Benji and the Beekeeper's Garden

Mr. Solomon had kept bees at the end of Cliffside Lane for thirty-two years.

He was not a commercial beekeeper. He kept three hives for the honey and for the specific pleasure of bees, which he had developed in an unlikely way after reading a book about them in his forties and finding himself unable to stop. The neighbourhood had come to terms with the bees many years ago — they were gentle bees, as bees went, and Mr. Solomon’s garden produced the best flowering plants on the road, and if you wanted honey you could knock on his door and he would sell you a jar at a reasonable price.

Benji was at the garden wall on Monday morning, Tuesday morning, and Wednesday morning.

He was not alarmed. He was the way he was when something needed attention but was not a crisis: still and patient, pointing.

“The bees are dying,” Nadine said, on Wednesday afternoon, after she had climbed on the wall — Mr. Solomon’s gate was open and she had gone in to look — and observed the hives. “Not all of them. But there are dead bees in front of the hive that shouldn’t be.”

“Bees die,” Clevie said. “That’s normal.”

“Not like this,” she said. “These are worker bees. In the afternoon. The pattern isn’t right.”

“How do you know what pattern bee deaths follow?”

“Miss Gloria has a flowering herb garden. The bees come to it. I’ve been watching bees for three years.” She looked at the wall. “Something is poisoning them.”

“What could poison bees?”

“Pesticides. If someone sprayed something nearby — something the bees are carrying back to the hive—”

“Mr. Solomon doesn’t spray,” Omar said. “He keeps an organic garden. That’s the whole point.”

“His garden, yes,” Nadine said. “But bees don’t stay in one garden. They range. Whatever they’re finding, it’s somewhere within—” she thought “—half a kilometre.”

“That’s a lot of Cliffside,” Clevie said.

They went to Mr. Solomon. He was eighty-one and had been watching his bees for thirty-two years and he already knew they were dying. He was sitting in a chair in the garden looking at the hives with an expression that Nadine recognised from her grandmother’s face when something she had tended was suffering.

“I know,” he said, when they told him what they’d found. “I’ve been watching since Sunday.”

“Something nearby is being sprayed,” Nadine said. “Do you know what’s changed in the area?”

He thought. “The empty lot at the corner. Someone has been cutting it. They started Monday last week. Using something to kill the weeds that came back.”

“What something?”

“I don’t know. A spray. You can smell it when the wind comes from that direction.” He looked at his hives. “I didn’t connect it immediately. I should have.”

“You connected it now,” Omar said. “That’s what matters.”

The person cutting the empty lot was a man hired by the property’s owner to clear it for sale. He had used a commercial herbicide. The herbicide was permitted. It was also, applied at the volume and concentration he had used, harmful to bees within a significant radius, which the instructions warned against if there were hives nearby, which there were.

He had not known about the hives.

Mr. Solomon had not known about the spraying.

Nobody had told anyone anything, because nobody had known anyone else was nearby in a relevant way.

This was the kind of problem that was not malice but consequence, and Sergeant Peart was not needed for it. What was needed was a conversation between the property owner’s agent and Mr. Solomon, which Nadine facilitated by walking to the empty lot, introducing herself to the man with the spray equipment, and saying: “There’s a beekeeper at the end of the road. Did you know?”

He did not know. He stopped spraying. He used a different method on the remaining weeds. He also, because he was a reasonable man and felt bad about it, helped Mr. Solomon source a supplement the hardware store stocked for stressed hives.

The bees did not all recover. Some were already too far gone. But the hive survived, and by the following month it was producing again, and Mr. Solomon said it was recovering.

He gave the three children a jar of honey each.

He gave Benji nothing because Mr. Solomon was not sure dogs could eat honey safely and he was not going to take risks with the dog who had brought him help.

“He can’t eat it anyway,” Clevie said. “He doesn’t eat sweet things.”

“How do you know?”

“I tried giving him sugar cake once,” Clevie said. “He looked at it like I had offered him a personal insult.”

Mr. Solomon, who had kept bees for thirty-two years and knew something about creatures with dignity, found this perfectly understandable.