The Painted Beehives That Are Vanishing One by One
Summary
In a Slovenian village beneath the Julian Alps, a grandmother who can no longer go near her bees and a granddaughter who is terrified of them must work out why painted beehives are disappearing night after night. Every clue points to the grumpy old beekeeper across the valley who hasn't spoken to her in thirty years, but the strange messages hidden in the hive panels may not mean what they seem.
Transcript
0:00The Empty Square
Where did the hive go? Ana stood barefoot in the wet grass at six in the morning, holding a smoker she still didn't know how to light, and stared at the place where a beehive had stood the evening before. There was nothing there. No broken wood, no spilled honey, no dead bees. Only a pale square in the grass, yellow and flattened, the exact size of a hive, as if someone had lifted it straight up into the sky. Behind her, the other hives hummed in their row, their painted wooden fronts glowing in the low sun. But something about them was wrong. The pictures were in the wrong places. Someone had taken the painted boards off and put them back in a different order. Ana looked up at the kitchen window, where her grandmother sat watching, one hand pressed flat against the glass. And this was only the first night.
0:49Two Weeks Earlier
Two weeks earlier, Ana had arrived in the village with a suitcase, a phone that barely got signal, and one firm rule: stay away from the bees. She was eleven, she was from Ljubljana, and she was terrified of anything that buzzed. The village sat beneath the Julian Alps like a cupped hand, all steep roofs and orchards, the mountains still wearing snow on their tops. It was late spring. The lime trees were in bloom, and the whole valley smelled of honey before the bees had even made it. Her grandmother, Marija Kos, was seventy-four and had kept bees her whole life. Her hives stood in a long row behind the house, and every one had a painted front: a golden-horned chamois climbing to the peaks, a fox creeping up on a goose, a shepherd carrying a lamb, a girl drawing black water from a cursed well. 'I painted half of these,' Marija said, 'and Jože Hribar painted the other half, back when we were young and still speaking.' She nodded at a farmhouse on the far slope of the valley. That was all she would say. And then, on the third day, a bee found her grandmother's wrist.
1:56One Sting
It was a single sting. Marija had been stung a thousand times and never blinked. She flicked the stinger away with her thumbnail, the way she always did, and kept talking about the lime blossom. Then she stopped talking. Her hand swelled. Her face went pale, then blotchy. She sat down very carefully on the back step and told Ana, in a calm, strange voice, to run next door and fetch Mrs Zupan and her telephone. The ambulance came winding up the road from town. By evening Marija was home again, tired, with a small yellow pen of emergency medicine in her apron pocket and the doctor's words, which she repeated like a sentence passed in court: 'Sometimes the body changes its mind. No more bees, Mrs Kos. Not one.' That night Ana found her grandmother at the kitchen window, looking out at the twelve painted hives in the dusk. 'They'll need checking every day,' Marija said, without turning round. 'Feeding, watching, listening. Someone has to be my hands.' And slowly, horribly, Ana understood who she meant.
3:02Hands Through Glass
The veil smelled of beeswax and old cotton. The gloves were far too big. Ana stood among the hives with her heart thumping so hard she was sure the bees could hear it, while Marija called instructions through the open kitchen window. 'Slow hands. Bees don't hate you, they just don't know you yet. Breathe out, never at them.' Marija had a notebook for every year since 1968, and she read from them like a general reading maps. By the end of the week, Ana could light the smoker, lift a lid, and not scream. Mostly. There were other things, small things, that Ana noticed and Marija wrote down. A sweet, sharp smell drifting up the hill some mornings. A cheerful man called Gregor Petek on a tractor in the big new orchard below the village, waving at her through a fine white mist from the sprayer behind him. A little scatter of dead bees in front of the hive nearest the orchard. 'Old bees die,' Marija said. 'It's spring.' But she frowned as she wrote it. And that night, from the window, they both saw it: a single lantern moving slowly across the high meadow above the valley, where nobody had any reason to be.
4:13A Message in Paint
Which brings us back to that first morning, and the pale square in the grass. Ana ran inside with the news, and Marija's face did something Ana had never seen before. It went completely still. 'Tell me about the fronts,' she said. 'Exactly. Left to right.' Ana went back out and read them off like a shopping list. The fox and the goose had been moved to the head of the row. Next came the shepherd carrying his lamb. Then the golden-horned chamois, climbing toward the peaks. Marija closed her eyes. 'When we were children, Jože and I sent each other messages with these. You line the pictures up and read them like a sentence. Nobody else in the valley knows that game.' She opened her eyes. 'The fox is what I used to call him. He always hated it.' 'So what does it say?' Ana asked. Marija's mouth went thin. 'Fox. Carries away. Up the mountain. It says Jože Hribar has taken my hive, and he wants me to know it.' She stared across the valley at the far farmhouse. 'And he isn't finished.'
