Kirsten Eve Beachy

Read a bit of my work over at The Tusculum Review.

On the twelfth day of the first year of the Obama administration, as the nation’s economy continued to crumble, we opened our beehive and found the colony dead.

Through most of the winter, we left the bees alone so as not to release the heat they generated huddled between their walls of honey. But when the temperature rose into the 50s, the bees could bear the air enough to take brief cleansing flights, and we dared to open the hive for a few minutes. We had plenty of unseasonable warmth this year—sunny days when the bees flew to gather maple sap, risen during the freezing night, draining through holes the sapsucker drilled through the bark. No bees were flying the afternoon we opened the hive, but we assumed they’d finished their business in the warmest part of the day. A few dead bees lay scattered below the hive, evidence of the cleaning efforts of the workers.

Read on.