Title Company

It was 1986 when a friend first cracked the propolis and lifted the lid of a Langstroth hive for my benefit. A docile European species rose in a startled cloud. Gentle and unafraid, their keeper held the frames up and located the queen. I was gazing, entranced, into a winged and buzzing kaleidoscope when a single worker zipped out toward a meadow. I followed her trajectory — a line of light connecting bee and hive. For a moment, fields glimmered, cross-hatched with tangled threads of sunshine.

I visited more apiaries, the gold-vector hallucination returning with each fresh encounter, each field of waving flowers. My compulsion to write fiction got lost in the weeds until 2012, when honeybees were making headlines and colony collapse disorder fuelled panic about pollination and food production. Channelling the sense of awe during those hive experiences, I came up with the story of a...