Story #11: The Beekeeper's Apprentice

Dad had been talking about bees for months. He talked about them the way he talked about all his homestead ideas — with the quiet, building enthusiasm of a man who had already bought the equipment online and was just waiting for the right moment to tell Mom.

“I think we should get bees,” he said one morning at breakfast, wearing the expression of someone presenting a completely reasonable idea and not the expression of someone who had three boxes of beekeeping supplies already hidden in the barn.

Mom looked at him over her coffee. She had a sensor for this — a finely calibrated instrument that could detect incoming homestead chaos from the first syllable. “How many hives?”

“Just two.”

“To start.”

The boys were immediately on board, because the boys were always immediately on board with anything that involved the outdoors and potential danger. The oldest was already thinking about the engineering. The middle one was drawing bees on his napkin. The youngest was vibrating at a frequency that suggested he might actually become a bee.

Gunner heard the excitement in the room and thumped his tail, because excitement meant something was happening, and something happening usually led to something falling on the floor.

Tiger, on the kitchen counter, observed the conversation with the detached interest of a creature who understood that this would become his problem eventually.

The hives arrived on a Saturday in spring. Two white wooden boxes, stacked like miniature apartment buildings, set up on cinder blocks at the edge of the garden — close enough to the wildflowers for the bees to work, far enough from the house for Mom’s comfort.

Dad wore the full suit: white coveralls, leather gloves, wide-brimmed hat with a mesh veil that made him look like a ghost beekeeper from a low-budget horror movie. The boys stood at what they considered a safe distance, which was about ten feet closer than what Mom considered a safe distance.

The bees came in a package — a screened box buzzing with ten thousand workers and a queen in a tiny cage. Dad opened the package and poured the bees into the hive the way you’d pour grain into a bucket, except the grain was alive and angry and had stingers.

“Cool!” said the youngest.

“Don’t touch anything,” said Mom, who was watching from the porch with the posture of someone ready to deploy first aid.

“This is so cool,” Dad said from inside his veil, his voice muffled and happy. Dad was always happiest when he was doing something that Mom would describe as “unnecessary and probably dangerous.”

Gunner watched all of this from approximately six feet away, which was already too close.

The thing about Gunner was that he had no concept of danger. Not really. He understood cause and effect in simple terms: if he chewed a shoe, he got scolded. If he sat nicely, he got treats. If he stuck his nose in the cat’s food, Tiger would smack him. These were the physics of Gunner’s universe.

But bees didn’t fit into any of his categories. They were small. They flew. They buzzed. They were interesting. And Gunner’s response to interesting things was always, always, always to get closer.

He crept forward. His nose — that magnificent, ridiculous nose that could detect a dropped Cheerio from three rooms away — extended toward the hive. The buzz grew louder as he got closer. Thousands of bees crawled across the hive entrance, fanning their wings, organizing their new home.

“Gunner, no—” Dad started.

Too late. Gunner’s nose was approximately two inches from the hive entrance.

A single bee landed on his nose.

Gunner went cross-eyed trying to look at it. His tail wagged cautiously. A friend? A tiny flying friend?

The bee stung him.

The sound Gunner made was not a bark, not a yelp, but a full-body howl of betrayal that started in his nose and traveled through his entire ninety-pound frame and out through his tail, which tucked between his legs faster than anyone had ever seen a tail tuck.

He bolted.

Not toward the house. Not toward Dad. Not toward safety. He bolted in a wide, panicked circle around the yard, as if the pain was something he could outrun. Behind him, a small cloud of guard bees — maybe six or seven, agitated by his sudden movement — gave chase.

“GUNNER!” Dad yelled, pulling off his glove to grab for the dog. But Gunner was in full flight mode, and ninety pounds of panicked Labrador at top speed is not a thing you grab.

He made two laps around the garden. The bees followed for the first lap, then lost interest. But Gunner kept running, because the burning in his nose was real and present and he didn’t understand why his face was attacking him.

Tiger, who had been on his usual fence post approximately forty yards from the hive since the moment Dad first mentioned bees, watched the entire spectacle with his tail wrapped around his paws.

And there it is, Tiger thought. Exactly what I predicted. Exactly when I predicted it. I should have started a betting pool.

Gunner finally stopped running and came to Dad, who was kneeling by the porch with his veil pushed up and a look of mixed sympathy and exasperation. Gunner pressed his entire body against Dad’s legs and looked up with the face of a dog who had been personally victimized by the entire insect kingdom.

His nose was already swelling. The spot where the bee had stung him puffed up like a small balloon, giving his face a lopsided, slightly clown-like appearance. His eyes watered. His lip quivered.

“I know, buddy,” Dad said, pulling the stinger out with a gentle thumbnail. “I tried to tell you.”

“Is he okay?” the oldest asked.

“He’s fine. Just a sting. He’ll learn.”

“He won’t learn,” Mom said from the porch, applying a baking soda paste to Gunner’s nose with the practiced efficiency of a woman who’d been treating scrapes, burns, bites, and bad decisions since the boys were born.

She was right.

The next day, Gunner went back to the hive.

Not cautiously. Not slowly. He went back with the same nose-first enthusiasm, as if the previous day’s lesson had been stored in a part of his brain that he didn’t have access to.

He got stung again. Left ear this time.

Day three: right paw.

Day four: he got stung on the lip and spent the evening looking like he’d had bad cosmetic work done. The youngest boy giggled every time he looked at Gunner, which made Gunner wag, which made his swollen lip wobble, which made everyone laugh harder.

“We should just let him figure it out,” Dad said.

“He’s not figuring it out,” the oldest observed.

“He’s getting stung every day,” the middle one added. “I don’t think he connects the bees to the stinging.”

This was accurate. In Gunner’s mind, the stinging was a separate, unrelated phenomenon that happened to occur near the interesting buzzing boxes. The boxes were fascinating. The stinging was unfortunate. These were two completely independent events.

Tiger, from his fence post, had established a personal exclusion zone around the hives of approximately fifty feet. He watched the bees from this distance with the respect of a creature who understood cause and effect and, more importantly, had the self-control to act on that understanding.

When Gunner came slinking back from his daily stinging, Tiger would be on the fence post, golden eyes tracking the big dummy’s approach, and there would be a moment — just a moment — where their eyes met, and the communication was clear:

Tiger: You did it again. Gunner: My face hurts. Tiger: Shocking. Gunner: I love you. Tiger: You’re hopeless.

It took two weeks. Two full weeks of daily stings, swollen noses, puffy paws, and one memorable afternoon when Gunner ran face-first into the screen door while fleeing an agitated guard bee and had to be untangled by the oldest boy.

But eventually, incrementally, something shifted in Gunner’s understanding. The stinging and the buzzing boxes slowly, painfully merged into a single concept in his mind: Those things hurt.

He started giving the hives a wider berth. Not as wide as Tiger’s berth — nothing was as wide as Tiger’s berth — but wider than nose-on-hive. He’d walk past them at about ten feet, casting them a look that was equal parts longing and wariness, the look of a dog who still found them fascinating but had finally, finally, learned that fascination had a price.

Dad noticed.

“Look at that,” he said, watching Gunner detour around the hives on his way to the pond. “He’s learning.”

“Only took seventeen stings,” Mom said.

“Eighteen,” the oldest corrected. “I kept count.”

Tiger, on the fence post, cleaned a paw and said nothing. He’d kept count too.

It was eighteen.