"Why do you want them?" Martha asked.
Caleb pushed a piece of potato around his plate. "I'm still figuring it out."
The silence afterward was not angry, but it was long enough for Caleb to feel all three members of his family looking at him. His mother finally nodded and passed him the bread. Thomas returned to discussing the tractor's hydraulic leak, yet Caleb could tell his father was filing away the answer in the same mental drawer where he kept unexpected expenses and weather warnings. The boy understood their concern. He simply wasn't ready to promise a result that existed so far only as a collection of questions.
Those questions had begun the previous autumn on a school trip to a fruit farm. The class had gone to learn about soil conservation, but the owner, a woman named Marian Sutter, had spent more time talking about the trees than the ground. The spring had been beautiful, she told them, white blossoms thick enough to make the orchard look dusted with snow. Yet at harvest some branches hung nearly empty, and she had pointed to the uneven fruit set as evidence that something was missing from the farm's yearly rhythm.
Caleb had asked about frost, water and fertilizer. Marian had answered each question patiently, then said the county extension office suspected the decline in wild pollinators was one part of the problem. She had described cold rain during bloom, fewer honeybee colonies within flight range, and the way farmers could do many things correctly and still depend on an animal so small they barely noticed it. Other students had been interested in the cider press and the doughnuts in the farm shop. Caleb had watched a single bee moving across a late flower and wondered how a creature that weighed almost nothing could decide the fate of a branch full of apples.
That night he borrowed an old library book about beekeeping. Then another. Then he used the school computer to read extension publications about pollination, queen health, diseases and the economics of renting colonies to orchard growers. Some of the terms meant nothing to him at first. The more he learned, the more he realized that knowing how to make honey was only a small part of knowing how to keep honeybees alive.
The valley had once supported dozens of backyard beekeepers. He found that out not from a database but from conversations, because conversations were how much of the county's history survived. People remembered rows of white boxes beyond fences, honey sold in jars at church bazaars, and old men who could identify a strong colony by the sound at its entrance. Then one keeper grew too old to lift boxes, another lost colonies over winter, someone sold the farm, and the boxes were left behind. It happened so gradually that nobody noticed the thing disappearing until an orchard owner started talking about what was no longer there.