Free The Sound of Language by Amulya Malladi Page B

“But they know me,” he says when I scold him, and they do. Our bees know us.
    This morning we found more brood, more pollen, more nectar, and more bees. The queen has worked hard in the past month; our colonies have become thicker, richer, and stronger.
    Sometimes I sit and watch the bees on the frames and every time there is precision. The cells are always one shape and the same size. I am amazed at their precision. So many bees working together in beautiful harmony makes me a little melancholy. Do they all want to be doing what they are doing? Are there bees that don't want to work so hard? I wonder about the personalities of the bees and I wonder if there is a rebel bee, one that wants to run away and find a new life.
    A fter so many years of nothing to look forward to, the excitement Raihana felt about the bees was new, and fresh, and scary.
    Even Layla had remarked that Raihana seemed happier. “What's going on?” she asked.
    They were shopping in Kvickly while Kabir was with Shahrukh at home. It was a beautiful day and neither of them complained about having to bicycle to the supermarket and then ride back with all the groceries.
    “Nothing,” Raihana said.
    “Something is,” Layla said, picking up two cartons of Aria letmoelk , skim milk.
    “We need cream too,” Raihana said and Layla grabbed a half-liter carton of thick cream, which they ate with sugar and strawberries in the warm evenings.
    Layla looked at Raihana suspiciously. Raihana was thrilled about her praktik but she couldn't share it with Layla, who might misunderstand. Every Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday, Raihana felt she was on an adventure when she went to the Danish man's house —she never knew what new thing she would learn about the bees.
    There were twenty-six boxes in the Danish man's backyard, neatly arranged in rows of three. Raihana assumed that the Danish man's dead wife had been responsible for this because he did not seem the neat kind.
    According to the black diary Raihana had found in the garage, as the colonies grew, they would place more boxes on top of the existing ones to give the colonies more room to grow. More boxes meant more honey and she couldn't wait to look into the boxes and see what was happening.
    ·   ·   ·
    The Danish man seemed confused when they reached the bees, as if unsure of what to do. He pulled out a lighter from his tool belt and lit the fuel in the smoker and shut it, shaking the smoker to kill the flames so that only smoke poured out. Raihana had looked inside the smokers in the garage and had found small pieces of sackcloth inside. She noticed that the smoke coming out of the smoker was cold.
    “Always use a smoker,” he told Raihana as he pumped the handle. “Smoke makes the bees think there is a fire, so they eat as much honey as they can and then they don't sting.”
    “Because the bee stomach is full with honey?” Raihana asked.
    “Yes, they don't sting when their stomachs are full,” said Gunnar.
    He put everything he had brought from the garage on an old wooden table that stood for this purpose in the backyard. The table was worn, the wood weathered from harsh winters and steady Danish rain.
    He had brought a wooden base with a mesh-like frame and put that on the ground. He picked up the first brown box full of bees and set it on the wooden base.
    “Never put the box with the bees on the ground,” he said but didn't explain why. Below the box was another board, a wooden base, in which lay several dead bees.
    Bees were everywhere, Raihana noticed. They were crawling out of holes in the boxes and going back in. The sound of the bees was almost overwhelming, like being in the middle of a busy supermarket where everyone was speaking Danish in loud whispers.
    The man bent down and looked at the dead bees and sighed.
    “Many have died,” he said. “I am too late in feeding them. I should've given them sugar.”
    Raihana was not sure if he was talking to her. She didn't understand