Our Hives Our Homes
My coworker, Laura, had a swarm of bees take up residence on the side of her house. One morning, her home was her own, but by the afternoon, hundreds of honeybees buzzed and swirled around her front porch, molding themselves to the vinyl siding. Laura walked out on her porch to record the swarm on her phone. They kept to themselves, flying close to the camera but losing interest and flying back to the swarm. They debated on claiming the porch as a new home for their queen.
In Key West, there is a couple who takes care of honeybees. If you have a sudden infestation, as Laura did, you can call this family, and they’ll come over to move the bees to a better location. When Laura told me this, I imagined this couple guiding the bees to their new home with weird arm movements or troughs of bright flowers. Like a parade made especially for them.
There must be something about our homes that draws bees in. Maybe they recognize the structure of the houses themselves and the families within. Maybe they see their queens in our mothers. They understand the busyness of our children, the tenacious desire of our teenagers to contribute. They know home when they see it. Somewhere they can burrow for a while. Somewhere they can claim as their own.
**
My momma is a queen bee, but not in the dramatic, pompous kind of way—more in the matriarch, force-that-brings-us-all-home sort of way. I’ve always admired that about her: the way she loves us but corrects us, encourages us to be independent, but always welcomes us back home. I needed that growing up but was never sure if I could emulate it in my future. Always wanting to be the queen bee but never a mother.
**
In the first grade, I got stung by a bee while wearing a black and white striped dress with a bumblebee stitched on the front. I felt a tickle at the back of my neck and reached back to scratch at it. A sudden stinging pain shot through my spine, making all the hair on my arms stand up. I looked down at the woodchips of the playground to see my attacker wriggling slowly near my white tennis shoes.
The tears welled up in my eyes, and the next thing I knew, I was being picked up by my teacher and carried to the nearest bench for examination, leaving the bee to die alone after losing its stinger.
**
My sisters and I lived to play outside when we were young. Our cul-de-sac was our kingdom, and we commanded it with ferociousness, hungry to conquer the street that shaped us.
We stood on old tree stumps, sang the song from Out of the Box, and leaped off, pretending once our feet hit the ground that we were in a new world. We rode on imaginary horses from mailbox to mailbox, hurrying past the trolls that we claimed lived at the end of each house’s driveway. We set up shop in our playhouse and played candy store, ordering the craziest sweet treats we could think of (a triple scoop of chocolate chip cookie dough ice cream, with lots of sprinkles and sweet tarts in the shape of puppies).
One day, we discovered a pond behind one of our neighbor’s houses. We hopped over their chain-link fence and trudged up a hill, slipping dramatically on the pine straw and grabbing on to the trunks of trees as if we were about to fall off a cliff. Once we reached the top, we looked over our new-found pond. The water was dark green with yellowish foam floating around the edges.
“I bet we shouldn’t be back here,” I said.
“I heard a kid died back here,” my older sister, Cameron, said.
“Nuh-uh,” I said, eyes wide.
She nodded assuredly and continued walking forward toward the edge of the water. I hesitated for one second before following her, as always.
For the next week, we went to the pond every day after school.
“Don’t call us home for dinner, Mom! We’ll just come back when it gets dark,” I yelled to my mom sitting on our front porch.
Moms always know, don’t they, when their child is playing with fire?
That night, when the sun dipped below the trees, and we made our way back home, we saw our mom standing on the front porch with her arms crossed.
“So, where have you been?” she asked.
Cameron and I both kept quiet, waiting for the other one to speak up first.
“Down the street,” Cameron said, looking at her feet.
My mom stayed quiet, staring down at us on the front lawn.
“That pond behind Ashley’s house,” I said, pointing in the direction behind us.
Livid, my mom didn’t say a word. She turned around and went inside, and we followed her in just as quietly.
My dad hadn’t gotten home from work, so we were safe in that regard.
“Are you gonna tell Dad where we were?” I asked.
My mom stared at me for a long moment before answering.
“I don’t think I have to tell either one of you how dangerous it is to play around water, especially when you’re completely out of my sight. You already know you weren’t supposed to be there because you weren’t honest about where you were.”
“Nothing even happened though, Mom. We were just playing,” Cameron said.
“Are you gonna tell dad?” I asked again.
She didn’t tell him. When he got home and settled, we all sat in the living room together watching TV. I tried to smile at my mom, but she glared back, reminding me we’d done wrong.
That night, she still tucked me in. She still kissed my cheeks and told me she loved me more than anything.
We never went back to the pond. We listened to our queen bee, feared her disapproval, and felt surges of comfort when she always, always called us home.
**
My little sister, Holly, got stung by a bee on her hand one summer at our grandparent’s pool. My Nana immediately went inside, leaving my sister crying in her dripping wet bathing suit, immobile by the pool’s edge. Nana returned with a bottle of my Pa’s cologne in her hand. She sprayed a few squirts onto the puffy, red blotch on Holly’s hand.
“Now, that should stop the burning. And make you smell good for a while,” Nana said.
Holly frowned at the swollenness of her little hand but nodded at Nana, her bottom lip quivering as she tried to stop her tears.
“You’re tough, right?” Nana asked.
“Yeah, I’m tough,” Holly said.
With that, she jumped back into the pool, keeping her hand above the water as not to wash off the spritz of Pa’s cologne, her magic healing ointment.
**
My sister and I used to play tennis against the wall situated above the mouth of our garage. We’d whack the neon balls against the vinyl siding and wait for it to fall back down and bounce on the concrete of our driveway.
During the springtime, an abundance of fat carpenter bees burrowed their way into the wood of the foundation of our garage, making it their temporary home. They would join in on our games of tennis, following the ball as it moved back and forth. They swooped low and high. We dodged them when they flew at full speed toward our faces.
Having had enough of the extra players on our court, Cameron and I started a new game. When the bees would come close, we’d reach up with our rackets, sometimes jumping off the ground, and smack the bees to the pavement. We’d trap them underneath the latticework of our rackets and squish them under our tennis shoes.
I think about those bees often. How we made them a part of our game. How, underneath our tennis rackets, they may have wished more than anything to return to their holes. Or maybe they embraced the break from the mindless drilling and burrowing, a break from the monotony.
But my guess would be they would have rather been in their holes.
**
In true middle-child fashion, I craved attention as a little girl and sought it in any way I could.
I lied and told my mom a girl at ballet ripped my dance outfit, and my dance teacher had to sew it back before I came home.
I stole two dollars from the desk of my classmate that sat beside me in the second grade and blamed it on someone else. My parents, terribly embarrassed, told me I would apologize to my classmate and my teacher first thing at school the next morning. We ended up having a substitute teacher that day.
I packed an apple in a pillowcase and announced I was going to run away. I got as far as our playset in the backyard. My parents let me stay there until it was dark.
Part of me wanted a parade to guide and welcome me back home, a bouquet of flowers to show me I was missed. There was no parade. Just a quick, “Susan, it’s time to come inside,” shot into the dusk. I still ate dinner at the table with my sisters. I was still tucked in that night by my mom, safe and warm.
Like the bees that swarmed Laura’s porch, I left home only because I knew it would still be there for me to come back to in some form or another. The house on Creekside. My mom’s arms. The pool at my grandparent’s where I spent every day of every summer.
I still think about the bee that lost its stinger after it chose me to land on in the first grade. I think of the ones we killed underneath our tennis rackets. I think of all the homes those bees had known, the homes they vowed to return to.