My mom takes care of the bees now. She spent the long soggy winter curled up next to the fireplace with stacks of brightly colored books packed with all the words my dad had poured out to her over three years of dinner-time conversations. They kept her brain buzzing with the sound of his voice in our otherwise hollow house while the bees slept in their homes, under the rain and the mountain ash tree, waiting for the sun to fight back the clouds.
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I used to gender bees as “he” until the day I met our first hive. Three white boxes stacked themselves neatly under the red-berried mountain ash tree in the backyard. It was a rather pointless and unfortunate-looking tree, but my mom always said it was her grandmother’s favorite, and that it would be bad luck to our family if we were to remove it from the hillside it watched over. A scraggly lawn spotted the sunbaked foreground of the hive where the shade of the mountain ash tree never rested. The tufts of grass created a map of the only places that our two 150-pound dogs didn’t play.
Most of the year, our backyard was a mud pit, but it was June now, and the earth cracked from dehydration under the unfamiliar heat of the Seattle sun. I scurried across the bare earth, my feet still winter soft, rushing to the refuge of the grass sprouting up near the hive.
My parents appeared from the garage in what they referred to as their super suits, white mechanics jumpsuits with wide-brim hats and veils of bug netting. I figured these outfits served the purpose of full protection without absorbing the heat of the sun, but I learned the hard way that the purpose they served was greater. Decked out in dark Levi’s and an oversized black sweater I scrounged from the floor of my mother’s closet, I found myself constantly swatting away the bees as my parents began to peek into the hive. Nobody told me that it would have been better for me to interact with the hive with my bare, reflectively white skin than in the full coverage outfit I had chosen.
“They think you’re a bear,” my dad murmured without looking up from the frame oozing with bees that he had carefully pried out of the hive. He sat calmly on an upturned 5-gallon bucket and watched the frustration on my face grow. Since my dad’s first surgery on his leg, white buckets sprouted up in the backyard, spotting every corner where he would sit and watch his bees tend to the land. I kept swatting.
Right as I had almost had enough, my mom returned with a hat like the one she was wearing and a white fleece jacket. She held them out in front of me, knowing if I didn’t put them on soon, I would lose my first chance to see inside the hive. My parents were searching for the queen, and they had asked me to take photos of the frames so we could play a game of Where’s Waldo later at the dinner table, long after the bees went to bed for the night. I threw on the jacket, secured the hat over my head, and inched closer to the hive, camera in hand.
Opening the photos up on my phone from the safety of the dinner table, the images revealed something I hadn’t noticed earlier at the hive. The bees were calm and focused. Disorderly, yet intentional. Nothing like the bees I’d seen with my own eyes. Much more like the bees I would come to know, and the stewards that nurtured them.
The words began to pour from my dad’s mouth as he recited books he’d been reading all winter about his hive. The worker bees are all females. The male bees are called drones. They have no stinger. Their only purpose is to produce more bees for the hive. If they don’t produce decent offspring, they get kicked out of the hive where they cannot survive. All the baby bees come from the queen. If the queen is not doing her job, the bees will starve her so that she loses weight and is easier to replace… The dinner time bee talk never stopped, until one day it did, and I wished I had been listening all those years.
I revisit these photos often when the peace of these bees existed only within the bounds of my phone screen. A time before every black and yellow striped lady reminded me of that first day under the mountain ash tree.
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A year before he welcomed home that first hive, my dad began another journey. After taking two steps one day, he crashed onto the floor in pain as his femur snapped into pieces. Knowing the rarity of such minimal impact in creating one of the most dramatic breaks, his doctor returned with the diagnosis that swept the air out of his lungs, four years before I would hear him exhale for the last time.
With over 1 million cases diagnosed in the United States every year, nobody is a stranger to cancer anymore. It is a disease so common that when asked how your father died, the response of “cancer” is met with looks of pity, a moment of silence, and then… life resumes. But what can you really say at this moment? Words don’t fill the holes in hearts.
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That scruffy patch of grass near the hive thickened that summer, giving the bees their own front lawn. They filled every flower that opened to the summer sky, returning to their hive with stores of orange and red pollen bulging from pollen baskets on their back legs, begging to enter the hive and feed their brood.
I started noticing bees outside my bedroom window. I would watch them gather for secret meetings around the hibiscus flowers on the other side of the glass. I wondered how many of these honeybees I watched were the resident bees I came to know and how many wandered here from neighboring hives to collect from the fruitful land that my dad’s bees kept.
Over the four years of my dad’s decline, these honeybees worked their way into our family stories. They stewarded us as much as they did our land. They got caught in my mother’s long, jet-black hair that she kept loose around the hives despite this constant occurrence. It seemed like once a week I’d find her standing outside the window with her head turned towards the ground, hoping that with a little help from gravity, the bee would escape without stinging her scalp. I laugh at my mother’s chaotic relationship with the bees until she reminds me of my own.
One summer day, a year after the first hive arrived, I was laying on the front lawn. My parents had just finished extracting their first-ever batch of honey from the hives. The cylindrical honey extractor sat in the garage, dripping remnants of honey from the harvest. I’d left the garage door wide open for easy access to shade once the sunburn on my back inevitably started to set in. Falling asleep in the warm Seattle sunshine, I was startled awake by a low buzz. I perched myself up on my elbows to find bees swarming the garage, begging to take back the honey my parents tried to bottle up as their own.