5:12Larch Shavings
He wasn't. The second morning there was a second pale square, right beside the first. Ana walked the grass in a slow circle the way Marija told her to, eyes down, looking for anything that didn't belong. She found it caught in the clover: curls of pale wood, thin as ribbon, smelling of resin. Larch. She held them up to the window, and Marija leaned close to the glass. 'That's from a drawknife,' she said. 'Somebody shaped a pole right here, in the dark. Nobody uses a drawknife anymore. Except him.' 'But why would he steal your bees?' Ana asked. And for the first time, Marija told her. Thirty years ago, a swarm had left one of her hives and settled in Jože's orchard. He kept it. She said he'd lured it. He said bees choose their own home. Words were said in the village square that neither could take back, and after that, nothing at all was said for thirty years. Ana opened her mouth to ask more, then stopped. She was staring at the empty pale square, where a small, confused crowd of bees was landing on nothing at all.
6:17Red Pollen
They came in low and tired, circling the place where their home should have been. And on their back legs, packed tight, they carried little balls of pollen. Not the pale yellow of the lime blossom. Not the cream of the apple trees. A deep, rusty red. Ana described it, and Marija sat up straight. 'Foragers remember where the door was,' she said. 'Move a hive a short way and some of them fly back to the old spot. They're not dead, Ana. That hive is alive, and close by. And that red pollen doesn't grow down here. That's from the mountain flowers. That's from up high.' That afternoon Gregor Petek knocked at the front door with a crate of apple juice and a huge smile. He was new here, he said, from the city like Ana, and he wanted to be a good neighbour. 'Big spray on Saturday,' he added cheerfully, 'when the blossom's fully open. Best protection there is. You'll smell it, sorry about that!' When he'd gone, Marija sat a long time with her notebook open. Then she lifted her eyes, past the orchard, past the river, all the way up to the high meadow where the lantern had been.
7:22The Black Well
On the third night, neither of them slept. They sat together at the dark kitchen window with a pot of chamomile tea going cold, and just after midnight, the lantern appeared. It came down the far slope slowly and vanished into the trees near the bottom of the hives. Ana held her breath. Then it climbed back up, much slower now, swaying, stopping every few steps, as if whoever held it was carrying something heavy too. In the morning, there was a third pale square. And the fronts had moved again. This time, at the head of the row, stood the girl at the cursed well, hauling up a bucket of black water. Marija's knuckles went white around her cup. 'Black water,' she said. 'He wishes the worst on my house. After thirty years, this.' She reached for the telephone. 'I'm calling the police in Bled at nine o'clock. Let them climb his meadow.' Ana looked at the clock. It was ten past six. And she made a decision she did not say out loud.
8:20Up the Mountain
In the end, she did say it, because Marija knew her too well. 'You'll take the phone,' her grandmother said at last, 'and you'll keep it on, and I'll watch every step through your grandfather's binoculars. And the moment I say come back, you come back.' So Ana climbed. Up the lane past the chapel, through the lime trees loud with bees, over the little bridge and up the long green slope, with her grandmother's breathing in her ear and the veil folded in her pocket, just in case. The high meadow was knee-deep in flowers. Yellow ones, white ones, and everywhere, nodding in the wind, clumps of a small red mountain flower Ana had never seen in the valley. Its pollen dusted her fingers rust-red. And there, at the top of the meadow, standing in a neat line against the morning sky, were three beehives with painted fronts. Ana took one step toward them. Then a deep voice behind her said, 'Stop. You're standing in their flight path.'
9:17The Old Fox
Jože Hribar was seventy-seven, tall and bent like an old larch, with a white beard and a carrying pole across his shoulders, still pale and new where the drawknife had shaped it. He did not look like a thief. He looked exhausted. 'They're fine,' he said, before Ana could speak. 'Look at them.' And they were. Bees poured in and out of all three hives, busy and loud, legs heavy with red pollen. Then he pointed down the valley at the white rows of Gregor's orchard. 'Down there, they wouldn't be. Whatever he's spraying kills bees. I've found them dead by the hundred on his grass. The hives nearest his trees go first. So I've been taking hers up, one a night, where the wind doesn't carry it.' Ana's mind spun backward. The dead bees by the hive nearest the orchard. The sweet smell. The red pollen. And the fronts. Not fox, carries away, up the mountain. Fox: it's me. Shepherd: I'm carrying them to safety. Chamois: up high. And the black well was never a curse. It was a warning: the water below is poisoned. In her ear, very quietly, her grandmother whispered, 'Oh, Jože.' Jože, who couldn't hear, only looked down at the valley. 'There are still nine down there,' he said. 'He sprays on Saturday. And I'm seventy-seven years old.' Saturday was tomorrow.
