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

So on a Saturday morning in August, I sat in a chair in the allergist’s office with a nurse, a doctor, an IV line in my arm, a crash cart in the corner and a single honeybee in a little plastic cup.

Clara was in the waiting room.

I’d finally told her the night before. She hadn’t said anything for a long time. Then she’d said, “I’m driving.”

The doctor tipped the cup against my forearm.

The bee stung me.

I watched the clock on the wall. One minute. Five. Fifteen. Thirty.

A little red bump. A little itching.

Nothing else.

The doctor smiled.

“Congratulations,” she said. “You’re not cured. You’ll keep getting shots for three years. You’ll always carry the EpiPens. But your body isn’t going to kill you over one bee anymore.”

When I walked out into the waiting room, Clara was standing by the window with her arms crossed so tight she looked like a knot.

“Well?” she said.

I held up my forearm with the little red bump on it.

“One bee,” I said. “I’m still here.”

She looked at the bump. She looked at me.

Then she grabbed the front of my shirt and kissed me. In the middle of the allergist’s waiting room. In front of a man with a hornet sting on his nose and a lady with a toddler who said, “Mommy, why are they doing that?”

On the drive home, she was quiet for a long time.

Then she said, “Three years of shots.”

“That’s what the doctor said.”

“Every week.”

“Every week.”

“In Salt Lake. Ninety minutes each way.”

“I know.”

She looked at me sideways.

“I guess somebody’s going to have to drive you.”

That was a year ago.

Last week, we harvested the honey. Two hundred and forty hives, all rebuilt, all strong. We bottled it in her barn, with the door open to the mountains.

On the label, she wrote: *Fenwick & Collins. Cache Valley Wildflower Honey.*

“You put my name on it,” I said.

“You earned it,” she said. “You and your two EpiPens.”

That evening, we sat on her porch with a jar of the first honey and two spoons, watching the sun go down over the Wellsvilles.

A bee landed on the rim of the jar.

I didn’t move.

Neither did she.

We let her have a little.