longer than the others. marked, by some keepers, with a small dot of paint on the thorax — a year-colour chosen by custom: white, yellow, red, green, blue, in a five-year wheel. the dot tells the keeper how old she is. it tells the colony nothing they did not already know.
she lays. she does not rule. the colony has no sovereign but the brood-comb beneath her feet. her absence is felt within twenty minutes by everyone, although none of them have seen her — they read the room by the propolis she scents and by the small calm she emits.
when she dies the colony begins to make new queens from the same eggs that yesterday would have been workers — a decision the bee-keeper recognises by the long downward-pointing cells. only one will emerge whole. the rest are remembered, briefly, in the threshold bee's ledger of who has come and who has left.
— marked her blue in april. by june i could find her by the silence around her. — k.r.