3. Anaya
three
Anaya
The fire road does genuine harm to my suspension, and I don't care, because at kilometre four the trees change.
They get older. That's the only way I know how to say it.
The second-growth stuff along the bottom is all the same height, planted the same year by the same crew, and then you come around the culvert and take the left fork and the forest goes ragged — big spruce with dead tops, deadfall, moss hanging off branches in beards.
Light comes down through it in shafts you could put your hand in.
His gate is a length of pipe on a hinge, open, hooked back with wire.
The cabin sits on a bench of flat ground with the slope falling away south.
Small. Squared logs, metal roof, a porch with a chair on it and a chair's worth of space beside it where another one isn't. A woodshed stacked to the rafters.
Two trucks — one that runs, one that's being kept for parts and isn't being subtle about it.
And below the cabin, down the slope in the sun, the hives.
I've seen apiaries. I did a whole piece on an urban rooftop operation in Burnaby, and I've stood in a field of two hundred boxes in the Okanagan.
That was agriculture. This is something else.
They're set in the natural clearings between trees, in rows of eight and ten, painted every colour that was ever on sale — sage, faded blue, oxblood, one that used to be yellow — and the whole slope hums.
I get out of the car and stand with my hand on the door and let it come up at me.
A very large dog with a very grey face comes off the porch at a dignified pace and puts his head against my thigh without a single preliminary.
"That's Moss," Heath says from the woodshed. "He's got no boundaries and no teeth to speak of. You're fine."
"Hi, Moss."
"He'll follow you all day if you let him. He's twelve."
"He's magnificent."
Heath comes out of the shed with a smoker in one hand and a bee suit over his shoulder, and he stops when I say it, and he looks at his dog like he's checking the assessment against his own records.
"He is," he says.
The suit's too big.
He doesn't hand it to me and tell me to sort it out. He rolls the cuffs himself, one wrist and then the other, standing close enough that I can smell woodsmoke and something green off his jacket, and he turns each sleeve twice and presses the fold flat with his thumb.
His thumb goes across the inside of my wrist doing it.
Both times. He doesn't notice. I notice enough for the pair of us — I stand in a bee suit on a mountain with my pulse going somewhere unhelpful while a thirty-eight-year-old man methodically fixes my sleeves, and I look at the top of his bent head and think about how long it's been since anyone touched me with that much attention and that little agenda.
His knuckles are scarred across the back. There's propolis under his nails, brown-red, worked into the creases the way I saw it at the stall.
"There," he says, and steps back, and has no idea.
"Rule one," he says. "Slow. Everything. You lift a lid slowly, you set it down slowly, you walk past the front of a hive slowly or better yet you don't walk past the front at all. That's their highway. You stand in it, you're a wall."
"Slow. Got it."
"You don't got it yet." He says it without heat, the way you'd correct someone's grip on a knife. "Everybody says it. Then a bee gets in the veil and they find out."
"Does that happen?"
"It'll happen today."
Heath lights the smoker with dry needles and a handful of burlap and gets it going till the smoke comes out cool and white, and then he shows me the thing that undoes me. He crouches at the side of the box with his ear eight inches off the wood, and he listens.
"Hear that?"
I crouch too. Under the general hum there's a texture — a low steady rolling sound, like a bag of dried beans being turned over slowly.
"That's content," he says. "That's them clustering and doing their business. Now watch."
He raps the box once with two knuckles.
The sound goes up. Sharp, a rising note, and then within about four seconds it settles back down into the rolling.
"That's a question and an answer. They asked what that was, and they decided it was nothing.
If it stays up — if it goes up and doesn't come down — that's a colony that's queenless or robbed or sick, and I need to open it and find out which.
" He sits back on his heels. "Sound before smoke.
You'd be amazed what people miss because they came in with the smoker already going. "
"How long did it take you to learn to hear that?"
"Two years to hear it. Six to trust it."
Then, a bee gets into my veil. I feel it against my cheek and everything in me goes hot and stupid, and I start to stand up fast.
His hand lands on my shoulder blade. Not gripping. Weight, and nothing else.
"Slow," he says, right beside my ear, and his hand stays where it is, warm through two layers. "Walk fifteen steps that way, into the shade, open the zip and let her out. It’s not interested in you. It's looking for the light."
I do it. It flies out. My hands are shaking, and I laugh at myself, one loud, embarrassing bark of a laugh, and when I turn around, he's watching me.
"You didn't run," he says, stifling a chuckle.
"I wanted to."
"Everybody wants to."
We work down the slope. He shows me how to lift a lid so the propolis cracks instead of snapping, how to read a frame — brood in the middle, honey at the edges, the difference between capped and uncapped, the difference between the pale wax of new comb and the dark leather-brown of old.
At the fourth hive he pulls a frame and holds it out flat.
"There," he says.
Along the top edge, the honey in the cells isn't gold. It's near-black, and where the light comes through it goes that deep red, and some of it's set hard and grainy in the cells like coarse sugar.
"That's the melezitose," I say.
"That's what fights me in October." He tilts it. "This one's mixed. See the gold there, that's goldenrod, they were on that a couple weeks back. That dark's from the second week of September when they went up the ridge and stayed up there for eleven days."
"Up where?"
He looks at me over the frame.
"That's the answer you came for," he says.
He puts the frame back. Slow. Sets the lid on. Slow. Straightens up and takes his gloves off and looks up the slope behind the cabin where the ground goes steep and the big spruce start.
"Old-growth up there. Eighty hectares of it in the draw, never been logged, ground's too broken to get equipment in.
There's an aphid that lives on those trees, three species of them, mostly on the Engelmann spruce.
They drink the sap and they can't use all the sugar, so they put it out again on the needles.
Sticky. Some years it rains and it's gone by morning.
Some years there's a dry spell in September and it builds up and my bees find it and they work it like a flower. "
"That's what the taste is. That's the resin thing."
"That's the tree, coming through an insect, coming through a bee, into a jar." He says it plainly, no wonder in it, which is somehow worse. "Eleven days this year. Some years I get two. Two thousand nine I got nothing at all."
I stand on his slope in his too-big suit with his dog leaning on my leg, and I look up at a stand of trees I can't get to and won't ever get to, and I don't say anything.
Which is when I notice.
I haven't been overthinking for three hours.
"You've gone quiet," Heath says.
I just shrug.
He picks up the smoker. "That's not a complaint."
We do the last row. He hands me the hive tool and lets me crack the lid myself, and I do it slow, and the sound stays low and rolling. I do it right.
Heath steps back and lets me do the next one alone.