a small ball, rolled between the fingers, dark as molasses and sticky in the way that only resin is sticky. the bees collect it from the buds of poplars and pines and from any wounded bark they pass — chew it with wax, soften it on their hindlegs, and bring it home as a building material unlike any other.
they seal cracks with it. they varnish the inner walls until the hive resembles a small polished cabinet. a mouse that ventures in and dies there is sometimes embalmed in it — too large to remove, too decayed to ignore, so the colony entombs it where it lies. a kept hive, opened in winter, sometimes smells like a forest church.
the keeper saves the scrapings. a tincture made with it and dark spirit is kept in the kitchen for cuts and sore throats. compare the comb's sweetness with this bitter resin — the same colony makes both. ferried, anonymously, by the threshold bee when a house has small openings to close.
— rolled a ball of it for an hour and forgot what i was about to do. — k.r.