She kept bees. Not for the honey — she gave most of that away — but because the hive was the only system she'd found that didn't need her to understand it in order to work.
The frames came out heavy in July. She'd pull one free and hold it up to the light, and the comb would glow amber all the way through, the cells so regular they looked machined. But they weren't machined. Each cell was built by a bee that could see maybe two cells in any direction, following rules about angle and wax temperature that no individual bee could state.
Her neighbor Gil asked her once why she didn't keep chickens instead. Easier, he said. You know what you're getting. An egg is an egg. She said she didn't want to know what she was getting.
The bees died in February. Not colony collapse — just a bad winter, a late frost that caught the cluster too small. She found them in the bottom of the hive, a fist-sized knot of bees that had tried to keep each other warm and hadn't had the numbers for it. The queen was in the center. They'd given her every degree they had.
She didn't start a new hive in the spring. She left the empty boxes stacked by the fence, and by May a swarm moved in on its own. She hadn't called them. They came because the space was the right shape.
The new hive didn't know anything about the old one. Same boxes, same frames, even some of the old comb. But the bees were strangers. They started building where the old bees had stopped, filling in the cells that had been left empty, and within a month you couldn't tell where the old construction ended and the new began.
She pulled a frame in July and held it to the light. Same glow. Not the same bees.
Gil said: see? Same as chickens. You get what you get.
She said: no. You get what moves in.