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Автор Meredith May

MEREDITH MAY is an award-winning journalist, author, and a fifth-generation beekeeper. She spent sixteen years at the San Francisco Chronicle, where her narrative reporting won the PEN USA Literary Award for Journalism and was shortlisted for the Pulitzer Prize. She is co-author of I, Who Did Not Die and lives in San Francisco, where she keeps several hives in a community garden.

MEREDITH MAY

THE

HONEY

BUS

A Memoir of Loss,

Courage and a Girl

Saved by Bees

ONE PLACE. MANY STORIES

An imprint of HarperCollins Publishers Ltd

1 London Bridge Street

London SE1 9GF

First published in Great Britain by HQ in 2019

Meredith May asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

Ebook Edition © March 2019 ISBN: 9781474077095

For Grandpa

E. Franklin Peace

1926–2015

“So work the honeybees, creatures that by a rule in nature teach the art of order to a peopled kingdom. ”

—William Shakespeare, Henry V

Contents

1980

Swarm season always arrived by telephone.

The red rotary phone jangled to life every spring with frantic callers reporting honeybees in their walls, or in their chimneys, or in their trees.

I was pouring Grandpa’s honey over my corn bread when he came out of the kitchen with that sly smile that said we’d have to let our breakfast go cold again. I was ten, and had been catching swarms with him for almost half my life, so I knew what was coming next. He slugged back his coffee in one gulp and wiped his mustache with the back of his arm.

“Got us another one,” he said.

This time the call came from the private tennis ranch about a mile away on Carmel Valley Road. As I climbed into the passenger seat of his rickety pickup, he tapped the gas pedal to coax it to life. The engine finally caught and we screeched out of the driveway, kicking up a spray of gravel behind us. He whizzed past the speed limit signs, which I knew from riding with Granny said to go twenty-five. We had to hurry to catch the swarm because the bees might get an idea to fly off somewhere else.