Sue Monk Kidd - The Secret Life of Bees by The Secret Life of Bees (html)(v0.9)

Author:The Secret Life of Bees (html)(v0.9) [Bees, The Secret Life of]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2011-10-05T02:32:11+00:00

Chapter Nine

The whole fabric of honey bee society depends on communication—on an innate ability to send and receive messages, to encode and decode information.

—The Honey Bee

July 28 was a day for the record books. I look back on it and what comes to me are people going over Niagara Falls in barrels. Ever since I'd heard about that, I'd tried to imagine people crouched inside, bobbing along peacefully like a rubber duck in a child's bathtub, and suddenly the water turning choppy and the barrel starting to thrash around while a roar grows in the distance. I knew they were in there saying, Shitbucket, what was I thinking?

At eight o'clock in the morning it hit 94, with the ambitious plan of reaching 103 before noon. I woke up with August shaking my shoulder, saying it was gonna be a scorcher, get up, we had to water the bees.

I climbed into the honey wagon with my hair uncombed, with May handing me buttered toast and orange juice through the window and Rosaleen sticking in thermoses of water, both of them practically running alongside the truck while August rolled out of the driveway. I felt like the Red Cross springing to action to save the bee queendom.

In the back of the truck August had gallons of sugar water already made up. "When it gets over a hundred," she said, "the flowers dry up and there's no food for the bees. They stay in the hives fanning themselves. Sometimes they just roast."

I felt like we might roast alive ourselves. You could not touch the door handle for fear of a third-degree burn. Sweat ran between my breasts and sopped my underwear band. August turned on the radio for the weather, but what we heard was how Ranger 7 had finally landed on the surface of the moon in a place called the Sea of Clouds, how police were looking for the bodies of those three civil rights workers in Mississippi, and the terrible things that had happened in the Gulf of Tonkin. It ended with a story about what was happening "closer to home," how black people from Tiburon, Florence, and Orangeburg were marching today all the way to Columbia asking the governor to enforce the Civil Rights Act.

August turned it off. Enough was enough. You cannot fix the whole world.

"I've already watered the hives around the house," she said.

"Zach is taking care of the hives on the east side of the county. So you and I've got the west side."

Rescuing bees took us the entire morning.

Driving back into remote corners of the woods where there were barely roads, we would come upon twenty-five beehives up on slats like a little lost city tucked back in there. We lifted the covers and filled the feeders with sugar water. Earlier we'd spooned dry sugar into our pockets, and now, just as a bonus, we sprinkled it on the feeding rims.

I managed to get stung on my wrist while replacing a lid onto a hive box.

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