the worker returns with two damp lumps of colour packed into the hairs of her hind legs. these are the corbiculae, the pollen baskets, and they tell the bee-keeper what is in flower without his needing to walk the garden.
a board set white beneath the landing slot catches the ones she fumbles. a season's losses, swept up on a sunday, make a small palette of where the colony has been. courtyard clover is a particular rose; kitchen mint's late flowers an unmistakeable lilac. ivy in november is the colour of old bronze.
not honey. pollen is the colony's bread — protein for the brood, fed by nurses to the larvae and never sold. compare the comb, which is sugar; and the propolis, which is glue. all three from the same small body, in the same afternoon.
— swept the board, sorted by colour. left me with a chart i could not name. — k.r.