Dale waited for forty-five degrees. That was the rule, or the nearest thing to a rule in beekeeping — don't open the hive below forty-five. The bees would chill.
March had been cold, then warm, then cold again. Twice he'd driven out to the yard and sat in his truck with the thermometer reading forty-one, forty-two, and driven home. On the third trip the dash read forty-seven and held.
He suited up by the truck. The veil went on last — he didn't like the restricted vision, the mesh between him and the world. The smoker took three tries. He'd let the fuel dry out over winter, and the burlap was stiff. Finally it caught and he pumped the bellows until the smoke came white and cool.
The yard held eight hives. He'd gone into winter with ten. Two were already clearly dead — he'd known since January, when the others showed cleansing flights on warm days and those two stayed silent. He'd left them in place. There was no hurry. The dead don't mind waiting.
He started with the strongest colony, the one on the south end that had been heavy going into fall. A few puffs at the entrance. The hum changed pitch, but only briefly. He lifted the outer cover, then the inner cover.
They were there.
That was the whole finding, every spring. They were there, or they weren't. Everything else — the brood pattern, the stores, the signs of disease or queen failure — was detail. The first question had only two answers.
He pulled a center frame. Capped brood in a tight oval, larvae curled white in open cells, eggs standing upright — three days or fewer. The queen was laying well. He didn't look for her. The eggs were proof enough.
The bees moved over his gloves, his forearms, the frame. They walked on him the way they walked on the woodwork: with direction, without acknowledgment. He was landscape to them.
He went through each surviving colony. Six of eight. Seventy-five percent, which was better than the county average and worse than his personal best. Two colonies had brood patterns that worried him — spotty, too many empty cells. Could be a failing queen. Could be early mite damage. Could be nothing.
He closed the last hive and stood in the yard. The sun was on his back. The smoker had gone out. He could hear all six colonies at once, each with its own pitch, and for a moment he tried to distinguish them — the strong one from the two that worried him, the three in the middle that were neither thriving nor struggling but just continuing.
He couldn't. From outside, they all sounded the same.
He loaded his gear and drove home. His notes said: six surviving, two with spotty brood, recommend re-check in two weeks. The notes didn't say that the first frame he'd pulled had been perfect and he'd held it up to the light and the capped brood had glowed amber through the wax. They didn't say: six of eight, and the six don't know about the two.