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paralysis virus, then the bees shiver and can’t fly so they die in or around the hive. But look at the ground.’
    Six hats dipped and surveyed the spongy grass growing thickly in the shade of the apple tree.
    ‘Nothing. And look inside the hive.’
    The hats rose, their wide brims pushing against each other.
    ‘If a virus had caused this then the bottom of the hive would be deep with dead bees. They’re like us; when they feel sick they head home and hunker down until they feel better. But there’s nothing there. The bees have just vanished. There’s something else here too.’
    She held the batten higher and pointed at the lower section of the honeycomb where the hexagonal cells were covered with tiny wax lids.
    ‘Un-hatched larvae,’ Kathryn said. ‘Bees don’t normally abandon a hive if there are still young to be hatched.’
    ‘So what happened?’
    Kathryn slotted the comb back into the silent hive. ‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘But it’s happening everywhere.’ She began walking back to the boarded-up cider-house at the edge of the orchard. ‘Same thing’s been reported in North America, Europe, even as far east as Taiwan. So far no one’s managed to work out what’s causing it. The only thing everyone does agree on is that it’s getting worse.’
    She pulled off her gauntlets as she reached the minibus and dropped them into an empty plastic crate. Everyone followed suit.
    ‘In America they call it Colony Collapse Disorder. Some people think it’s the end of the world. Einstein said that if the bee disappeared from the face of the earth then we’d only have four years left. No more bees. No more pollination. No more crops. No more food. No more man.’
    She unzipped her gauze face protector and slipped off her hat revealing an oval face with pale, clear skin and dark, dark eyes. She had an ageless, natural air about her that was vaguely aristocratic and was regularly the object of the young male volunteers’ fantasies, even though she was older than many of their mothers. She reached up with her free hand, unclipped a thick coil of hair the colour of dark chocolate and shook it loose.
    ‘So what are they doing about it?’ The enquirer – a tall, sandy-haired boy from the American Mid-West – emerged from beneath a bee smock. He had the look most volunteers had when they first came to work for Kathryn at the charity: earnest, un-cynical, full of health and hope, shining with the goodness of the world. She wondered what he would look like after a year in the Sudan watching children die slowly from starvation, or in Sierra Leone persuading starving villagers not to plough fields their great-grandfathers had worked because guerrillas had sown them with landmines.
    ‘They’re doing lots of research,’ she said, ‘trying to establish a link between the colony collapses and GM crops, new types of nicotinoid pesticides, global warming, known parasites and infections. There’s even a theory that mobile phone signals might be messing around with the bees’ navigational systems, causing them to lose their bearings.’
    She shrugged off her smock and let it fall to the ground.
    ‘But what do you think it is?’ Kathryn looked up at the earnest young man, saw the beginnings of a frown etching itself on to a face that had barely known a moment’s concern.
    ‘Oh, I don’t know,’ she said. ‘Maybe it’s a combination of all these things. Bees are actually quite simple creatures. Their society is simple too. But it doesn’t take much to upset things. They can cope with stress, but if life becomes too complex, to the point where they don’t recognize their society any more, maybe they abandon it. Maybe they’d rather fly off to their deaths than stay living in a world they no longer understand.’
    She looked up. Everyone had stopped squirming out of their smocks and now stood with worried expressions clouding their young faces.
    ‘Hey,’ Kathryn said, trying to lighten the mood,