The Wedding Bees Read Online Free PDF

about blooming, Sugar would coax a sleepy Elizabeth out of the hive where she’d been huddled for the winter. She’d place her carefully on an old map of her granddaddy’s, let her crawl all over it, and wherever she finally stopped was their next destination.
    Actually, it wasn’t entirely true that she let her crawl all over. Sugar put up barricades, usually made with drinking straws, to steer the queen away from places she didn’t want to go back to, which was anywhere she’d already been or the middle of the ocean.
    The very first time she’d done it, after she’d fled South Carolina all those years ago, she’d deliberately set up the straws so they led out of the South like a trumpet, nudging Elizabeth the First north of the Mason-Dixon and away from the Atlantic.
    That first year, her queen took her to Half Moon Bay in California, clear across the country. The following year she moved inland to the Napa Valley, then back to the coast and Mendocino (one of her favorite stops).
    A new queen, Elizabeth the Second, had taken her to Truckee near Lake Tahoe next, then up to Jacksonville, and her successor, the Third, another gentle soul but a little dizzy, led them to Puget Sound, then north Idaho and back down to Santa Fe, while the Fourth chose Colorado and Pennsylvania, before the cantankerous but geographically unadventurous Fifth crawled to Vermont, Maine, New Hampshire and finally Rhode Island before slipping off to queen-bee heaven: five years being a particularly good innings for a queen.
    Privately, Sugar had hoped the Sixth might take them elsewhere in California, where the weather suited her own circulation a little better. But if there was any proof that her queens had minds of their own and could not be pushed around like an upturned glass on a high school Ouija board, that confident new queen crawling purposefully toward the tiny overpopulated island of Manhattan was it.
    And now here they were.
    Sugar got up, drew back the curtains, and stepped out onto her terrace. The bees were parked, for the moment, still in the Styrofoam cooler but in front of the hive, which was currently sitting a few yards out from the exterior wall of neighboring 5A, an apartment that seemed from the outside only marginally bigger than a walk-in closet. It had no direct access to the rooftop as her 5B did, but rather two deep windows that faced out onto it, each one planted with the most exquisite window boxes. One was thick with parsley, sage, chives and coriander and the other with mint, lemon balm, chervil and a miniature pepper.
    The perfect spot for her bees, in terms of sun and shelter, was right between those window boxes, but it was rude to put them there without asking whoever lived in 5A. And whoever lived in 5A had been mulching the garden boxes overnight but had not so far pulled back the curtains. However, one of the windows was open a smidge and Sugar could smell something delightfully spicy and buttery wafting from it.
    She could not wait to meet such a dab hand in the baking department but people could be a little iffy about living next to bees, she had learned. And a person who gardened at night and blocked the world out during the day was likely more iffy than most.
    She’d play that one by ear.
    In the meantime, the hive, painted in rainbow stripes by a neighbor’s six-year-old twins in some long-ago backyard, was sitting in the middle of the terrace with two gardenias acting as scented sentry guards on either side.
    Sugar lugged the gardenias with her wherever she went to help guide the bees back to their new home while they were getting used to their surroundings.
    She lugged an electric blue mosaic birdbath too, so they always knew where their drinking water was.
    The hive and its accoutrements certainly added a little extra color to her terrace, which, for all its staggering backdrop of Manhattan’s downtown alps, was otherwise empty but for a weathered teak table, a