Zibby Mag

By Eileen Garvin

What bees taught me about love, loss, and remembrance.

Spring and Rain

It rains the day the bees come — a cold spring torrent that falls in sheets. Fat drops hit my bare arms as I run out to collect the buzzing box from the truck idling at the curb. The local bee supplier is weeks late, but everything is upside down this year. At least I’ve had time to prepare my hive.

My previous colony died over the winter. A postmortem revealed they’d starved. Although many beekeepers reported winter losses, mine was unnecessary. I could’ve fed them sugar or honey, but I didn’t know at the time.

This strange year brings many unexpected lessons. A week before the hive autopsy, I delivered my father’s eulogy. He’d been unwell for years, and not one to complain, so his diagnosis of late-stage cancer wasn’t a complete surprise. But we were all unprepared for the swiftness of his death just days later and hours before I could get there.

I encounter his absence every morning like an impassable wall.

“Dad is dead,” I think upon waking, and a wave of grief rises up.

My grandfather died at fifty when my dad was in high school, so I’ve been worried ever since he reached the same age. It’s been decades. I thought I’d be ready when it was time for him to go, but I’m not.

I recall the last time I saw him and our final phone conversation. I replay his voicemails. I wish I’d called more, visited more, said more. I also know I said all that needed to be said, or at least all that could’ve been said.

When the rain tapers off, I carry the bees into the garden, don my bee suit, open the hive, and transfer the colony. The bees notice the cold draft and the movement but don’t seem to mind much. They’re a contented family — one queen and thousands of daughters.

Easter passes, and my siblings’ birthdays, opening day at the family cabin, my parents’ anniversary. We can’t gather. Confined by stay-at-home restrictions, I take my coffee out to the hive and watch the foragers flit across the sunlit yard.

Summer and Harvest

It’s a warm afternoon when I open the packed honey super. I hold up a frame and drink in the sweet scent of honey and beeswax.

Working through a methodical list of seasonal tasks from my beekeeping program, I’m learning to see new things — eggs, uncapped larvae, capped larvae, drone cells and worker cells. I watch undertaker bees take slow, ceremonial flights to remove the dead each morning.

During afternoon orientation flights, younger bees hover like tiny golden helicopters. I glimpse the queen’s regal form and the mysterious bee waggle. I add additional boxes as the population grows to stave off their instinct to swarm.

Honey harvest is a glorious, sticky day. I cut creamy wax caps off honeycomb and load frames into the extractor. Golden waves glug into Mason jars.

As I listen to the rhythmic slap of the extractor, I want to tell Dad about it. He was never easy to talk to or one to feign polite interest. If caught unwillingly in conversation, he’d look into the distance, wheel around, and leave the room.

I joked that he’d only discuss golf, medicine, or the Civil War. But he was also a talented carpenter and a tinkerer. My beekeeping offered a slim Venn diagram of our interests: woodwork, hardware, labor, and process.

In July, I drive to my parents’ house, which my siblings and I started calling “Mom’s house” immediately after Dad died — both shocking and automatic. I sit on her porch in a mask. I haven’t seen her since the funeral. I know Dad’s ashes are just inside on the coffee table in the wood urn he made.

I want to hug her and I can’t. I give her a jar of honey, and we eat sandwiches and talk about her flowers, which are in full bloom.

Fall on Fire

Standing over the teeming hive, my beekeeping mentor congratulates me on my successful tending of this apian world. Despite the strength of the hive, a mite check advises treatment, which I begin immediately.

A week later, the West is on fire and millions of acres burn. The air quality soars up to “hazardous” and a grey sky chokes the sun. “Can’t we go back to the regular pandemic?” we joke as we’re forced indoors for weeks. Only it isn’t funny.

The bees stay inside too. They have plenty of food, but I worry about the incomplete mite treatment. When the air clears, it’s obvious the population has been decimated. I can only hope they will recover before winter.

I wonder what Dad would say about the fires. Wildfire was something he always worried about at the family cabin. I think of the years he spent felling trees, clearing brush, tending to that small tangle of green on our behalf — a demonstration of the love he couldn’t speak.

Thanksgiving comes and I think of last year when my brothers spent hours in Dad’s shop building bird houses for the cabin. Dad watched, not commenting. Returning the next day, the boys found he’d modified every single one.

It was almost like he did a project with you, I laughed.

My brothers installed the bird houses on pilings and the old pump house. In my mind’s eye, I see Dad there. He leans on the doorjamb with a lit cigarette, looking out at the lake, watching us from a distance.

“Happy Thanksgiving, Dad.” I say aloud. “I miss you.”

Winter and Waiting

Christmas comes, and we can’t gather, so we text, Zoom, email, and write letters.

The first snowfall blankets the yard. I put an ear to the brood box and hear the bees clicking and whirring away. I know they’ve created a tight cluster around their queen, these few daughters who’ll keep her safe through winter. By January, she’ll start laying eggs again and a new generation will emerge with the spring sunshine.

I do quick checks to add sugar, honey, and pollen patty. The bees buzz a slight complaint at the cold draft. It lightens my heart to know they’re surviving.

The anniversary of Dad’s death passes, then the anniversary of his funeral. Mom gets vaccinated and the future feels brighter.

I sit in my kitchen planning spring hive maintenance, feeling more optimistic than I have for some time. I find myself in a strange daily conversation with my father — someone who’s no longer here, someone who could never quite be with me even when we were in the same room, and yet now is with me everywhere I go.

I imagine the day my family will meet for the interment of Dad’s ashes, a simple ceremony I would have taken for granted before. But this year of loss and revelation has taught me to pay attention and take action, offering gratitude for the brief, brilliant moments that make up our lives.

Some moments are golden; others, like smoke, like birds, like bees, like light on the lake, like everything that rises, are held briefly in our fallible human hearts and move on like a swarm abandoning the hive.

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Eileen Garvin is a writer of fiction, memoir, personal essay and creative nonfiction. She is based in Oregon and is the caretaker to approximately 60,000 honeybees. Her first novel, The Music of Bees, was released by Dutton on April 27, 2021.

This essay is part of our Moms Don’t Have Time to Grieve column.