Sergeyich enters Crimea with his bees

Sergeyich enters Crimea with his bees after preparing to leave his damaged home and apiary under threat. The journey is both practical and uncertain: he loads the hives for safe transport, drives through the checkpoint at Chonhar, and continues toward Dzhankoy, carrying a household of living creatures into a place where he hopes to find refuge and his old friend Akhtem. The bees are not cargo in any ordinary sense; their needs dictate the route’s timing and conditions, while the border turns Sergeyich into a refugee in the eyes of others and makes his flight impossible to hide.

Departure and the decision to go

Sergeyich’s departure begins with urgency. He has only a few hours before dawn and expects the roads to become busier, so he hurries to prepare the apiary. He closes all six hive entrances, loads the hives wall to wall onto the flatbed trailer with Galya’s help, and straps them down. His belongings go into the Lada’s boot. Before leaving, he asks Galya to look around later and keep safe anything he may have overlooked, adding that he will come back. The uncertainty of that promise is already present in the haste of the preparations.

The move is also a matter of care for the bees. Sergeyich knows that a bumpy journey can agitate them and raise the temperature inside the hives, where the bees maintain a constant warmth of thirty-seven degrees; excessive heat could kill them. On this cool, rainy morning, however, the weather is suitable for travel. His practical preparations make the apiary’s survival the measure of whether the journey can succeed: the hives must be sealed, covered, and secured, not simply abandoned or hurriedly transported.

The empty road calms him, yet he keeps driving past possible quiet places where he might have stopped and set up the hives. Instead, the road’s desertedness seems to urge him farther onward, as though further must mean better. At a junction, a sign for Simferopol suddenly reveals that he is almost in Crimea. The realization brings a jolt of happiness. He remembers Akhtem, a Crimean Tatar beekeeper he befriended at a beekeepers’ convention years earlier, and takes the unexpected direction of his journey as a possible way toward that old connection.

Crossing the border

At Chonhar, Sergeyich passes the checkpoint relatively quickly, but the queue makes his displacement conspicuous. People in the cars behind him look at the battered, windowless green Lada, its licence plate, and his gloomy face. They call him a refugee, sometimes in whispers and sometimes aloud. With no windscreen or side windows, he cannot shut out either the words or the small stones thrown up by cars ahead. The word follows him like a swarm of irritating insects: an imposed identity that he cannot block out, even as he keeps moving.

He crawls past the queued cars, ready to stop and apologize if anyone challenges him for passing. No one does. Instead, he receives surprise and sympathy, and people look from his face to the licence plate as if it could account for his misfortune. The damaged vehicle thus serves as a public sign of what has happened to him, though it can communicate the cause only in outline. His passage is permitted, but he experiences the attention as another exposure of his vulnerability.

The Ukrainian border guard checks his passport, pauses at his address, and asks how long he plans to stay. Sergeyich answers that perhaps he will stay a month. The guard warns him not to pick up hitchhikers on the way to the Russian side, since doing so could bring a fine, then lets him proceed. Meanwhile, two customs officers examine the trailer and hives; they appear excited and somewhat frightened. When Sergeyich opens the driver’s door, they move away and turn their attention to a new dark-blue Volvo behind him. The contrast briefly shifts the officials’ scrutiny away from his precarious, conspicuous vehicle.

From Chonhar toward Dzhankoy

Beyond the Ukrainian checkpoint, Sergeyich remains tense. His fingers tremble on the steering wheel as he drives past people carrying carts, suitcases, bags, and backpacks in both directions. Their looks range from pleading to compassionate. After crossing the bridge, he sees the Russian border post marked “RUSSIA. DZHANKOY CHECKPOINT.” The distance between the posts sharpens into a thought about the transformer box at Chonhar, marked “18 KM TO THE RUSSIAN OCCUPIERS.” What seemed to be a short stretch of road now carries the weight of a political boundary and an occupation.

His destination is not the celebrated city of Sevastopol, though approaching it gives him pleasure, but the village of Kuybyshevo near Bakhchysarai, where Akhtem lives. The signs toward Sevastopol and Bakhchysarai make the journey feel less accidental: Crimea has become a route toward a particular person, not merely a place to which he has driven. The bees accompany him into this unfamiliar territory as both the reason for his careful travel and the living continuity of the life he has left behind.

The bees as livelihood and measure

The journey draws together Sergeyich’s practical expertise and his sense of responsibility. In winter, he explains to Pashka that bees do not truly sleep: to avoid freezing, they keep their hives warm, maintaining a temperature of thirty-seven degrees. Later, as summer slows the passage of time, the sound of their wings becomes proof to him not only that the bees are alive but that he himself is present. He sees his role as representing their legitimate interests, though their own purpose is simply to gather nectar and pollen. He monitors their health, removes wasps, uncaps the honeycomb, and collects honey, wax, and pollen; he does not claim authority over the bees’ internal life.

That practical bond also shapes how he understands human conduct. Watching worker bees drive drones out of the hive before the cold, he sees a natural order in which labor, food, and survival are closely joined, and measures human life against it, usually to humanity’s disadvantage. His flight with the hives therefore carries more than a livelihood: it carries the world through which he has made sense of work, mutual dependence, and survival. At the border, that world is literally fastened to a trailer, exposed beside a mutilated car and examined by officials.

Significance of the crossing

The crossing is a turning point from the threatened home toward an uncertain refuge. Sergeyich does not leave the bees behind or separate his escape from his work; he makes their safe transport central to the decision and to the journey’s conditions. The road, the trailer, the checkpoints, and the signs all shape his passage, while the hive’s internal warmth supplies an intimate counterpoint to a human world divided by borders and war.

The journey also complicates the idea of arrival. Sergeyich has reached Crimea’s administrative boundary and is heading for Kuybyshevo, but the word refugee clings to him, and his plan to stay only about a month leaves his future open. The bees’ presence makes his displacement both more difficult and more purposeful: he travels not alone, but with a fragile community whose survival depends on his judgment and care.