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19
GREEN FLAG
KEATON
Bees flitted around the other side of my mesh hood with nothing more than mild curiosity as Daisy explained to Sophie how to harvest honey. I was only an observer and child-lifter, but I watched and learned and soaked up every word she spoke.
That wasn’t new, but every day, I enjoyed it a little more.
Her face was shadowed by the mesh, but she was otherwise just in a long sleeved shirt and jeans, no gloves. Sophie was in head to toe gear, and though I had elbow high gloves in my back pocket, I hadn’t needed them yet.
Daisy used a tool to pop out a frame and slid it out for inspection, shaking it firmly. Bees fell off it in a curtain. “Wow, look at that, Soph—this one’s perfect. See how all the ends are capped?” She motioned at the wax with the tip of her tool. “This frame is almost completely full.”
“Can I do it?” Sophie asked, reaching for the frame.
“Sure. Hold it up here by the wood. Got it?”
She nodded, stepping off the small ladder she stood on and moving delicately toward the box we’d been filling with frames to harvest.
“There’s a lot of bees on here still,” she said warily.
“Don’t worry—they’ll leave when they realize the queen is still over here.”
Sophie slid the frame in and turned with a mighty air about her. “Can we find the queen?” she asked, hurrying back to climb on her box.
“I bet we can,” Daisy answered. “We won’t take any frames from there, though. Gotta leave the brood alone so we don’t disturb the eggs. Plus, they might get real mad.”
“Like when Daddy puts my shoes away and I can’t find them?”
“Just like that,” Daisy said, slipping her hands beneath the hive box to lift it. But before she got far, two walls came apart at the corner. “Damn. We’ve gotta fix that.”
I was already moving for an empty hive box, setting it next to them as the three of us went to pull frames.
“Let’s start at one end and put them back in the same order as they were.”
“How come?” Sophie asked.
“Well, the bees lay their eggs in one frame at a time, so we don’t want to confuse them by mixing them up.”
Sophie nodded thoughtfully, and once the frames were relocated, Daisy picked up her smoker while I took the broken box and put it in the back of the golf cart, wishing I’d brought my tools with me. When I approached them again, they were both hunched over, looking at the frame, covered in wiggling bees.
“Uncle Keaton, look!” Sophie waved me over, bright with excitement. “Daisy painted her so you can find her easy, see? She’s right there.”
I followed her index finger to the bees, and in the middle of a knot of insects was one that looked a little different, a hot pink spot on her back. She was longer, shinier than the fat bees, without stripes.
“Wow,” Sophie breathed. “She’s the only girl?”
“No, there are girl worker bees, but only one queen,” Daisy said as we watched the queen wander around, surrounded by drones. “Any female can be turned into a queen. When the queen starts to get old or sick, the nurse bees will pick around ten larvae and start feeding them royal jelly, which turns on their reproduction system. Makes it so they can have babies.”
“Royal jelly?” Sophie asked skeptically.
“It’s a … kind of a milk they produce. But the only bees allowed to drink it are baby queens. So about two weeks after feeding them like that, they cap the cell with wax, and when she’s grown, she chews her way out.”
“How do they decide which queen gets the hive?”
Daisy glanced at me as if to apologize. “Well, she calls to them all with a little chirp, and the queens chirp back from their cells so she can find them. And then … well she has to kill them.”
Sophie’s eyes went wide, but she didn’t get upset. All she said was, “Rude.”
On a bout of laughter, Daisy shook her head and slid the frame back into its box, then stacked another on top of it, effectively topping it off. Sophie didn’t say anything until we were headed back to the house with a massive basket of flowers we’d picked and two boxes of frames to harvest.
Though she hadn’t said anything, her brain hadn’t stopped working.
“So … honey isn’t like … dead bees or anything. Right?” she asked.
Again Daisy laughed, the wind lashing her hair and her rosy cheeks high. “No. You know how every bee has a job?” When Sophie nodded, she continued. “Well, forage bees collect the nectar and eat it until their bellies are full. Processor bees collect the nectar and crawl up to where the bees are storing honey in the honeycombs, which are built by architect bees.”
