Death By A HoneyBee (2 page)

He is lying face down in a beehive.”
 
I gave the police my name and address, clicked the phone shut and sat on the meadow grass waiting for the wail of the police siren. It seemed like a long time before they came.
 

2

     
My name is Josiah Reynolds.
 
My maternal grandmother, who felt compelled to give biblical masculine names to the girls in her family, gave name to me.
 
She said it was to make us strong.
 
My mother’s name was Micah.
 
People always mistook her name for mica, a silicate mineral.
 
However, I love my moniker, being named after a king.

     
For the past three years, I have made my living from working the land – mainly beekeeping.
 
My home is built on a cliff overlooking the forest-green, fast-flowing Kentucky River.
 
Following the river east of my farm, Daniel Boone built Fort Boonesborough.
 
North is Ashland, former estate of Henry Clay, the Great Compromiser and statesman who owned slaves; south lies White Hall, the haunted home to Cassius Clay, a distant cousin of Henry’s who was a firebrand emancipationist.
 
Legend has it that the moment Cassius Clay breathed his last, lightning struck Henry Clay’s towering memorial statue in the Lexington Cemetery, decapitating it.

    
The blue and grey once skirmished on my property.
 
I still find Civil War uniform buttons, as well as arrowheads from

the Shawnees who used to hunt here. I suspect that a small hill on my land might be a Native American Adena burial mound. I stay away from it out of respect, and I will not let the Anthropology Department at the University of Kentucky excavate it.
 

    
I think it was Faulkner who said, “The past is never dead.
 
It is not even past.”
 
My neighbors would concur, and so do I.
 
Like a blue morning mist hovering over the Kentucky River, the history of this land hangs tight.
 
The past is always tapping on my shoulder.
 
It never strays far from anyone who lives in Caintuck, the dark and bloody ground, as I would find out later.
 
It was going to bite me but good, but I didn’t realize this when I found the body.
 
Looking back, I was naive, plain and simple.
 
Like most women, I didn’t sense the danger coming my way.

     
I am a beekeeper, and a good one at that.
 
Since most of my current income derives from selling honey at the local Farmers’ Market, I am always concerned about my bees.
 
As a rule, they receive better medical attention and general care than I do.
 
So I was pretty agitated when I saw police officers poking around my hives even to the point of banging on their sides.
 
Of course, the guard bees of these hives responded by swarming the offenders.
 
A cop angrily pulled a fire extinguisher out of his cruiser trunk after being stung several times.
  

    
“Don’t you dare use that on my bees!” I yelled.
 
I glared at the coroner struggling into his hazmat suit.

    
“Yes, put that away or you’ll contaminate the scene,” the coroner said, putting on his headgear after crushing a cigarette in the grass.
 
He and two other officers looked like Michelin Men as they waddled through quick darts of bees.
 
Most of the field bees had already headed out to harvest nectar from wildflowers in the surrounding pastures.
 
Their daily routine was not going to be hampered by a dead body in their neighbors’ hive. Field bees, already returning from pastures laden with flower juice, expertly swerved around men standing in their pathways.
 
Both smell and sight guided them home among a row of twenty painted white hives.
 
Honeybees can fly forward, backwards or sideways at fifteen miles per hour, so they are able to swerve around strange obstacles in their way.

     
“Quit swatting at those bees,” I cried.
 
“It only makes them mad.”

     
“This is rich,” said a voice at my elbow.
 
I looked up to see my helper, Matt, standing beside me suited up, but with his veil off.
 

     
I smiled inside.
 
Matt was six feet two with dark curly hair and blue eyes.
 
He looked like Victor Mature, the matinee idol of the 40’s and 50’s.
 
I thought Victor Mature was the most delicious male I had ever beheld after seeing him in
The Robe
.
 
And he even had a sense of humor.
 
When an exclusive country club refused Mature membership because he was an actor, the Louisville homeboy protested, “I am not an actor.
 
Haven’t you seen my movies?”
 
Good looking and funny.
 
What woman could resist that combination?

    
Many thought Matt and I were lovers, which was ridiculous.
 
Why would this Adonis be bedding a frumpy middle-aged woman?
 
But the rumors did give me a source of pride.
 
So I never told my straight friends that he was gay.
 
And neither did he.
 
He was that good of a friend to support my vanity.
     

    
“Who is it?” Matt asked, seemingly unperturbed at the commotion in the beeyard.
 
