Sins of the Bees by Annie Lampman

Author:Annie Lampman [Lampman, Annie]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781643135335
Publisher: Pegasus Books
Published: 2020-09-02T00:00:00+00:00

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When she woke, it was early evening. She walked to Nick’s open bedroom door and reached in fast, flicking on the light, hesitating a moment before walking in. She stood looking at his folded clothes, then went to the nightstand, picked up the jar, and turned it in her hands. What kind of man packed around a jar of honey? She examined the wrinkled label decorated with bees, careful to put the jar back in the same position as she’d found it before paging through a beekeeping book until she got to the center photo insert: piñata-size swarms hanging from tree branches and close-ups of hive interiors. Diagrams of bee anatomy; differences of wing pattern, body size, and antennae placement; bees classified according to type: Apis mellifera ligustica, the Italian honeybee, or Apis mellifera carnica, the Carniolan honeybee. Pictures of the queen and the drones and the workers, pictures of the eggs, the pollen cells and wax caps. Illustrations and captions on nectar collection, propolis storage, egg rearing, honey production, and hive health.

Flipping to a chapter titled “The Trials and Tribulations of Beekeeping,” she stopped to read. It said the beekeeper must be patient. Building the hives was slow, painstaking work—battling diseases, mites and viruses, frosts, wax moths, mice, skunks, bears, yellow jackets. Unknown pestilence. Colony collapse. Keeping bees was a way of life, a lost art. She read terms common to her—order, family, tribe, genus, species—immersing herself in the world of bees: nectar and honey, breeding and rearing, broods and queens. The queen’s calls of sovereignty, of mating, everything somehow imbued with sex, full and pulsating.

The author was photographed in front of flowering honeysuckle, serenely bearded with bees. Bees clustered on his cheeks, on his neck, on his lips. Beads of bees dangling from his ears. She imagined exposing herself like that—bees all over her body, buzzing her skin.

The house creaked, and she jumped. She closed the books hastily and put them back in place, then walked quickly out and shut the door behind her.

Safely in her own bedroom, she opened the window, warm night air gusting in, the river a murmuring backdrop, a family of coyotes singing to one another. Silva pulled off her clothes and lay on her bed in the dark, the bonsai silhouetted against the bedroom walls. Nick’s lingering presence just across the hall. Close enough almost to reach. She imagined the heavy portent of all those swarming wings—her body entombed with crawling insects and dripping with honey. The words of beekeeping a litany running through her subconscious: brood nest, beemilk, deep super, nurse bees, virgin queen, royal jelly. She imagined herself with delicate hands breaking open a honeycomb’s seal and sucking honey from chambers of wax, her skin and mouth sticky and ripe.

When she reached for herself, she sucked in her breath at the shock of it, her hands on her skin, on her stomach, on her breasts, her body alive with a kind of longing that took her by surprise. She

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