I had waited over six months for these fragile winged, hairy legged, bug-eyed fur balls no bigger than the joint of a finger, to make their appearance into my life. Now, by strict order and reminder from Jimmy, WAM, my class instructors and every book I had read, I needed to step back and let them percolate. There was to be no peeking through the looking glass, no raising the roof, no removal of bars for three days. Seriously? Three days! 72 hours! 4320 minutes! This seemed impossible, but I understood that this was the most critical time of all. In the next three days, the future of the entire colony rested on the ability of these emigrants to form a bond, accept this empty box and the surrounding flora and fauna as home and liberate their new queen. There was a chance that they would hate her and leave her to starve in her cell. Or they could release her and smite her the moment she walked free. A third negative possibility was that they would abscond with her and swarm to a more desirable location. So here I was, once again playing the waiting game.

Being the warm, sunny month of April with the temperatures in the low sixties, I felt encouraged that the weather was on my side. I reassessed the environment and breathed a little easier viewing the flowering tulip trees, sprouting dandelions, and tiny-leaf laden blackberry bushes. I had planted hundreds of sunflower and vegetable seeds to promote pollination, but found I was losing the battle to the ever presence of sneaky grey squirrels who were just as intent on digging up the seeds as I was planting them. I had also added a small bird bath near the hive entrance to serve as a closer watering hole. I stewed over the activity or lack there of, that was hidden behind closed hive doors and twiddled my thumbs.

By day four I was chomping at the bit but also scared as hell. I had requested Jimmy’s presence so that I would have a shoulder to cry on if things were bleak. We approached the quiet hive that showed no signs of life. I looked at Jimmy with puppy dog eyes and said, “I think they left. I don’t see one single bee.”  My heart was breaking.

“Don’t be discouraged,” he countered. “Just because you can’t see anything doesn’t mean there is nothing going on. Take a deep breath and open the lid.”

I exhaled the swallow of air I had been holding, gulped another and lifted. Nothing. Not one honeybee moseying along the inside cover. My pained eyes pleaded with Jimmy’s.

“Keep going,” he encouraged. “This part can be bee-free. Remove the bars on either side of Rosie’s cage and let’s see if she’s there.” Cautiously removing the two adjacent bars, I perceived a low-pitched hum. Buoyed by the sound, I raised Rosie’s bar slowly and found the cage empty. My eyes grew to the size of frisbees as I turned to Jimmy and exclaimed, “She’s gone!”

“That’s good!,” he reminded me while smiling. “Can you hear the bees? They’re in there. Now we have to find Rosie and make sure she’s alive.”

I tentatively continued my excavation. Beginning at the far end of the hive, I removed one empty bar after another. With each withdrawal, the humming and my confidence grew. But we were by no means out of the woods. Though a good sign, buzzing bees were of little value without the presence of a queen. I was mid-hive before I had my first face-to-face encounter. Hanging from the next bar were hundreds of gold festooning honeybees. They held tightly onto each others legs like acrobats on a trapeze, creating a living, woven chain. At the top, attached to the wood apex, was an inch or so of pure white, newly created comb. Each hexagonal cell was perfectly shaped and replicated. I lightly lifted the swaying bees and  grinned at Jimmy.

“Excellent,” he said. “But I don’t see Rosie.”  I calmly moved this bar to the back and kept digging. Each consecutive bar held more waggle-dancing bees and more glossy comb, but no queen. Running out of bars, I raised the next one and squinted. Immediately my eyes were drawn to a shimmying blue dot. There she was, waddling around her mini-kingdom, encircled by her entourage, so intent on her toil that she was oblivious to my intrusion.

“EUREKA!” I shouted.

“Great,” he said, “but we’re not home free yet.  We have to know whether or not she is laying. If there’re no eggs, the colony will crash.” Prudently I off-handed the frame, knowing his experienced eyes could detect far more detail than mine. He held the bar up to the sunlight while I bit my bottom lip and fretted that there would be no eggs. When his face lit up, mine exploded. “There!” he confirmed. “And over there! See them?” He lowered the frame to my eye level and pointed with his index finger to what appeared to me to be empty cells. “Look carefully, they are like tiny pieces of white rice, one per cell, standing up on end. And here, see all these little white curlycues?  They’re larvae!”

“I see them,” I squealed, nearly knocking the bar from his hand. “Yes yes, I SEE them! Now let’s get out of here!” And with a new found sense of urgency, I hurriedly replaced all of the bars and closed up the hive so that Rosie and her workers could resume their tasks.

Once Jimmy had gone, my Rocky Mountain high was overshadowed by a skosh of guilt. For you see, I had lied. I had never actually seen the damn eggs. I had really wanted to, but truth was, I hadn’t. And then as quickly as it had set in, the guilt began to recede with the memory of the pearly white larvae that had been curled up like croissants. And not just one, the comb had been polk-a-dotted with them.

So even though I had seen no eggs that day, I had witnessed a miracle. In a mere three days, Rosie had gone from being a captive queen to the reigning matriarch of a mushrooming community. And in the spring of 2014, a new circle of life had burst forth… right in my own backyard.