I’m Allergic to Bees. Deathly Allergic. So Naturally I Agreed to Spend the Summer Helping the Beekeeper Next Door Save 2 Million of Them

The doctor at the emergency room in Logan, Utah, was very clear.

“Mr. Collins. Next time, you might not make it to the hospital.”

That was two years ago. One bee. One sting on the back of my neck while I was mowing. Eleven minutes later, my throat closed up. My neighbor drove me to the ER at ninety miles an hour while I turned blue in his passenger seat.

Three days in the hospital. A bill my health insurance mostly paid. Two EpiPens in my pocket from that day forward.

I’m Asher Collins. I’m 48, divorced, and I grow alfalfa on two hundred acres in Cache Valley, in northern Utah.

I’m not afraid of much.

I’m terrified of bees.

So when I tell you that I spent the whole summer of last year inside a field of two hundred and forty beehives, you’ll understand that something unusual had happened.

The something was named Clara Fenwick.

She’d bought the old Hansen farm next to mine in March. Widowed, fifty, from Oregon, with eleven years of commercial beekeeping behind her and two hundred and forty hives on the back of a flatbed truck.

I waved to her from my tractor in April.

I talked to her over the fence in May.

In June, a freak hailstorm came over the Wellsvilles, and in twenty minutes, it smashed her hives flat.

I found her in the field the next morning, standing in the wreckage, surrounded by a cloud of two million angry, homeless bees.

She turned around and looked at me.

“Asher,” she said. “I need help. Today. Can you lift a hundred pounds?”