The History of Bees

Chapter 15 GEORGE

We had reached the hives by the Satis farm. I took those closest to the main road. I caught a glimpse of Jimmy and Rick, who were working their way across the field. I was tired, but not worn out, knew I was going to sleep as if somebody had pulled out the plug on me that night.

I was just about to lift the lid off the last hive when Gareth Green showed up.

His semitrailer truck thundered through the landscape. Three more followed behind him. When he saw me, he stopped. He actually stopped. And the semitrailer trucks behind him had to wait in line, stand there with the engines running and the sun beating down on the windshields and just wait for Gareth. It probably wasn’t the first time.

He got out of the cab with a huge smirk on his face, sporting mirror sunglasses and a suntan. And a bright green cap with the words CLEARWATER BEACH, SPRING BREAK 2006. Bought on sale down south, maybe. Gareth liked doing things on the cheap, but preferably in a way so people wouldn’t notice, because he also liked it if people were impressed. He left the door open and the engine running.

“So. Everything good up here?”

He nodded towards me and my hives, which were placed at irregular distances across the field. There weren’t many of them so they looked pretty sparse.

“Looking good,” I said. “A good winter. Didn’t lose many.”

“Good. Good. Happy to hear it. Us too. Not much waste.” Gareth always used the word waste about the bees. Made it sound as if they were plants. Farm crops.

He nodded towards the landscape. “We’re going to stop here for a round now. Pears.”

“Not apples?”

“Nope. It’s pears this year. Got a bigger farm. Have more bees now, you know. The Hudson farm is too small for us.”

I didn’t answer. Just nodded again.

He nodded, too.

We stood there nodding, while our gazes slid away in opposite directions. Like two figurines, the kind we had when I was little, where the head is loose and just needs a tiny push to set it into motion, nodding and nodding while staring out into space.

He concluded with a final nod towards the trucks. “Been on the road a long time now. It’ll be good to get everything in place up here.”

I followed his gaze. Hive after hive, all prefabricated, gray expanded polystyrene, were securely strapped to the semitrailers and covered with a green, fine-mesh netting material. The rumbling of the engines drowned out the buzzing of all the bees inside.

“California, is that where you’re coming from?” I said. “How many miles is it from there?”

“You’re out of touch.” He laughed. “California was in February. Almonds. The season ended a long time ago. Now we’re on our way back from Florida. Lemons.”

“Lemons, right.”

“And blood oranges.”

“Right.”

Blood oranges. Nope, ordinary oranges weren’t good enough for Gareth.

“Been driving for twenty-four hours,” he continued. “Small potatoes compared to the trip we took before that. California to Florida. That’s some serious driving. Just getting across Texas takes almost twenty-four hours. Do you have any idea how wide that state actually is?”

“No. Can’t say I’ve ever thought about it.”

“Wide. The widest state we have. Except for Alaska, that is.”

“Right.”

Gareth’s four thousand beehives were on the road year-round, never at rest. Winter in the southern states, peppers in Florida, almonds in California, back to lemons and oranges—or blood oranges, which were apparently new this year—in Florida, then north for three or four stops in the course of the summer. Apples or pears, blueberries, pumpkins. The bees were only at home here in June. Then Gareth took stock, as he put it, calculated his losses, combined hives, did repairs.

“By the way, I met Rob and Nellie down there,” he said.

“That right?”

“What’s the place called—Gulf Village?”

Well, well. So he’d been there. To the so-called paradise.

“Gulf Harbors.”

“Well, I’ll be! You’ve heard of it, too! Gulf Harbors, yes. Got to see the new house. Right out on the canal. They’ve got themselves a water scooter. Rob took me out for a ride. Believe it or not we saw dolphins.”

“Dolphins, you say. Not manatees?”

“No. Manatees? What’re those?”

“Rob and Nellie have been bragging about it. That they have manatees right outside their house.”

“Wow. No. I didn’t see any manatees. Anyway. They’ve got a good setup there. Nice place.”

“So I’ve heard.”

Someone in one of the trucks behind him gunned the engine. Impatient. But Gareth ignored it. That’s how he was. My legs were itching. But he just stood there calmly, it seemed like he’d never finish.

“And you.” He took off his glasses and looked at me. “Any trips planned?”

“Yes,” I said. “More than enough trips. Going out in a few weeks. Maine.”

“Blueberries, as usual?”

