Page 6 of Dark Honey Mountain Man

"That's content," he says. "That's them clustering and doing their business. Now watch."

He raps the box once with two knuckles.

The sound goes up. Sharp, a rising note, and then within about four seconds it settles back down into the rolling.

"That's a question and an answer. They asked what that was, and they decided it was nothing. If it stays up — if it goes up and doesn't come down — that's a colony that's queenless or robbed or sick, and I need to open it and find out which." He sits back on his heels. "Sound before smoke. You'd be amazed what people miss because they came in with the smoker already going."

"How long did it take you to learn to hear that?"

"Two years to hear it. Six to trust it."

Then, a bee gets into my veil. I feel it against my cheek and everything in me goes hot and stupid, and I start to stand up fast.

His hand lands on my shoulder blade. Not gripping. Weight, and nothing else.

"Slow," he says, right beside my ear, and his hand stays where it is, warm through two layers. "Walk fifteen steps that way, into the shade, open the zip and let her out. It’s not interested in you. It's looking for the light."

I do it. It flies out. My hands are shaking, and I laugh at myself, one loud, embarrassing bark of a laugh, and when I turn around, he's watching me.

"You didn't run," he says, stifling a chuckle.

"I wanted to."

"Everybody wants to."

We work down the slope. He shows me how to lift a lid so the propolis cracks instead of snapping, how to read a frame — brood in the middle, honey at the edges, the difference between capped and uncapped, the difference between the pale wax of new comb and the dark leather-brown of old.

At the fourth hive he pulls a frame and holds it out flat.

"There," he says.

Along the top edge, the honey in the cells isn't gold. It's near-black, and where the light comes through it goes that deep red, and some of it's set hard and grainy in the cells like coarse sugar.

"That's the melezitose," I say.

"That's what fights me in October." He tilts it. "This one's mixed. See the gold there, that's goldenrod, they were on that a couple weeks back. That dark's from the second week of September when they went up the ridge and stayed up there for eleven days."

"Up where?"

He looks at me over the frame.

"That's the answer you came for," he says.

He puts the frame back. Slow. Sets the lid on. Slow. Straightens up and takes his gloves off and looks up the slope behind the cabin where the ground goes steep and the big spruce start.

"Old-growth up there. Eighty hectares of it in the draw, never been logged, ground's too broken to get equipment in. There's an aphid that lives on those trees, three species of them, mostly on the Engelmann spruce. They drink the sap and they can't use all the sugar, so they put it out again on the needles. Sticky. Some years it rains and it's gone by morning. Some years there's a dry spell in September and it builds up and my bees find it and they work it like a flower."

"That's what the taste is. That's the resin thing."

"That's the tree, coming through an insect, coming through a bee, into a jar." He says it plainly, no wonder in it, which is somehow worse. "Eleven days this year. Some years I get two. Two thousand nine I got nothing at all."

I stand on his slope in his too-big suit with his dog leaning on my leg, and I look up at a stand of trees I can't get to and won't ever get to, and I don't say anything.

Which is when I notice.

I haven't been overthinking for three hours.

"You've gone quiet," Heath says.