Mad Honey: A Novel by Jodi Picoult, Jennifer Finney Boylan Page A

up, making sure not to disturb him, and look at it. On the lock screen are notifications from Dirk. I remember suddenly that there is a game at 4:00 p.m . today, one that Asher will obviously not be playing in. Then I realize that Dirk likely isn’t texting about the game. By now, I am sure, news of Lily’s death has spread.
    I power down the phone so that Asher won’t be disturbed, and leave it on his nightstand. I rush through a shower and braid my hair, then mix up 2:1 sugar syrup. I put on boots and a parka, grab a top hive feeder and the crate that holds my bee kit, and hike across the frosted field to my hives. I don’t want to disturb the colony that was attacked yesterday, but I don’t have a choice. I have to free the queen, feed them sugar solution, and insulate the box—even though I know this is still a losing battle.
    When I reach it, I light my smoker first and remove the cover. I’m surprised to see a couple of drones—male bees, with their big heads and giant eyes and helicopter noise. By this time of year, drones are mostly gone. Their only purpose is to mate with the queen in the spring, and they die in the process. While waiting for their big orgy,they do practice flights, the bee equivalent of flexing. But they don’t collect pollen or nectar, even though they are allowed to eat it anytime they want. They don’t make beeswax. They don’t clean. They’re allowed to enter other hives, like goodwill ambassadors. But because they are basically a giant energy suck on a hive, in the fall, any drones that are still alive are attacked by the worker bees, literally dismembered and tossed out.
    We could learn a lot from bees, frankly.
    Girls run the bee world, and worker bees are all female. They feed baby bees, shape new cells out of beeswax, forage for and store nectar and pollen, ripen the honey, cool down the hive when it’s too hot. They also are undertakers, working in pairs to drag out the dead. But their most important job, arguably, is taking care of the queen, who can’t take care of herself—feeding and cleaning her while she lays fifteen hundred eggs a day.
    It’s hard to spot a queen bee if she’s unmarked. She is the largest—longer, skinnier—but she tends to look more frenetic, and to run away from the light with her ladies-in-waiting. When Asher was younger, we’d play a game where I’d pull out frame after frame until I found the queen for him . How do you know it’s her? he would ask, and I’d say, She’s wearing that tiny, tiny crown. In truth, the way you spot a queen is usually by sussing out the proof that she’s alive. If you don’t see eggs in all stages of development, the queen of a colony is probably dead.
    The first time Asher brought Lily to our house, I was with the bees. I saw him crossing the field with her, holding her hand as if he thought she might fly away—a balloon untethered, a dandelion puff. I was debating whether to add another super to Ariana’s hive when they stopped, about twenty feet away. In his free hand, Asher carried his beekeeper hat. But tucked beneath his arm was also an old brimmed pith helmet with face netting, one that used to belong to my father and must have been in the attic.
    Asher had dated before, but he’d never gone the extra step of introducing me to a girlfriend. Granted, I knew all the kids in town. This one, I had never seen before.
    “Mom,” Asher said, after he’d helped her don her makeshift bee gear. “This is Lily.”
    I glanced up, smiling through my own netting. It was September; the winding down of bee season. In a few weeks I’d do the second honey harvest, but for now, there were still plenty of blossoms and forager bees diving into the entrances of the hives with leg baskets full of pollen. “Ah,” I said. “The famed Lily.”
    She glanced at Asher with her eyebrows raised.
    “I talk about you,” he said, grinning. “Maybe a lot.”
    “It’s nice to meet you, Mrs. Fields,” Lily