The Bee Tree

About this book

The Combs have kept bees in Sourwood Hollow for a hundred and fifty years, not in tidy apiaries but the old way, hunting the wild colonies, lining the bees back to their trees, and taking swarms from the great bee tree that stands at the head of the hollow and has never once, in living memory, been empty. The last keeper of the bees and of the Swarm Book, the register in which every swarm, every hiving, and by long custom every death in the family that was told to the bees, is recorded, was Nell's great aunt Ada, and Ada is dead now, and Nell, thirty six, who left the mountain young and keeps two thousand commercial hives on the move across three states, has come back to settle the place, sell the timber or not, keep the old bees or not, and go.