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MEREDITH MAY is an award-winning journalist, author, and a fifth-generation beekeeper. She spent sixteen years at the San Francisco Chronicle, where her narrative reporting won the PEN USA Literary Award for Journalism and was shortlisted for the Pulitzer Prize. She is co-author of I, Who Did Not Die and lives in San Francisco, where she keeps several hives in a community garden.
MEREDITH MAY
THE
HONEY
BUS
A Memoir of Loss,
Courage and a Girl
Saved by Bees
ONE PLACE. MANY STORIES
An imprint of HarperCollins Publishers Ltd
1 London Bridge Street
London SE1 9GF
First published in Great Britain by HQ in 2019
Copyright © Meredith May 2019
Meredith May asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
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Ebook Edition © March 2019 ISBN: 9781474077095
For Grandpa
E. Franklin Peace
1926–2015
“So work the honeybees, creatures that by a rule in nature teach the art of order to a peopled kingdom.”
—William Shakespeare, Henry V
Contents
3. The Secret Language of Bees
1980
Swarm season always arrived by telephone. The red rotary phone jangled to life every spring with frantic callers reporting honeybees in their walls, or in their chimneys, or in their trees.
I was pouring Grandpa’s honey over my corn bread when he came out of the kitchen with that sly smile that said we’d have to let our breakfast go cold again. I was ten, and had been catching swarms with him for almost half my life, so I knew what was coming next. He slugged back his coffee in one gulp and wiped his mustache with the back of his arm.
“Got us another one,” he said.
This time the call came from the private tennis ranch about a mile away on Carmel Valley Road. As I climbed into the passenger seat of his rickety pickup, he tapped the gas pedal to coax it to life. The engine finally caught and we screeched out of the driveway, kicking up a spray of gravel behind us. He whizzed past the speed limit signs, which I knew from riding with Granny said to go twenty-five. We had to hurry to catch the swarm because the bees might get an idea to fly off somewhere else.
Grandpa careened into the tennis club and squealed to a stop near a cattle fence. He leaned his shoulder into his jammed door and creaked it open with a grunt. We stepped into a mini-cyclone of bees, a roaring inkblot in the sky, banking left and right like a flock of birds. My heart raced with them, frightened and awestruck at the same time. It seemed like the air was throbbing.
“Why