Sometimes I lack faith.
I am not always sure bulbs planted in fall will come up in spring, that potato vines mounded to their tips will push toward the sun, that peas legging up the trellises out back will produce enough to make a nice risotto.
And I basically dismissed my husband when he dropped the newspaper on the table one Friday morning a month ago and said he just knew we would have bees again, that writing about my empty hive had ordained it.
For three weeks, I felt jealous when friends collected wild swarms or met the apiarist out on the highway to pick up store-bought bees.
And then an e-mail came. There was a swarm on a crab apple tree near the sidewalk. Could someone come get it?
I raced across town with my bee gear and acted brave as I clipped the branch and placed the swarm in a cardboard box.
Back home, I poured the bees into the waiting hive and called a beekeeper with panicked questions about how to make sure they stay.
“You’ve done the best that you can with what you have,” he soothed.
A week in, they seem orderly, returning to the hive with fat packs of pollen on their legs. I can hear them humming gently inside the box and I believe that for now, they are mine.
Dana Coffield: dcoffield@denverpost.com, 303-954-1954 or
