The Bees Built My Face Inside Hive Nine

APRIL 18

I inherited Morrowglass Apiary from my aunt Sabine. The property held eight painted hives along the pear orchard and a ninth beneath the trees, unpainted and bound with copper wire.

Sabine had left three rules on a card inside her smoker. Never harvest from Nine. Never speak your whole name near Nine. If the colony hums in your voice, do not answer.

I assumed the rules were part of her old-country theatrics. Sabine talked to queens before moving them and left a spoonful of honey on the windowsill whenever someone died. Still, Hive Nine unsettled me. No bees used its entrance. No propolis sealed its cracks. Yet the wooden box was warm enough to melt frost in a perfect square around it.

APRIL 26

My assistant, Cale, heard buzzing inside Nine while mowing. He put his ear to the cover and said the colony was repeating a woman's name.

I asked which name.

He said mine: Mara Ellery.

I had introduced myself to him that morning within sight of the hive.

We agreed not to open it.

MAY 3

We opened it.

A normal hive smells of warm wax, nectar, wood, and thousands of living bodies. Nine smelled like the lavender soap Sabine used when I was a child.

The top super was empty. In the box below, bees covered every frame in a motionless curtain. They were the wrong color for any local strain: black abdomens, gray wings, and pale bands that looked like fingerprints.

When I lifted the center frame, the bees moved aside.

They had shaped the comb into a human face.

It rose from the hexagons in shallow relief. Brow, cheeks, closed eyelids, lips. Yellow pollen shaded the skin. Dark propolis formed hair. The features were unfinished but unmistakably mine.

Cale laughed once, too loudly. Then he noticed the scar beneath its chin.

I received that scar at nine years old after falling against Sabine's cellar steps. It is hidden unless I lift my head. Cale had never seen it.

The wax lips parted.

Every bee on the frame beat its wings together, producing my voice.

Which one of us is outside? it asked.

We dropped the frame back into the hive and replaced the cover. Neither of us answered.

MAY 9

The other colonies avoid Nine. Foragers returning from the orchard make wide arcs around it. Queens in Hives Two and Six stopped laying on the sides facing the trees. At sunset, every bee in the apiary turns toward Nine and holds still for one minute.

Cale wants to burn it. I found Sabine's old ledger first.

Her final entry reads: A swarm remembers one body by dividing it into thousands. Nine remembers thousands of bodies and is trying to choose one.

MAY 14

The face has opened its eyes.

They are not wax. Each eye is made from a living cluster of bees packed headfirst into the comb, their gray wings overlapping to form irises. They track movement even when the frame is horizontal.

The mouth now contains white wax teeth. One front tooth is slightly crooked like mine.

I found my missing hairbrush sealed into a lower frame. Every strand had been cleaned, sorted, and woven through the comb.

MAY 17

I woke with six sting marks arranged in a hexagon over my heart. My bedroom window was closed. There were no dead bees in the room.

The marks do not swell. They smell like lavender soap.

MAY 22

Cale recorded the hive after midnight. The buzzing formed a lullaby Sabine used to sing. Beneath it, my voice recited memories I have never told anyone: the blue cup I broke at seven, the lie I told at my mother's funeral, the name I planned to give a child I never had.

When Cale played the recording backward, another voice said, Thank you for the inside parts.

MAY 24

I tried to move Nine beyond the orchard. The hive weighed more than four men could lift, though it had been almost empty three weeks ago. Roots of black comb extended from its floor into the soil.

We cut one with a spade. Honey welled from it, warm and red-brown. For the next hour, I could not remember Sabine's face.

Inside the hive, the wax face looked more complete.

It smiled at me with Sabine's smile.

JUNE 1

The colony has begun building downward. Cale dug beside the stand and exposed comb descending four feet into the earth. Hexagonal cells contained objects too large to have entered the hive: my winter boots, Sabine's kitchen chair, a framed photograph, the pillow from my bed.

Each object was reduced to a thin wax copy. The originals have disappeared from the house.

Cale asked whether I was certain there had ever been a ninth hive. The question frightened me. I made him write HIVE NINE on both arms with permanent marker.

JUNE 4

His left arm now says HIVE EIGHT.

His right arm is blank.

JUNE 7

We opened the lower boxes in daylight. The bees had completed a wax throat, shoulders, and two folded arms beneath the face. It was building an entire person vertically through the frames.

The chest rose and fell.

Where its heart should have been, a queen bee lay inside a clear honey cell. She was longer than my finger and had a tiny human tooth at the end of her abdomen.

The wax figure opened its eyes. My voice came from its throat without the bees moving.

May I come out when I am finished?

Cale whispered no.

The figure turned its head toward him. Hundreds of workers poured from its mouth and covered his veil. They did not sting. They pressed their bodies against the mesh and hummed until he collapsed.

When he woke, he recognized my clothes but not my face.

JUNE 8

Sabine's ledger contains one more rule written beneath the binding: Do not refuse it directly. A hive denied an exit makes one from the nearest mouth.

Cale has been coughing wax scales.

JUNE 10

I prepared two smokers with burlap, pine needles, and dried lavender. At dusk I flooded Nine with smoke while Cale cut the copper wire.

No bees emerged.

The hive inhaled.

Smoke vanished through the entrance in one long breath. From inside came the sound of my own coughing. Then the cover lifted.

The wax woman climbed out.

She was naked, golden, and perfect except for the open hexagonal cells along her spine. Bees moved beneath her surface like blood. My hair grew from her scalp. My scar creased her chin. When she stepped onto the grass, the other eight colonies bowed their queens toward her.

Cale looked from her to me.

He chose her.

He said my name and went to stand beside the wax woman. She touched his mouth. The bees he had been coughing crawled out between his lips and joined the cells in her back.

Every memory he had of me moved with them. I could see it in her changing expression: our first harvest, the day we painted Hive Four, the private joke about Sabine's ancient truck.

She knew all of it now.

I tipped the smoker into Hive Nine.

The dry comb caught at once. Flames ran down the black roots beneath the ground. The wax woman screamed in the combined voices of everyone who had ever worked the apiary. Her face softened. For a moment, Sabine's features rose through mine.

She said the sentence my aunt had apparently died trying to remember.

A beekeeper does not own the hive. The hive keeps the beekeeper.

Then the figure collapsed into honey and bees.

Cale ran. I have not seen him since.

SEPTEMBER 26

I burned the apiary and sold the land. Investigators found nine empty hive stands and no human remains. They said the fire spread through old tree roots, though the black comb beneath Nine continued for almost half an acre.

I moved into an apartment in the city, twelve floors above the nearest garden. I keep no flowers. I use unscented soap.

This morning, I cut my finger opening a jar.

Honey came out instead of blood.

A worker bee crawled from the cut, cleaned its wings, and flew into my mouth before I could stop it.

Now thousands of wings are vibrating behind my ribs. They are humming my whole name, and when I look in the mirror, the reflection asks in Sabine's voice whether it may come out when it is finished.

I have not answered.

But the skin over my heart has started opening into perfect hexagons, and something inside me is practicing my smile.