Roy wrote in the margins. I had forgotten that, or made myself forget it. Not bee things. Just things.
In his small square capitals it said: M. found the queen before I had my glasses on. Thirty years and she still beats me to it.
That was from the fifteenth of July. I remembered the day. It was ninety-four degrees and he had sweat running off the end of his nose inside the veil, and when I pointed at her he said, “Well, I’ll be darned,” like it was the first time and not the five hundredth.
I couldn’t read it out. I tried. I got as far as the M.
Curtis didn’t say anything. He reached over, slow, the way you reach into a hive, and turned the notebook a little so he could see. He read it to himself. Then he read the one under it out loud, quietly, so I wouldn’t have to.
“Supper on the tailgate. M. brought pie. Best yard in Hamilton County.”
His wife had come back out. She set a cup of coffee on the tailgate by my hand and stood there with the baby, and nobody talked for a minute. A meadowlark was going on a fence post. The steam came up off the coffee.
“Mrs. Olson,” Curtis said finally, “I need to ask you something, and I want you to hear all of it before you answer.”
“Go ahead.”
“I work nights. Jenna’s got Katie all day. I have twelve hives of my own and I lost five of them last winter and never did know why.” He nodded at the journal. “I can’t do four combines and forty mite checks and get all of them fed before it freezes, not by myself, and not right. I’d be guessing. I’d pay you fifteen dollars an hour to come up here two mornings a week and show me. I know that’s not what you’re worth. It’s what I’ve got.”
I want to be truthful about what went through me, because it wasn’t noble. I thought: he is offering to hire me to work my own bees. Fifteen dollars an hour to stand in another man’s yard and tend the queens I raised.
Then a bee landed on the cover of the journal. One of fourteen’s, I’d bet money, they have that gold band. She walked across Roy’s rubber band and cleaned her feelers and flew off.
They were not my bees anymore. But they were still bees I knew, and they were going into a Nebraska winter with a boy who would be guessing.
“Tuesdays and Fridays,” I said. “I cook at the nursing home the other three. And I’ll leave the book here with them. It goes with the bees.”
His face did something. “You’d leave it?”
“It’s no good to them on my shelf.”
“I’ll keep it in the house. I’ll keep it dry.”
“Keep it in the truck,” I said. “It’s never been dry a day in its life.”
We did it right, the two of us.
The first cool Tuesday in October I found the drone-laying queen in seven. It took me eleven minutes and Curtis never saw her until I had her between my fingers. We laid a sheet of the Grand Island paper over twenty-six and set seven on top, and by Friday there were shreds of newsprint all over the ground out front and one fat hive where there had been two. We folded twelve into nine and thirty-one into thirty-three. We took the old queen out of thirty-six and gave those bees to fifteen.
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.