Bees here now

$2700 in bees delivered by a Russian who drove them up from Chico in the backseat of his truck (50 colonies in small boxes, wedged in) with 130 hives, bees flying, on the flatbed, a BobCat vehicle in tow. My bee man, Philip Smith, was impressed. "The vision," he said, eyes shining, "I wish I had a video."

One suburban mother with two children under eight in tow. A cell phone with a camera only they can operate. Four jars of honey for hungry bees.

Philip and I share the love of bees. For their pollination, their ruthless devotion to community, each being EveryBee, the queen the workers All.

It's about getting our hands sticky. It's about breaking out of classrooms to get our sensory experience by nature's design. It's about the invisible umbilical cord that holds us close to the hive, the fields. It's about learning the pathway home.

The boys and I spun open the tops of Ball jars, slathered honey by hand across the combs that would hang in deep frames side by side in cubicle hives. This tinkering isn't in the bees plan. We invade their sacred rhythm to support ourselves in the nourishment we provide them. Each uprooted colony hungry. "It's like landing them in a home with the refrigerator stocked," I told my sons.

Their hands so sticky. The honey, liquid gold, slid into upturned caverns and set. The bees flew around us, in our hair, our clothes. My boys quietly honored the bees on their foreheads, cheeks, wrists. "Look," they said. "Look. Isn't she beautiful?"

I took the last full frame to Philip who invited me to shake the boxes of bees into their new hives. I was not wearing veil or gloves. Philip's ease and expectation of peace is infectious. Hat tilted against sudden spring hailstorms. Clothes untucked. "Philip gets stung fairly often, and it doesn't seem to bother him," I told the boys.

"I've only been stung a few times today," he said. The boys snapped pictures on the cell.

I went into the hives, took the box full of bees, and shook it as instructed. They fell out in balls. They crawled into my sleeves. I stopped taking care not to touch them and rested with a more peripheral sense of their traffic. I shook them out from under my sweater. "This is a celebration," I told Philip. "My first time without protective clothing. Suburban mom turned beekeeper."

"I've never thought of you as a suburban mom," he said.

"You didn't know me before I kept bees," I said.

When dark clouds opened and let loose over the bee yard, I took my small swarm and drifted back across the fields, over the hill, and into our city. I called a friend on my cell to report the triumph: "I didn't even get stung!"

We took a cart at the grocery store and began our rounds. So much food in packages, plastic, paper. And then, the sting. Inside my underwear, a bee. On aisle seven, city girl took her reckoning. Or was it baptism on the wing?