The Beekeeper
DANA USES HER FINGERNAIL to flick honeybees away from her protective suit. She wears no gloves, preferring to risk stings than to compromise her tactile knowledge of their nests. Ever the ecologist, she similarly prefers top-bar hives to horizontal stacking ones.
From a distance, I shake my head. Even a hazmat suit would be insufficient for the likes of me. What’s more, traditional hats and veils appear too flimsy. My anxieties about bees border on melissophobia. I wave to the young one, anyway. She waves back.
Later, over tea and pretzels, Dana exclaims that her favorite queen’s hive has superseded rather than swarmed. Her beloved, aged empress, who was likely missing a leg or an antenna, or who had emptied her spermathecal, that receptaculum, which the bug had filled on