10:37Lights Across the Valley
Ana ran the whole way down. Not home, but to the orchard, where Gregor Petek was hosing out his sprayer and whistling. She told him everything in one breath, holding out a handful of dead bees she'd gathered from beside the hives. Gregor's smile disappeared. He stared at the bees for a long time. 'I didn't know,' he said, and you could hear that it was true. 'The man at the shop said it was fine. I never even thought.' Then he wiped his hands on his trousers. 'What do you need?' Bees are moved at dusk, when every forager is home. So at sunset, Ana went from hive to hive, gently plugging each entrance with grass the way Jože had shown her, bees crawling over her gloves and her heart, for once, perfectly calm. Gregor brought his tractor and trailer. Jože came down the slope with his lantern. And one by one, the nine painted hives were lifted, strapped, and carried up the mountain in the dark. Halfway up, Ana looked back. In the kitchen window far below, a light switched on and off. Once, twice, three times. Jože stopped. He stood very still. Then he raised his lantern high over his head, and lowered it, and raised it again, three times, answering a signal that had not crossed this valley in thirty years.
11:55Seeds and Silence
Gregor did not spray on Saturday. He didn't spray the next week either. He drove to the farming office in Radovljica and came back with a stack of leaflets, a gentler treatment that could only be used at night once the bees were home, and a very red face. He also came back with a sack of wildflower seed, which he and Ana scattered in a long strip along the bottom of his orchard. 'Bees for my trees,' he said, 'and flowers for your bees. Apparently that's how it's meant to work. Nobody told me.' 'Nobody told my grandmother either,' Ana said. 'Somebody just sort of showed her.' Up on the high meadow, all twelve hives stood in a row, humming. Ana climbed up every morning to check them, with Marija reading notes into the phone and Jože grumbling about every single one. But Marija still hadn't spoken to Jože. Not properly. Not face to face. Until one evening, just after supper, there was a sharp knock, not on the door, but on the kitchen window.
12:55Through the Window
Jože stood outside the glass in his work coat with his hat in his hands, a few bees still drifting round his shoulders. He couldn't come in, not smelling of the hives the way he did. So he stayed where he was, and Marija opened the window, and they looked at each other across thirty years. 'You could have just knocked,' Marija said. 'You could have just looked,' said Jože. 'I lined them up for you three nights running. Fox, shepherd, chamois, well. Who else in this valley would read that?' 'I read it wrong,' she said. 'You always did read me wrong,' he said. And then, astonishingly, they both laughed. Ana sat at the kitchen table pretending to do a puzzle. She heard him say the swarm had chosen his orchard, and heard her say she knew, she'd always known. She heard him say sorry, quietly, as if the word were heavy, and she heard her grandmother say it back. Before he left, Jože reached into his coat and set something flat, wrapped in sacking, on the windowsill. 'For the girl,' he said. 'When they come home.'
13:53Coming Home
They came home in early July, when the lime blossom was over and the orchard had gone green and quiet. Gregor drove the trailer. Jože walked beside it. And Ana, veil on, gloves on, not shaking at all, set each hive back onto its own pale square in the grass. The squares had nearly grown over, but not quite. Each hive fitted exactly into the shape it had left behind. And the bees, after a little confused circling, found their old doors and went in as if they'd never been away. Then Ana unwrapped the package. It was a new hive front, freshly painted. It showed a small girl in a too-big veil, standing in a cloud of golden bees on a mountain meadow, holding a lantern up toward a window far below. In the corner, in two different hands, two old friends had signed their names. Ana carried it to the newest hive at the end of the row, the one she'd built that summer from Jože's larch, and fitted it on. Then she turned toward the kitchen window, because there was one last thing to say.
14:55A Light Left On
Marija was at the glass, where she would always be now, smiling. And Ana did something she had never done before. She lined up the painted fronts herself. The girl with the lantern first. Then the shepherd carrying his lamb. Then the chamois, climbing high. And at the very end, the fox, who had always hated being called that, and secretly didn't mind at all. Marija read it, and pressed her hand flat against the glass, the same way she had on that first frightening morning. Only now it meant something else. Where did the hive go? That was the question that started all of this. It went up, where an old friend was keeping it safe. It went up on the shoulders of a man too proud to say a single word, and too kind to say nothing at all. And then, one by one, it came home. The way bees do. The way people do, sometimes, if someone leaves a light on in the window long enough.
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Series: thriller (English)