Sergeyich’s flight to Crimea with his bees is both an emergency relocation and a journey into the unresolved absence of his Crimean Tatar friend Akhtem. After Galya warns that Sergeyich may be endangered by the consequences of Valik’s attack, he loads his hives into his damaged Lada and follows the road toward Crimea, seeking a place where the bees can live and forage in peace. At Akhtem’s home, he learns that his friend has been missing for twenty months; the journey’s intended refuge thus becomes a meeting with the human cost of the conflict.

Causes and preparations

Galya advises Sergeyich to leave for a while, suggesting places near Melitopol and promising to contact him if circumstances change. He is frightened by the prospect of driving his battered car in public, but acts quickly rather than wait. At the apiary, he closes all six hive entrances, and he and Galya load the hives tightly side by side on the trailer. His other belongings go into the car. He asks Galya to keep safe anything he may have left behind, adding that he expects to return; she reassures him that he will.

The practical work of moving the bees reflects the care on which their survival depends. Earlier, Sergeyich had explained that a hive must stay warm through winter: the bees keep its interior at thirty-seven degrees and cannot simply sleep through the cold. For this trip, he plans to close the entrances so the bees will not scatter, cover the hives with a tarpaulin, and strap them down. He intends to take about a dozen jars of honey as well. In his view, honey holds its value like money, regardless of whether it comes from buckwheat or mixed meadow plants. The cargo is at once living colony, livelihood, and a form of portable wealth.

The road to Crimea

Sergeyich leaves Galya behind and drives through the night. At a fork, the road points toward Donetsk or Melitopol; he has passed possible quiet places to stop, but continues onward. A sign for Simferopol suddenly reveals that he is almost at Crimea. The unexpected direction feels like good fortune, and recalls Akhtem, the beekeeper Sergeyich met at a convention years earlier and had recently tried to call. The peninsula has never been familiar territory to him, but he associates it with sweetness and imagines it as a welcome place for an apiary.

At the Chonhar administrative border, Sergeyich passes a queue of cars slowly, ready to stop and return to the back if challenged. People look at his damaged car, its licence plate, and his face. Some call him a refugee, a word that reaches him repeatedly and deepens his discomfort; the car’s missing windows leave him exposed to both pebbles kicked up from the road and other people’s remarks. The passage is not a triumphant escape. His movement depends on the tolerance of people in the queue, while the label of refugee makes the displacement publicly visible.

Beyond the bridge, Sergeyich reaches the Russian checkpoint at Dzhankoy. An officer directs him to park and asks why the car is in such poor condition. Sergeyich explains that someone smashed its windows and he has not yet replaced them. Later, in a small office, a civilian official examines his passport and asks where he is going. Sergeyich says Crimea, then explains that he has an address near Bakhchisaray: a beekeeper he knows. He stresses that he is travelling for the bees, so they can fly in peace and make honey, not simply for himself. The explanation gives the journey its defining purpose, but does not remove the uncertainty of crossing into a place under Russian control.

Arrival and Akhtem’s absence

At the address, a woman identifies herself as Aisylu. She tells Sergeyich that Akhtem is gone: he was taken, and twenty months have passed. Sergeyich freezes at the news. He had come expecting to find a fellow beekeeper and a possible place for his hives; instead, he discovers that the friend who drew him toward Crimea has been subjected to enforced disappearance. The delay and uncertainty surrounding Akhtem’s fate turn arrival into a revelation rather than a reunion.

Sergeyich explains that he had hoped to set his hives nearby so the bees could fly in peace, while he stayed with them in a tent. Aisylu responds with kindness, telling him of an apiary behind the vineyards near the mountain. When Sergeyich asks whether those are Akhtem’s bees, the conversation ties his own travelling colonies to the absent beekeeper’s continuing apiary. Aisylu then invites him to stay and place his hives next to theirs. She apologizes that Akhtem never mentioned him and offers lunch, though Sergeyich declines because he is concerned to let his bees out as soon as possible. She agrees to show him the way, offering to ride with him.

Refuge, work, and the meaning of the journey

The crossing brings Sergeyich to a possible refuge, but not to the intact friendship he had imagined. His bees can be settled beside Akhtem’s apiary through Aisylu’s invitation, even as Akhtem himself remains absent. The journey therefore joins practical shelter to political loss: the hives find a place, while their owner must live with news that has no resolution in the encounter.

The move also shows how Sergeyich’s life is organized around the colonies rather than treating them as possessions to be left behind. He sees himself as responsible for their legitimate interests, though their own purpose is simply to gather nectar and pollen. Their need for warmth governs winter care; safe transport requires closed entrances and suitable weather; on arrival, he is eager to release them. Later, when a swarm threatens to fly away, he uses water from a flask to wet its wings, then gathers the bees carefully into a trap and returns them to a hive. These acts place the journey within a larger pattern of attentive work: displacement changes where the bees live, but not the obligation to care for them.

That obligation also shapes Sergeyich’s judgments about human life. Watching bees evict weak drones before winter, he compares their use of shared stores with human ideas of work and entitlement, often finding nature’s order more comprehensible than people’s. During the flight, however, the contrast is not an abstract lesson: the bees’ ordinary needs—warmth, safe movement, pollen, and a functioning hive—make them both companions and the reason he keeps going. His escape reaches its destination only provisionally, through an offered place beside Akhtem’s bees, and remains shadowed by the unanswered fact of Akhtem’s disappearance.