The Bee Yard
Aunt Bee hands you a hat with a net like a bride's veil and talks to her bees the whole time she works, as if they were old friends. “Yes, yes, I know,” she murmurs to a hive painted robin's-egg blue. “I feel it too.”
“Feel what?” you ask.
“Storm coming.” She squints at the horizon, where the clouds have gone a bruised violet color. “But the girls are wound up wrong for a regular storm. Look at them.”
The bees aren't going in and out of their hives in busy lines like they should. They're clustered on the landing boards, all facing the same direction — toward the orchard on the hill — like a tiny audience waiting for a show to start.
“What kind of storm do bees wait up for?” you ask.
Aunt Bee is quiet for a moment too long. “The kind my grandmother used to call sky trouble,” she says at last, and smiles like she's joking. You're not sure she's joking.