Beekeeper

The hive’s pitch rises a quarter tone.

Most wouldn’t notice,
but she stops mid-step in the garden path,
sets down her smoker.

That high shimmer in the collective voice:
not anger, not alarm,
but democracy in action.

Forty thousand votes cast in wingbeats,
the sound of consensus building
like a storm inside the cedar walls.

They’re leaving.

Not today, maybe not tomorrow,
but the decision hums through the frames.

Scouts have found something better:
a hollow oak, a barn wall’s secret space.

The queen, heavy with next year’s children,
doesn’t know yet she’ll fly soon,
but the workers have already begun to thin her down,
their feeding dance gone sparse.

Twenty years back, her first swarm caught her off guard:
one morning the air went golden, biblical,
her bees pouring skyward like smoke reversing.

Farmer Jakob next door found her crying by the empty hive.

“Listen better,” he said, not unkind.
“They tell you everything, just not in words.”

Taught her the difference:
contentment like a cat’s purr,
anger like a dental drill,
and this fever pitch,
this racing heart of colonies dividing.

She opens the hive, gentle,
already knowing what she’ll find:
queen cups being built,
royal jelly gleaming,
the next monarch growing in secret.Nothing to stop now, only to witness:
this ancient referendum,
this winged parliament
voting with their bodies
for the future they’ve already begun to fly toward