He acted more intrigued than worried, but then it wasn’t really his problem.
 

    
“No idea,” I shrugged.
 

    
The state's bee inspector, Caleb Noble, pulled up in his jeep, flashed the cops his badge and began recording the proceedings.

    
“Hell’s bells,” I murmured to Matt.
 
"Somebody called Caleb.
 
Like I don’t have enough trouble.”

    
The coroner and two assistants measured and probed the body with forbidding-looking instruments.
 
They filled evidence bags, sealed them and made notes on a log.
 
The police photographer took pictures.
 
Satisfied, the coroner gave the word for his guys to yank the body out of the hive.
 
Honeybees fell lifelessly from the victim’s hair.
 
One coroner’s assistant put some dead bees in a jar for testing. The victim’s face was gooey with streaks of honey and mashed bee pollen.
 
Great clumps of beeswax fell from his swollen jowls to the ground.
 
An acrid smell drifted from the disturbed hive.

     
Matt groaned, “Oh man. That is nasty looking.”
 
I was glad to see Matt finally unnerved.

     
The victim’s face was not recognizable due to the lumpy swelling from hundreds of bee stings.
 
It looked like a huge red beet, the kind that wins prizes at fairs.
   

     
“I don’t know how this could have happened,” I said.
 
“What was he doing here?”

     
“Are you sure it is a he?
 
Who could tell from that thing?”
 
Matt looked away from the awful sight.

 
    
I concurred that it was a hard spectacle to behold.

     
“You know that they will probably take that hive as evidence, or at least some of the frames,” said Matt.

     
I sighed.
 
“You’d better put another hive box together.
 

Take some frames with honey from the other hives.
 
Some brood, too, if they can spare it. Just save what you can.
 
I hope they don’t kill the Queen with their meddlin’.”
   

     
Matt pulled out his cell phone and started taking pictures.
 

     
I stared at him in silent annoyance.

     
“If Caleb is video-recording, then I should take pictures,” he argued, scanning the scene with his phone. “Here he comes.”
  

     
I looked over.
 
He was also carrying samples of dead bees.
  

     
“Yes, we better take pictures.
 
Just in case,” repeated Matt.

     
“In case of what?”

     
“You know – in case you get sued.”

     
“Sued for what?
 
I should sue that person’s family for destruction of my property.”

     
Matt assumed his superior lawyer’s look.
 
“It has been my limited experience that usually it is the property owner that gets the crap stomped out of him, in this case her, both in and out of court.”

     
“As if you have even tried your first case,” I snorted.
 
I looked at the body now being zipped into a black bag with plastic handles.
 
“I think that poor schmuck is the one who got stomped on.”

     
“Morning, Miss Josiah.
 
Got quite a mess here,” said Caleb, making notes as he approached me.
 
He was dressed in white coveralls and had his bee hat tied around his waist.
 
“Know what happened?”

     
I took my time replying.
 
Whatever I said was going into an official report to Frankfort, and Caleb had the power to make my life miserable.
 
“That guy was probably drunk or high and got the bright idea of stealing some hives.”

    
“Any possibility that these bees are Africanized and attacked without provocation?”

    
“You can test them if you like but
 
. . .” I held out my hand where several bees settled.
 
I poked them.
 
The bees merely scraped pollen into the pollen basket on their hind legs and flew off.
 
“They don’t seem too aggressive to me.
 
I think

these are all European bees.”
 
It was every beekeeper’s nightmare that their pure European stock would become compromised with African DNA, making the bees a hundred times more aggressive.
 
Instead of being stung ten times by honeybees, a person would be stung a hundred times and be chased for one thousand feet or more.
 
The problem was that Africanized bees looked just like European bees.
 
To protect myself against possible aggression, I always wore my suit into the beeyard until I could establish that the bees were friendly.
 
If they were, I usually stripped down to a pair of pants, long sleeved shirt and a veil.
 
Other times they were cranky and I kept the suit on.

     
Caleb wiped the sweat from his forehead.
 
“They look pretty gentle to me too, but I am going to check their DNA anyway.”

     
“Fine with me,” I said. “I’ll let you go about your business then.”

     
“Will call you if I find anything odd.”

     
“Sounds good, Caleb.”
 
I watched the inspector move towards my hives.

     
“Where is his car, Rennie?”
 
Matt used his pet name for me because I could recite Michael Rennie’s lines to the robot in
The Day the Earth Stood Still.
 
We share a love of old movies.
 
It was how we met.