It was a little like a library—but a vast, giant, monolithic kind of library, such as she imagined some race of titans might have built, to memorialize in solid metal the books that had told of their exploits. The plates were lined up in rows, one after another, with only a little space between. Her hands itched to pull one down from the shelf and read it, huge and heavy though they were.
From farther down the rows, Mrs. Griffin cleared her throat. She was standing near the back corner, arms folded, caught in a shaft of sunlight coming in through the nearby window. It gilded the gray hue of her dress and made the silver in her hair gleam like liquid fire. A few errant bees danced in the light around her, small sparks hovering over a larger, hotter flame.
Mrs. Griffin burned with impatience, alternately glaring at Penelope and at something else down the aisle to her right.
Presumably the swarm, judging from the unmistakable humming of hundreds of bees. Penelope wished she had the luxury of stopping and listening for a while. But even from half a warehouse away, there was no withstanding the force of Mrs. Griffin’s expectations.
Penelope walked forward, fighting the urge to kneel like a squire being knighted.
Then she reached the aisle and saw the bees.
Everything else fell away.
As she’d suspected, this colony of bees wasn’t a swarm proper: it had been once, but the bees had long since settled and made themselves a hive. A strong one, too, by the look of it—even from six feet away Penelope could make out the round domed cells of drone brood, and the smaller domes where baby workers were growing, and even a few rows of new honey capped off. Well-done of them, so early in the season.
They’d built fresh comb in between the leaden plates, fixed to the underside of the shelf above. Quite as if the bees had only wanted to memorialize their own work alongside Joanna Molesey’s. The shelf they’d settled on was chest-high, which was good, since if they’d colonized one of the higher areas it might have been more difficult to wrestle them out without damaging either the bees or the humans trying to help them.
Penelope stepped forward to get a closer look—and stopped as a hand seized her arm. She turned her head. “Is something the matter?”
“I thought...” Mrs. Griffin peered at her anxiously, then took a deep breath and dropped her hand from Penelope’s coat. The spot where she’d touched burned a little for a moment or two after, then cooled. “I’m sorry.”
Penelope tilted her head. “You were afraid I’d get stung?”
“Weren’t you?”
“Not particularly.” Penelope tilted her head. “But I’m used to bees, remember. I forgot that you weren’t.” She pulled out her smoker and her tinderbox. “Here’s what I’m going to do: I’ll start with a little smoke, to make the bees drowsy and willing to be handled.”
“You’re going tohandlethem?” Mrs. Griffin paled.
Penelope laughed softly. “How else did you plan for them to be moved?”
Mrs. Griffin huffed, but made no reply.
Penelope pulled out her tinderbox and lit the smoker. A few pumps of the bellows later and the funnel was puffing out clouds of sweet white smoke. Penelope brought it close to the colony and puffed at the main mass of bees; the colony clutched a little tighter and wriggled a little slower, as the smoke began to take effect. “It will be a minute or two yet,” Penelope said, and went to retrieve the wheelbarrow.
Mrs. Griffin was still there when Penelope returned, wheelbarrow trundling over the stone floor.
Penelope realized that she would have an audience for today’s work. “You don’t have to stand watch, if you don’t like. It’s going to take some time, I’m afraid.”
The printer grimaced. “I will not feel comfortable until these insects are gone,” she replied. “My people know where to find me when I am needed.”
Well, Penelope was used to working with touchy, easily irritated creatures. She puffed a little more smoke on the bees, though, just in case, and wished it would have had the same calming effect on Mrs. Griffin.
Perhaps the printer would be less anxious if she knew what Penelope was doing, and why. “First thing is to make the new hive a welcoming place,” Penelope began. She’d brought with her a round straw skep in two parts, like a bell with the top part of the dome sliced off. The inside of the larger part she’d rubbed with a little beeswax, which gave some traction to the straw coils and let the bees know this was a safe place for building comb. She set this on the bottom board and made sure it was steady and wouldn’t tip. Next she spread out a plain sheet on the floor—the better to spot you with, my dear—and brought out a handful of slender bars made of birch.
“The bees should be well and drowsy by now,” she said, turning to Mrs. Griffin. “I’m going to put on some gloves and a veil, since I’ll be working quite closely with the comb, but you should be quite safe as long as you stay still and quiet.”
Mrs. Griffin nodded once, sharply, and Penelope donned the rest of her bee clothes: sturdy gloves that disappeared into her coat cuffs, and a hat with muslin hanging down from the brim, tucked cozily beneath her coat lapels. “Right,” she said, and pulled out her knife. “Now we start cutting out the comb.”
She moved forward leisurely and carefully sliced the largest golden wedge away from the shelving. Bees clustered and hummed on the comb as she lifted it, but only one or two took flight in alarm.
Penelope turned the comb back and forth, peering closely. “Ah, there’s the queen—see that larger bee, in the center of the cluster? Her daughters are taking proper care of her.” Penelope couldn’t keep some of the joy out of her voice: bees followed their queen loyally, so moving her was the first step to moving the colony as a whole.
“Now we just... rearrange the furniture a bit.” Penelope knelt and rested the base of the honeycomb on the sheet, near the larger main section of the skep. A few quick strokes with a turkey feather brushed the bees from the comb to the sheet, where the workers quickly made a defensive clump around their dethroned queen. Meanwhile Penelope took out a large needle and thick linen thread, and whipstitched the upper edge of the honeycomb to a birch bar, being careful not to go through any brood cells. She then rested the bar across the top straw coil.
The honeycomb was now hanging in the center of the skep, just as it had hung from the underside of the shelf.
Penelope grinned. “Time to move our queen.” And, slowly, she slipped her gloved fingers into the mass of bees on the sheet.
