A Recipe for Bees by Gail Anderson-Dargatz

ranch. Even Karl, who invited these men into his house, wouldn’t have expected them to walk by his side.
    Years before, while they sat fishing across from reserve lands, Manny had told Augusta stories about Indians, stories about the drunks—like Tommy Joe and Jack Moses, who’d gotten themselves pie-eyed and into a fight in 1919. Tommy Joe took after Jack Moses with a shotgun and ran him down to the river, where Jack threw himself into the water, hoping to escape by swimming the South Thompson. When he came up for air, Tommy Joe shot him in the head, killing him. Tommy Joe got just three years in jail for his crime. They were both Indians, after all. If Jack Moses had been white it would have been a different story.
    The Indians had different manners, different expectations about how things were done. When Augusta was a child, Indian women came round to the farm selling huckleberries and blueberries from large baskets decorated with designs that looked like trees or deer faces or feathers. The berries were warm and juicy from the horse ride down the trails on hot summer afternoons; they stained Augusta’s hands purple and tasted of heaven. Sometimes the Indians opened the gates and walked right through the farm, with their horses and dogs, on their way up the mountain to pick those berries, following old Indian trails. They seemed to have no regard for private property. Manny let them get away with it for the most part. The one time he did get all fired up and stood at the gate in the way of a group traipsing through the back pasture, it came to nothing. The Indians stopped a moment and stared at him, then formedtwo streams of bodies that went around him, engulfing him briefly before passing on.
    The young minister at Augusta’s church in Courtenay gave sermons, now and again, on the damage his white grandfathers had inflicted on the Natives, how they forced Indian children into residential schools, splitting families and forcing whole generations into dependency, and how the church now had to support the Natives’ fight for the land stolen from their forefathers. “What are they ballyhooing about?” Rose said after one of these sermons. They were all having tea and sandwiches, as they usually did after church, in Augusta and Karl’s apartment. “They don’t have to pay taxes, they get welfare. They’ve got a house on the reserve if they want it. More than I ever got. I had to work for what I got. And look at me. No house to show for all that work.”
    “We did take their land,” said Augusta.
    “I didn’t take anything from them. Do we have to go on paying for the mistakes people made a hundred years ago? They should be thankful the government treated them as well as they did.”
    Augusta had half agreed with her at the time, though now, as she made tuna sandwiches for lunch beside Rose, she thought how that kind of thinking made her no better than a hive of senseless bees, acting on instinct, buzzing angrily about, protecting their honey even as they robbed other hives. A hive was so like a nation in miniature, complete with customs officials and border guards. Augusta could pick a guard bee out by its authoritative stance. It sat back on its haunches, on its four back legs, and raised itsfront legs and antennae to scrutinize every bee passing through the tiny entrance to the hive. The guard bees could tell their nestmates from bees of another hive by scent and by behaviour. Each hive had its own customs; different races of bees had different dialects to their dance language. Often bees from other colonies were simply stonewalled, prevented from entering a hive by guard bees blocking the entrance with their bodies. If a wasp tried to get in, the guard bees
shimmered
, vibrated back and forth very quickly, to intimidate the foreigner. If the invader was an ant, they fanned their wings and showed their behinds to it, kicking at it. If the threat came from a mouse or skunk, or even a human, the bees flew