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

She was furious.

I’d never seen her furious. She went white, then red, then white again.

“You’re allergic,” she said. “You’re anaphylactic, and you’ve been standing in my bee yard for four days.”

“Three and a half.”

“You could have *died*.”

“I didn’t.”

“That’s not the point!”

“Clara. You needed somebody. I was somebody.”

She sat down in the grass across from me. She was shaking.

“My husband had a heart attack in a bee yard,” she said. “Eight years ago. In Oregon. I was in town buying jars. When I got back, he was lying between the hives. I spent the next year fighting his life insurance company because they said he’d had a ‘pre-existing condition’ he’d never been diagnosed with. I’m not going to watch it happen again.”

“I’m not your husband.”

“No,” she said. “You’re a stubborn alfalfa farmer who doesn’t have the sense God gave a goose.”

I didn’t argue. She wasn’t wrong.

The next morning, I drove to an allergist in Salt Lake City. Ninety minutes each way.

I’d heard about a treatment called venom immunotherapy. Shots of tiny amounts of bee venom, increasing every week, until your body learns not to panic. It takes months. Sometimes years. My insurance company covered most of it after two phone calls and one very long form.

I started the shots that week.

I didn’t tell Clara.

I kept helping her rebuild, but from the tractor, from fifty feet away, moving pallets and boxes and stacks of supers, while she worked the hives. We talked over the noise. We ate lunch on the tailgate.

She stopped being angry somewhere around the end of June.

She started looking at me differently somewhere around the middle of July.

In August, on a Friday afternoon, the allergist in Salt Lake called with the results of my latest test.

“Mr. Collins,” she said. “I want you to do something for me tomorrow.”

“What?”

“Go get stung,” she said. “Under supervision.”