best when dealing with bees, so I rubber-banded myself. I even pulled my hair up into a ponytail to keep it out of my face. Then I closed off the entrances to both hives with wire mesh, gave them a few puffs of smoke from the smoker, which worked wonders in keeping them calm, started the truck engine because vibrations also help quiet bees for some unknown reason, and began trying to load the boxes into the back of my truck. That turned out to be harder than I thought. The hives were incredibly heavy.

Impossible to lift, in fact.

I gave up and called Holly. “I need you to help me lift something,” I said into the phone.

“Do you know what time it is?”

“So? You sleep all morning. I assume you stay up all night.”

“K, K (okay, okay). Where and when?”

“My house. Now.”

Good thing my sister didn’t ask what she was going to lift or she never would have shown up.

“You’ve got to be kidding,” she said when I handed her the proper attire. “I’m afraid of bees. I might be allergic.”

“Bee allergies are hereditary,” I said, pulling that scientific fact out of thin air. “We don’t have it in our family.”

Holly sighed, one of those big, noisy, disgusted, why-me air releases that might cause a lesser woman to excuse her from the task at hand. After she realized I wasn’t going to back down, she got herself dressed in the protective clothing.

Getting her to take a position at the side of a hive was another thing. “They can’t get out of the hives,” I reassured her. “See the wire mesh? It’s literally impossible for them to get at you.”

With further coaxing, we got to work, gingerly loading the hives into the truck, being as careful as we could not to jar them.

The bees weren’t too happy. They fanned inside the hive boxes, causing a wild vibration and scaring Holly into a few dashes toward the house before we completed the task.

After tying everything down and shutting the truck doors softly, we were on our way.

Suddenly I felt the stress draining from my body. The farther we got from my house, the better I felt. Enough bad things had happened in the last few days without the added worry of Lori Spandle killing my last two hives of honeybees. The back of my neck and my shoulders ached from carrying around that fear. Tomorrow couldn’t come fast enough. My bees would be safe, no more stressing over them.

I checked my rearview mirror to make sure we weren’t followed. We weren’t.

“Where are we going?” Holly wanted to know.

“You’ll see,” I answered.

I cut the truck lights a quarter mile from the house, right after Holly figured out where we were going. I eased along with the windows rolled down, smelling earth and green growth. Crickets sang and bullfrogs croaked. The ground leading into the field was rough, causing the truck to bounce. I slowed down to a crawl for the hives’ sake.

I headed to the far side of the cornfield, where the early-morning sun would warm the hives. The boxes were just as heavy as they’d been when we loaded them up, but getting them down was definitely easier. I picked the most level spot I could find, we finished placing the hives, then we both got back into the truck and I moved it a distance away.

“Stay in the truck,” I said to my sister. “They are going to be angry once