I read him number one. Blue dot queen, last year’s, a daughter out of fourteen. Gentle. Two deep boxes full, hefted on the twelfth of September and heavy. Roy’s note at the bottom said, Leave her alone, she knows more than we do.
Curtis laughed. It was the first easy sound either of us had made.
I read him two, and three, and four. I told him to find the numbers on the backs of the boxes and set them back in order when the weather turned cold enough that they’d quit flying, a pallet at a time, because the journal was written left to right and he would lose his mind otherwise. I read him fourteen, the best queen we ever raised, and twenty-two, which is mean as a snake and makes more honey than any two others.
Then I read him seven.
“Seven has a drone layer,” I said. “The queen ran out. She’s laying, but nothing she lays will ever be a worker. You’ll see it when you pull a frame: the cappings stick up like bullets, scattered all over. There’s not one bee in that box that will be alive at Christmas, and no young ones coming.”
He had stopped writing. “What do I do with it?”
“Find her and take her out. Then lay one sheet of newspaper on top of a strong hive, cut three or four slits in it, and set seven’s box right on the paper. By the time they chew through it, a day or two, they’ve got each other’s smell and they don’t fight. One good hive instead of one good and one dead.”
“That’s how you combine.”
“That’s how. And you do the same with twelve, a late swarm that never built up, about four frames of bees. And thirty-one, that went queenless the second week of September. And thirty-six. Her queen is three years old and they’ve got chalkbrood. You’ll see little white mummies on the bottom board.”
He was writing again, fast.
“Nineteen and twenty-three are the ones that scare me,” I said. “We treated for mites in August, every hive. Roy washed a sample from each one after. Most came back at one mite or none to the hundred bees. Twenty-three came back at six. Nineteen came back at eleven.”
He knew enough to know what eleven meant. I watched it land.
“The bees a hive raises in September are the ones that have to live till March,” I said. “If the mites got to them in the cell, they’re short-lived before they ever hatch. Nineteen may already be past saving. You treat both of them again at Thanksgiving, when there’s no brood for the mites to hide in, and you keep them from getting robbed, and you watch.”
“So that’s six.”
“Six that will be dead by spring if nobody does anything. Four of them you can fold into the others this month. Two, you fight for.”
He looked down the row. Forty white boxes, and the sun had come over his windbreak far enough to reach the first pallet. A few bees were starting to come out on the landing boards and take a look at the day.
“He told me half of them were dead-outs,” Curtis said. “I haven’t even had the lids off. I’ve been working doubles.”
“Wade’s never had a lid off either. He didn’t lie to you. He doesn’t know.”
I turned back a few pages to show him how Roy drew a brood pattern, a little oval with dots in it, and I ran straight into the margin of fourteen’s page.
Laura Bennett writes about complicated family dynamics, difficult conversations, and the quiet moments that change everything. Her stories focus on real-life tensions — inheritance disputes, strained marriages, loyalty tests — and the strength people find when they finally speak up. She believes the smallest decisions often carry the biggest consequences.