It is the new queen who is the bride today. The bee man is still in the orchard searching for her, pumping his bellows in a hazy landscape of fern and meadow grass and purple-tufted thistles. The bees grow sleepy as he checks the brood combs with his smoker, puffing the nurses and the workers to the edges of the frames, looking for the sleek, auburn body of the young queen. When he finds her he’ll mark her with a drop of nail polish, a little red drop on her back. She’ll take her bride flight, chased by the drones; then she’ll never leave the hive again. Like a bridesmaid in attendance, Sylvia painted the hand-me-down beehive herself, a green gabled house positioned under the semaphoring trees.

Upstairs, Ted sits on a chair in their bedroom, his hair dusted yellow with pollen, his forearms and collar sticky with propolis, his fingertips green-stained from mowing the lawn. He was up first thing, bringing the baby to Sylvia in the bed before she even awoke, then off to the Taw at dawn light with his tackle in his old army rucksack. He’s been outside all morning as she’s been in, scouring the house until the bee man arrived. The bee man brought the swarm humming furiously inside a vibrating box.

Ted is holding ice cubes wrapped in a tea towel to his purpling lips. His forehead is lurid, lumpy and hot, his eyes swollen almost totally shut. When he shifts his weight in the chair, dead bees fall out of his loose cotton shirt and skitter crisply on their velvet over the gray floorboards. They stung him six times, swarming his head. They chased him as he ran, the bee man pumping his smoker uselessly, trying to mask the banana scent of fear.

“We smell of smoke,” Sylvia says quietly, as she sits down on the edge of the bed beside Ted’s chair, propping Nicholas into a sitting position among the pillows. Nicholas sucks his fat hands and a large wooden bead.

The yeasty aroma of burnt twine and peanut shells drifts from their clothes and their hair. Sylvia scans her husband’s mottled, darkening face. He looks wretched, a miserable Cyclopean monster. The curtains exhale behind them at the open windows.

“I thought you said they didn’t like white,” Ted mumbles, his mouth swollen, his voice pulpy and slow.

“That’s what the rector told me. He said they’re attracted to black. But you didn’t put on the hat. Did you think you could keep them away with that napkin?”

“Not a napkin. My handkerchief,” he answers gloomily.

“Even so.”

They listen as Nicholas smacks his toy. Sylvia opens the tin of baking soda with the edge of the spoon and knocks a few clumps of powder into the cup. She leans forward toward the bedside table, pours a bit of water from the drinking glass there into the cup.