“How about this? The bee is more honored than other animals not because she labors, but because she labors for others. That was said by Saint John Chrysostom, Archbishop of Constantinople. He lived from 349 to 407 A.D.”

“That’s old,” Tyler said.

Chapter One

Meet Me, Holly McNee Jensen

Sullivan’s Island, South Carolina

February 2017

I was standing on our back porch hanging wet dish towels on a swing-arm gizmo, having just finished cleaning up after breakfast. Momma was headed back to bed, where she lived 90 percent of the time, ever since Leslie got married and moved to Ohio with weird Charlie.

I stepped outside and scanned the yard. Mother Nature was clearly losing it, one marble at a time. It was a Friday morning in the middle of February and eighty-something degrees. Eighty-something degrees! When I was a child on this sleepy island, I would’ve been wearing an overcoat, a hat, and maybe a neck scarf and gloves. I’d be shivering and waiting for the ramshackle school bus to stop at the corner and take me and a hundred other kids to Catholic school, where I would be made to tremble over the painful retribution to come for sins I had yet to commit. Now, people were all over the island, a parade of surfboards and coolers disappearing over the dunes, and on the beach, people half-naked, slathered with suntan lotion, running around like idiots.

Didn’t anyone know it was supposed to be winter? And no, I wasn’t cranky. There it was! Proof! Climate change.

Flowers that weren’t expected to bloom for another six weeks decorated our yard in huge clumps and stands of color. Daylilies, Shasta daisies, and purple smoke reared their pretty heads toward the morning sun and opened wide. My honey bees, who were supposed to be huddled in winter mode, getting their well-deserved beauty rest, had been sending out scouts from the hive all week long to see what was going on. They had to be very confused. I know I was. Something was seriously wrong.

But confused or not, my bees needed attention. I was going to check the hives for the early arrival of—what else—Varroa mites. I was super picky about hive health. These nasty mites were awful! All over the country, varroa mites, along with hive beetles, not to mention pesticides, were trying to put honey bees on the extinct list. If that happened, God forbid, the whole planet would be doomed to starvation. Maurice Maeterlinck said without honey bees, mankind only had four years and then, forget it. Doomsday.

I headed for the backyard shed where I kept my beekeeper suit. Normally, I wouldn’t see mites until late summer. But everything seemed so off kilter, I was just being extra vigilant.

“I’ll be back in a bit,” I called out to my mother.

“WHAT?” she screeched back.