Telling the Bees
When my grandfather went missing in the Cascade foothills in October of 1979, the search-and-rescue people looked for him for six days, and on the seventh day my grandmother’s bees found him.
I was eight. I remember it mostly in pieces: the sheriff’s deputies in our kitchen with their hats on the table, the radio crackling on the counter, my grandmother Hedda standing at the window in her cardigan with her arms folded, not crying, watching the hives at the bottom of the orchard. There were fourteen hives, white boxes in two rows under the filbert trees. On the morning of the seventh day she said, “They’re going,” and walked out of the house without her coat.
They were going. I went to the window and saw it, a gray-brown smudge in the air over the hives that thickened and stretched and then moved off east, over the fence, toward the timber, like smoke being pulled by a draft. My grandmother got into the truck. One of the deputies went with her, I think because he thought she’d lost her mind. They followed the bees eleven miles up a logging road and then two more on foot.
The bees were clustered on a Douglas fir at the bottom of a ravine, in a single hanging mass the size of a feed sack. My grandfather was under the tree. He’d fallen. They said he’d probably died the first night. The bees hadn’t touched him. They had only gathered over him, on the trunk, humming, the way they’d gather on a branch when they swarm, and they stayed there until the men brought him out, and then they went home.
My grandmother explained it to me that winter, carefully, the way she explained anything to do with the bees: as a set of rules, not a story.
In her family, and her mother’s family in Norway before that, when someone in the household died, you went down to the hives before you did anything else, before you called anybody. You knocked three times on each hive with a wedding ring or a house key and you told them, out loud. Bees, bees, Anders is dead. You tied a strip of black cloth to each box. If you did it, the bees would stay. If you didn’t, they’d sicken, or leave.
“But that’s not the part people forget,” she said. We were in the honey house, where she was scraping frames, and the air was so sweet it was like breathing syrup. “People forget why. The bees aren’t asking to be told for manners. They need to know who is gone so they know who’s still here. They count us. And if somebody’s gone and nobody’s told them, they’ll go and look. They’ll go and sit with whoever it is until somebody comes.”
“Like with Grandpa.”
“Nobody knew to tell them,” she said. “So they found him themselves.”
I asked her if it had ever happened any other time, and she put down her scraper and looked at me in a way I didn’t understand until much later. “Once,” she said. “When I was a girl. It was a man in the village they went and sat with. The man didn’t think he was dead.” She picked up the scraper again. “Some people don’t take the news well.”
I thought she was making a joke. She did not make jokes.
I grew up, moved to Salem, came back. I learned the bees from her through my twenties. I’m not sentimental about them. They’re livestock, and difficult livestock, and most of keeping them is smoke and paperwork and losing a third of your hives every winter to mites. But I kept her rules, because she asked me to, and because I’d seen the gray smudge go over the fence in 1979.
When my grandmother died in 2019 at ninety-four, I went down to the orchard before I called my brother. I took her wedding ring off the dish by her bed and I knocked on each of the hives, which were down to nine by then, and I said, “Bees, bees, Hedda is dead.” I tied black ribbon on each of them, cut from one of her skirts. I felt foolish and I didn’t care. The bees came out and walked on the ribbon and went back in, and they stayed, and the next spring they were strong.
I inherited the house and the orchard and the honey house. I married Pilar there, under the filberts, in 2021. The bees came to the wedding and nobody got stung.
Last April, Pilar went hiking alone at Silver Falls and didn’t come back when she said she would.
It was about five hours. I don’t want to make it bigger than it was. She was on a trail she knew. It had rained, and she slipped on a slick bit of the canyon trail and went down a bank and into the creek below the lower falls, and she said afterward she must have hit her head, because the next thing she remembered was walking out of the water onto the gravel bar a quarter mile downstream, soaked and shaking, with her phone dead. A couple found her on the trail and drove her to the ranger station. By the time I got there she was wrapped in a foil blanket, drinking cocoa, laughing at herself. The EMT checked her over and said she was lucky and to watch for signs of concussion.
She didn’t have any. She was fine. She was more than fine, actually. She slept well for the first time in years. She stopped needing her glasses for reading, which she joked was the creek knocking her eyes back into place. She said the water had been so cold it felt like being rinsed out.
I wasn’t thinking about the bees. I want to be clear. It didn’t cross my mind.
In June the bees started going visiting.
It began with a few dozen on the bedroom window screen in the mornings. I’m used to bees in odd places, and I didn’t think about it. Then it was a few hundred. Then one Sunday I walked around the side of the house with my coffee and stopped, because they were clustered on the outside wall under our bedroom window in a hanging mass the size of a feed sack, humming.
They weren’t swarming. A swarm is a colony moving; it hangs for a day and then goes. This came from all nine hives. I could see the lines of them in the air, traffic from the orchard to the wall and back. They’d move off at night, mostly, and come back with the light. And they settled on the same spot every morning: the bit of wall directly outside Pilar’s side of the bed.
Pilar thought it was wonderful. She took pictures. She stood under them in her robe with her hand up, almost touching, and they didn’t sting her, and she said, “They like me.” She asked me why they were doing it, and I said I didn’t know, which was true at the time.
Then she went to visit her sister in Eugene for a week in July, and on the first morning she was gone the bees were not on the wall.
I drove down to Eugene. I didn’t tell Pilar I was coming. I parked down the street from her sister’s house at six in the morning and sat in the truck and watched the sun come up, and by seven there were bees in the air over the neighborhood, gray traffic coming in from the north, eighty miles from my orchard, and they gathered on the wall of the house under the guest-room window, in a mass, humming.
I drove home before anybody saw me. I sat in the honey house for a long time.
I have thought about it every way I can.
I’ve thought that it’s a smell. Something in the creek water, some chemical that stayed in her hair. I’ve thought it’s a coincidence, though I don’t know what kind of coincidence follows a woman eighty miles. I’ve reread my grandmother’s rules in the notebook where I wrote them down when I was twenty, and they haven’t changed. If somebody’s gone and nobody’s told them, they’ll go and look. They’ll go and sit with whoever it is until somebody comes.
And I keep coming back to the last thing she said, the thing I took for a joke: The man didn’t think he was dead.
Pilar is in the kitchen right now. She’s singing along to the radio, badly, the way she always has. She is warm when I hold her. She remembers everything about our life, our wedding, the dog she had as a girl. She cries at the same commercials. When I ask her about the creek she says it’s funny, she doesn’t remember being cold at all, only coming up out of the water and thinking how bright everything was.
The bees are on the wall. They’re there every morning now. There are more of them than there were.
I know what I’m supposed to do. I’m supposed to go down to the orchard with her wedding ring, which she takes off to do the dishes and leaves on the dish by the sink, and knock three times on each hive and tell them. I’m supposed to say her name and the word, and tie the ribbon, and then the bees will know, and they’ll stop waiting.
I don’t know what she’ll be, after they know. I don’t know if she’ll still be in the kitchen.
So I haven’t told them. I get up early and I go out and stand under the wall and I look at them, and they hum at me, a little louder every morning, the way you’d raise your voice at somebody who isn’t listening. I’ve started to get stung. Just once or twice a week. Just on the hand I’d use to knock.