Ninety-six hives, and eleven without a drop of honey

The ninety-six hives stood on the north slope of Sorbeda, in four rows of twenty-four, and Elsa Trigo had eighteen days left to decide what to do with them. The transhumance lorry was coming up on the 30th.

She arrived at seven in the morning in her overalls, her smoker packed with green pine cones. She had never laid eyes on the apiary. Her uncle Ovidio Trigo, her father's brother, had died in February in a hospital in Ponferrada, and she found out through a solicitor's letter that opened with "dear heir" and went on with a list of assets in which the hives took up a single line: ninety-six Langstroth hives, Sorbeda site, in production.

In production. That was what it said.

"I've got the key to the gate, but I know nothing about bees," said Amaro Cid, the district vet, a man of sixty with his boots caked in dry mud. "Your uncle wouldn't let anyone near this place. Not even me."

Elsa lit the smoker and started on the first row. She opened number one. Full frames, gentle bees, the queen marked in the blue of the year she belonged to. She opened two, three, four. Capped honey right to the edge, the weight just so, the colony strong and no trace of varroa, the mite that wrecks an apiary in two seasons. By the seventh she was moving fast, with that silly gladness of finding a job well done by someone you never got to meet.

"They're better than mine," she said. "The man knew what he was doing."

Amaro did not answer. He had stayed two steps back, hands in his pockets, looking at the fourth row.

Elsa carried on. Eight, nine, ten. In eleven she found a patch of drone comb that would need cutting out, and she noted it in the notebook with the pencil she kept behind her ear, the way her father did. She was halfway through the second row when she noticed the first odd thing: number twelve had no traffic. On an August morning, at half past nine, a hive in production has a queue of foragers going in and out of the entrance like a small airport. Twelve was still.

"This one's lost its queen," she said, more to herself than to the vet.

She lifted the roof. Nothing hummed. She took off the crown board and stood holding it for longer than she needed to.

There were no frames inside.

In the space where the ten brood frames should have been there was a pale wooden box, fitted to the millimetre, filling the whole volume of the hive. It was not a box knocked together in a hurry: someone had made it to measure, the corners jointed in dovetails and the seams sealed with cappings wax, the same white wax the bees use to close the honey. It was clean. No dust, no cobwebs, none of the propolis varnish that coats everything inside a living hive.

Elsa lifted it out with both hands. It weighed little, two and a half kilos at most, and as she moved it something shifted inside with the sound of a sack of rice.

"Amaro."

The vet took his time coming over. When he did, he did not look at the box: he looked at the row.

On the lid, branded into the wood, were two numbers separated by a stroke.

1 / 11

Elsa set the box down in the grass and went hive by hive along the second and third rows, lifting roofs, not even bothering with smoke, counting. Fifteen was still. Twenty-three. Thirty-one. Every one that did not hum held the same pale wooden box sealed with wax, and every one carried its number branded on the lid: 2 / 11, 3 / 11, 4 / 11. By the time she finished the third row she had all eleven located and written down, with the exact position of each, and her hands smeared with old wax.

She sat down on the ground with her back to the apiary and looked at box number 1, still lying in the grass.

"You knew they were here," she said.

"I knew there were eleven hives your uncle wouldn't let anybody touch," Amaro Cid answered. "The boxes I've never seen in my life."

Elsa took the knife out of her overall pocket. Cappings wax gives without a sound, like a warm candle; it cuts in a single pass and does not crumble. She ran the blade along the four seams, turned the box round and lifted the lid.

Inside there were no papers, no money, none of the things she had imagined in the four seconds it took her to open it.

There were seeds. Hundreds of small seeds, brown and dry, and on top of them, folded in four, a nursery card written in pencil in a large square hand, the same hand as the notebook Elsa would end up finding two days later.

The card gave a name and a year: *Winter pear of Sorbeda. 1994.*