the hive is a single body composed of many. counted from the outside it is one box. counted from the inside it is forty thousand decisions, none of them taken alone. the bee-keeper approaches it as one approaches a person who is asleep and dreaming a long-considered dream.
the upper supers hold the surplus — capped honey, pale wax. the lower box is brood, warmer by several degrees, and the temperature is not a coincidence but a labour. a hive that has stopped tending its own warmth is not yet a corpse, but it has begun to forget that it is a hive.
set near the garden wall where the courtyard clover comes through the stones. on still afternoons the kitchen mint two doors down receives visitors from here without being told. the threshold bee uses the entrance as a referendum.
— lifted the lid an inch. the smell of warm cathedral. set it back. — k.r.