The Honey Bus. Meredith May

      

      MEREDITH MAY is an award-winning journalist, author, and a fifth-generation beekeeper. She spent sixteen years at the San Francisco Chronicle, where her narrative reporting won the PEN USA Literary Award for Journalism and was shortlisted for the Pulitzer Prize. She is co-author of I, Who Did Not Die and lives in San Francisco, where she keeps several hives in a community garden.

      MEREDITH MAY

      THE

      HONEY

      BUS

      A Memoir of Loss,

      Courage and a Girl

      Saved by Bees

      ONE PLACE. MANY STORIES

       Copyright

      An imprint of HarperCollins Publishers Ltd

      1 London Bridge Street

      London SE1 9GF

      First published in Great Britain by HQ in 2019

      Copyright © Meredith May 2019

      Meredith May asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

      A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

      All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

      Ebook Edition © March 2019 ISBN: 9781474077095

       For Grandpa

       E. Franklin Peace

       1926–2015

      “So work the honeybees, creatures that by a rule in nature teach the art of order to a peopled kingdom.”

      —William Shakespeare, Henry V

      Contents

       Cover

       About the Author

       Title Page

       Copyright

       Dedication

       Epigraph

Prologue: Swarm

1. Flight Path

2. Honey Bus

3. The Secret Language of Bees

4. Homecoming

       5. Big Sur Queen

       6. The Beekeeper

       7. Fake Grandpa

       8. First Harvest

       9. Unaccompanied Minor

       10. Foulbrood

       11. Parents Without Partners

       12. Social Insect

       13. Hot Water

       14. Bee Dance

       15. Spilled Sugar

       Epilogue

       Author’s Note

       Acknowledgments

       Further Reading

       About the Publisher

PROLOGUE

       Swarm

       1980

      Swarm season always arrived by telephone. The red rotary phone jangled to life every spring with frantic callers reporting honeybees in their walls, or in their chimneys, or in their trees.

      I was pouring Grandpa’s honey over my corn bread when he came out of the kitchen with that sly smile that said we’d have to let our breakfast go cold again. I was ten, and had been catching swarms with him for almost half my life, so I knew what was coming next. He slugged back his coffee in one gulp and wiped his mustache with the back of his arm.

      “Got us another one,” he said.

      This time the call came from the private tennis ranch about a mile away on Carmel Valley Road. As I climbed into the passenger seat of his rickety pickup, he tapped the gas pedal to coax it to life. The engine finally caught and we screeched out of the driveway, kicking up a spray of gravel behind us. He whizzed past the speed limit signs, which I knew from riding with Granny said to go twenty-five. We had to hurry to catch the swarm because the bees might get an idea to fly off somewhere else.

      Grandpa careened into the tennis club and squealed to a stop near a cattle fence. He leaned his shoulder into his jammed door and creaked it open with a grunt. We stepped into a mini-cyclone of bees, a roaring inkblot in the sky, banking left and right like a flock of birds. My heart raced with them, frightened and awestruck at the same time. It seemed like the air was throbbing.

      “Why