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A novelette in 20 chapters
Telling the Bees: Chapter 1
A Walk in the Woods
The Hill was stubborn this morning.
It didn’t want to cede those metres of elevation to her stiff legs.
But you bloody well will, damn you.
She gripped her pole, dug in the steel tip and levered herself up the slope.
It was slick here, where feet, hers and Tom’s, had polished away the grass, tramped bare earth into mud. Maybe she should get him to come up with the tractor, spread a few bucketloads of chips?
Just a few steps more, then she’d be over the Bulge, down into the Dip.
They had private names for the features of their eight hectares of hillside. Sometimes they’d find that each had come up, independently, with the same one.
The sun was up now, sending its rays down the valley toward her, skimming the treetops. There was no warmth yet in the air that she drew into her lungs, but it would come.
Uncle Kooka started up, somewhere over to the left. She pictured him on a low bough of the big manna, over Top Dam.
Ah, Aunty Burra too. That’s the way, girl. Don’t let him have the last say.
The harsh duet rang out, filled the woods with inhuman mirth. You had to chuckle along. Even if you felt the joke might be on you.
She traversed the Dip swiftly, denying her legs the respite they pleaded for, and pressed on upslope. An east-facing clearing opened left of the track, allowing morning light to penetrate the deep, dark stillness under the trees.
Her hives dotted the Glade, tall grey sentinels greeting the sun. Five now, after splitting Number One last spring. Number Three was at six boxes, a lot to overwinter with. It would need watching, come the warmer weather.
Tom had grumbled about ‘carting everything up and down the bloody hill,’ but she’d insisted that this was the right spot for her apiary. Sheltered from the prevailing winds, harvesting a precious extra half-hour of morning sun on chill winter days like this one, with sufficient gradient for icy air to slip away downslope, not form a frost pocket.