These stories once echoed off the walls of a house that once felt the right size, but now feels much too small. They weaved their way into my shrinking family, bringing chaos and laughter through every moment.
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Chondrosarcoma, a word almost as repugnant as the disease it names, is a rare form of bone cancer that develops in the bones of some adults. When his femur snapped as easily as my sisters and I used to break the wishbone when my grandmother deboned the chicken, the surgeon rushed to remove as much diseased muscle around the broken bone as he could get his hands on. He replaced the decayed femur with a titanium replica of the bone that once made part of this man. The surgeon desperately tried to prevent the cancerous cells from entering his bloodstream and making their way to other parts of his body.
But his cancer had an aching desire to spread, and multiply, and transform his body, the way that our apiary under the mountain ash tree had a desire to do the same to our land. But where the bees spread, and multiplied, and transformed his land as they nurtured him, he lost himself, piece by piece, lobe by leg to the cancer.
Despite his addiction to Pepsi and ice cream sandwiches, my father’s cheeks began to hollow, his gut receded into his abdomen, and what little hair remained on the top of his head turned gray. Each day it took a little more strength to pull himself out of bed, to take that next inhale, but each day the hive grew and grew. The bees lived and died and turned over and took over as the cancer cells in his body did the same.
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Not long after he arrived home from his first major surgery since the initial diagnosis, I spotted him sitting on one of his buckets next to the hive through the kitchen window. Below his tattered cotton shirt, bandages stretched from his sternum to his lower back, covering the gaping hole where the lower right lobe of his lung used to live. His chest raised and lowered dramatically as his body adjusted to compensate for the reduced oxygen he could take in with each inhalation.
I refocused my eyes in front of him, blinking hard to ensure my vision wasn’t lying to me. Two hives sat under the mountain ash tree where one hive lived until that day.
Six months later, he sat in his spot on the white bucket in front of two familiar hives, and one new one. This time, he stretched his right leg out long, grazing the cinderblock foundation of the newly created hives, and put his hand on the spot where his left thigh should have been. With no leg to catch his tired hand, gravity took over and pulled him toward the ground.
Just before this new hive sprouted, he underwent a hip disarticulation surgery, which is how doctors sugarcoat saying legamputation. His cancer had caused an aggressive, uncontrollable infection in his left thigh surrounding his titanium femur. Fearing “losing the patient to save the leg” (the words my father used to convince himself that this was the right decision), his oncologist made the decision to ditch the leg. But with every piece of his body he lost, the bees nurtured his pain and absorbed his love, so much so that they couldn’t help but to grow and divide and raise a new queen.
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The four o’clock AM ring calling out from under my pillow would have made me grumpy had I not already been awake staring at my imagination projected on the ceiling. I felt my mom dial my phone number hours before the call connected. Stumbling into the sterile hospital lobby, I saw clusters of familiar faces staring straight into my sleepy eyes. My uncles and aunts and grandparents, our family friends, and all my dad’s favorite people from states all over the country stood 8 floors below him.
It had been three years since the first hive arrived. Three major surgeries had taken pieces of my dad, and three flourishing hives filled the space under the mountain ash tree.
Between visits to his room, I watched one of my uncles wandering around a small patch of green next to the hospital entrance. Wielding his phone, he ran from flower to flower, as if trying to sell something to each plant. After what felt like hours of observing the chaotic dance he was putting on, I approached him to ask what could possibly be so interesting about a patch of poorly kept flowers in the middle of a city while his brother-in-law lay nearly lifeless 8 floors above us. He whipped his phone around to show me a pixelated photo of a striped lady bee, slowly nursing the scraggly garden in a sea of concrete back to health.
For every day that my dad was in the hospital, my uncle sent him a picture of a bee. My dad missed his bees under the mountain ash tree, so my uncle brought him the warm buzz of life to his hostile hospital room in the ICU with every photo.
And all those years I thought it was the hives that needed my dad, but the bee that my uncle chased around a small garden in front of the emergency department had no knowledge of his failing body sitting 8 stories above us. He cared for the bees almost as much as he cared for our family, and while they loved him as much as they loved the land, they never needed him. They needed the flowers, and the flowers needed the bees. And my mom needed the flowers and so my mom needed the bees. And my dad needed my mom and so my dad needed the bees. And I needed my dad, so I needed the bees.
It’s been four years since the first hive showed up under the mountain ash tree. What love each bee had for him they poured into the land that is now packed with blossoming apple trees and dancing dahlias. White buckets still scatter the backyard. I still watch the bees dance outside my window, whispering secrets to each other as they fill their pollen baskets. I still hear the bees that filled the garage to clean up the honey seeping from the extractor every time my mom gives a sticky jar of mountain ash honey to the neighborhood girls that used to scream with laughter as they took turns pushing my dad up and down the driveway in his wheelchair. Sometimes I wake up at four o’clock in the morning and hope to see every white bucket occupied by a disappearing man.
But my mom takes care of the bees now.