“Yeah, blueberries.”

“Then we’ll see you, maybe. I’ve got Maine this year, too.”

“You don’t say. Yeah, well, be seeing you, then.” I tried to twist a smile out of my lips.

“White Hill Farm, know where that is?” He scratched under his cap. His hand turned green under the sunlight shining through the fabric.

“No,” I said. It was the biggest farm for miles around. Everyone, even the youngest toddler, yes, even every single dog, knew where it was.

He grinned, didn’t answer, knew for sure I was lying. Then he finally turned around to face the truck again, gave a salute with his hand against his cap, winked cheekily at me and got in.

The cloud of dust blocked the sunlight as they disappeared.

We went to school together, Gareth and I. He was a sluggish guy. Ate too much, worked out too little, afflicted with eczema. The girls weren’t interested. Not us guys, either. For some reason or other he took a shine to me. Maybe because I couldn’t bring myself to bad-mouth him all the time. Could see there was a person in there. And my mom was on my case all the time. You should be nice to everyone, especially those who don’t have many friends. Gareth was without a doubt in that category, the one for people without many friends. That’s how my mom was. It was impossible to be really cruel when you had her voice in your head all the time. Mom even made me invite him home a couple of times. Gareth thought it was out of this world to be invited to dinner on the farm. My dad took us out to the bees. Gareth asked questions, poking and prying. He was a lot more interested than I’d ever been, or at least had given the impression of being so. And my father was happy to explain, of course.

Luckily, in high school we lost touch. Or else, it was just easier to stay away. I got the impression that Gareth buried himself in school and work. He had a part-time job at the hardware store, already started saving money back then. With time the extra pounds disappeared and he apparently got one of those sunlamps that helped the eczema, and as a result his skin was always slightly golden. Had to admit, it didn’t look half bad.

He also managed to find himself a pretty nice girl. After finishing school, he bought a piece of land, and wouldn’t you know he started with bees. Operations boomed, Gareth apparently had a knack for it. He expanded, got more hives. The girl had children, more attractive than Gareth had been, no eczema on any of them. And now he’d become a big shot. One of the biggest in town. Cruised around on Sundays with his family securely seat-belted into a huge German SUV. Was a member of the country club, paid $850 a year so the whole family could stand out there in the meadow and hit balls in all kinds of weather. Sure, I’d checked what it cost.

He’d also invested in the new library. A shiny brass plaque informed everyone who cared to read it, and there were many who did, that the local community was deeply grateful to Green’s Apiaries for its generosity when the library was built.

Revenge of the nerds, that’s what it was. And the rest of us, those of us who hadn’t been particularly nerdy, but popular enough in school, had to sit on the sidelines and watch how Gareth wallowed in increasingly more dough with every passing year.

Everyone who worked with bees knew that the real money didn’t lie in honey; Gareth’s assets didn’t come from honey. The real money was in pollination. Agriculture didn’t have a chance without bees. Mile after mile of blossoming almond trees or blueberry bushes; they weren’t worth a dime unless the bees carried the pollen from one flower to another. The bees could travel more than several miles a day. Many thousands of flowers. Without them the flowers were just as useless as the contestants of a beauty pageant. Nice to look at, while they lasted, of absolutely no value in the long run. The flowers wilted, died, without bearing fruit.

Gareth had invested in pollination from day one. His bees had always been traveling colonies. Always on the road. I’d read that it made the bees stressed, that it wasn’t good for them, but Gareth claimed the bees didn’t notice anything, they were thriving just like mine.

Maybe it was exactly because Gareth had come to the trade from the outside that he’d invested in that field. He’d understood where things were headed—that small honey farms, like mine, run more or less in the same way for generations, didn’t exactly put money in the bank, hadn’t done so before and certainly didn’t do so now. Every single small investment was an effort, and we lived at the mercy of the friendly local bank, which wasn’t always a stickler when it came to making loan payments on time and trusted that the bees would do the job this year as well, trusted me when I said that the watered-down cheap stuff from China, which was sold as honey and came in greater quantities with every passing year, didn’t make a difference, that honey prices would remain exactly where they’d always been, that the prospects for a steady revenue were good, that the ever more unpredictable weather had no impact on us, that we could guarantee good sales in the fall. That the money would pour in, just as always.

It was all lies. And that was why I had to reorganize. Become like Gareth.