I keep my bees in the city. The hives are in a nature preserve in South Austin, just east of Interstate 35, where the neighborhood is gentrifying like so many other Austin neighborhoods. New modern houses, half-built, tower over the single-story homes from an earlier generation. The apiary is next to one of these construction sites, down a narrow and pitted dirt road. For months I’ve watched the house being built—granite slabs stacked and leveled for the patio, iron girders outlining the empty shapes of windows. The xeriscape garden is mostly dust. Across the street, the vacant lot is full of firewheel and waist-high prickly poppies.
The bees aren’t easy to find without knowing their exact location. I follow the dirt path down a long hill, past a screen of trees, and emerge into a field where the landscape is dotted with a five-lobe purple flower whose name I don’t know. In the grass, about a dozen white beehives sit on a row of cinderblocks. Honeybees go in and out, visiting the flowers or the quiet creek, or, on the hottest days, hang in clusters like elderberries on the outside of the hive, waiting for a breath of cool air. It’s as if I’ve stumbled into a hidden world inside the city—from the street above, passersby would never suspect the bees were there.
beekeeping in 2020, six months into the COVID-19 pandemic. Nearly everyone who works for Two Hives Honey, the Austin company that now employs me, had some previous career. I had been a bookseller at Malvern Books, an independent Austin store specializing in experimental literature, and I had sent my first novel out on submission two weeks before Austin temporarily shut down nonessential businesses. In
