The guard at the notch

Fiction. Hive mouths work like this. This colony is made up.

The notch was a gap the width of a pencil.

It was the whole border of the country. Everything that belonged passed here. Everything that did not tried here. The landing board was a worn lip of wood, hot to the touch by ten in the morning, hotter by two, I-4 heat even though the interstate was a mile of roofs away.

The guard stood in the shade of the upper edge and tasted the air.

She had been a nurse last month. Then a wax worker. Then this. Guard duty is not a promotion. It is a stage. You get the jaws for it and the patience, which in a bee is not a virtue. It is a setting.

Incoming foragers hit the board with their loads. She knew them by smell. The colony smell changes by the hour and still counts as home. She antennated. She let them through. A forager with lime on her, a forager with Bidens, a forager with the cream of cabbage palm still in June's last week. Each one a bill paid.

The afternoon stacked its clouds and then held them. No rain yet. Just glare. A screened porch across the fence hummed with a box fan. Someone's radio talked about traffic. The guard did not have traffic. She had the notch.

A bee landed that was the right size and the wrong smell.

Robbers look like workers because they are workers. They come from a hive that is hungry or greedy or both. They do not dance for a flower. They dance for someone else's comb. This one came in low, not heavy with nectar, too interested in the dark behind the guard.

The guard met her on the board.

They locked. Mandibles. Legs. A brief wrestle that threw a tick of sound off the wood. The robber tried to slip the edge. The guard had help in two seconds, because a fight at the mouth is a broadcast. Three of them piled on. The robber was not stung so much as held, bitten, rolled, until she broke and flew, and even then a guard followed her up a yard of air to make the point.

No one inside gave a speech. The queen was busy being a queen, which is eggs, not policy. The policy is already in the bodies at the door.

The guard returned to the notch. Her wing was nicked. She did not inventory the nick. She tasted the next arrival.

Heat baked the stand. A drop of water sat in a clay saucer the unnamed keeper had remembered to fill that morning, finally, after a week of bees at the neighbor's pool. A forager drank there, a legal sip, and came to the board with water, which is as welcome as nectar when the brood needs cooling.

Another stranger tried the notch at three, just as the light went flat with rain coming. Worse timing. The colony was already pulling inward. The stranger got the same answer: jaws, number, the board as a wall.

The rain arrived and hammered the lid. The guards stayed as long as the foragers were still coming. Then the board emptied. The notch became a dark gap. The guard stepped inside last, or nearly last, and took a place on comb that was not rest so much as a pause in a job that would be waiting at dawn, same heat, same wood, same country to keep.

Outside, steam lifted off the sand. Spanish needles in the side strip shone. The robber did not come back that hour.

She might come back tomorrow. That is why the notch has a bee in it.