Bees

The bees in the novel are not merely a pastoral emblem or a mirror for human society. They are working, vulnerable communities whose needs shape Sergeyich’s daily labor and wartime displacement. Their self-heating hives, dependence on careful transport, and continued activity after Akhtem Mustafayev’s death make them fellow inhabitants of a world disrupted by conflict; their social order, in turn, gives Sergeyich a language for judging human behavior.

A living community and its keeper

Sergeyich describes the bees as able to keep their hives at thirty-seven degrees through their own activity, even in winter. They cannot simply sleep through the cold: they must remain active, just as someone must keep coal in the stove to warm a human home. The comparison connects domestic survival and apiculture without making them identical. The bees have their own means of keeping warm, but their survival still depends on the beekeeper’s care and on conditions beyond the hive.

That care is practical and sustained. Sergeyich watches over the colonies’ health, drives out wasps that try to occupy the hives, uncaps combs to extract honey, and collects wax and pollen. He regards the bees’ internal social arrangements as their own concern; he is not their ruler or adviser. His responsibility is to protect their health and respond to losses, especially the death or disappearance of a queen. The bees do not need his permission to live, but his work helps preserve the conditions in which they can do so.

Their buzzing also anchors Sergeyich’s sense of himself. In summer, he hears the ring of their wings as evidence both that the colonies are alive and that he remains present in the world. He sees himself not simply as an apiary owner but as the representative of the bees’ interests, although those interests are more direct than any human political cause: they gather nectar and pollen. The work gives his life meaning, while the bees themselves perform much of the labor and require no instructions from him.

Migration and a new apiary

When Sergeyich leaves home with his colonies, the move is a demanding act of animal care as well as a journey. He must close the hive entrances so the bees will not scatter, load the hives one by one onto a flatbed trailer, cover them against the rain, and secure them for the road. He packs jars of honey too, treating them as a portable resource whose value can help sustain him away from home. The weather matters: agitation on a bumpy road can raise the temperature inside a hive, and excessive heat can kill the bees. Cool, rainy conditions make this particular journey safer.

In Crimea, the landscape offers another apiary. Beyond vineyards and a forested rise, Sergeyich sees almond and fig trees and at least two dozen yellow, blue, and green hives. Akhtem’s hives stand in uneven rows among the trees; Sergeyich looks for a place to put his own nearby. The site becomes a place of refuge, but it does not erase the losses that brought him there. His colonies have arrived as displaced dependants, while Akhtem’s bees already belong to a landscape and a family whose circumstances have been transformed by the war.

The first morning in the new surroundings seems to promise peace. Sergeyich finds that the voices of birds, trees, and vines fill the landscape, and he imagines a life in harmony with nature and his bees. Yet this hope rests on attentive routine, not on a guarantee. He checks both his own colonies and Akhtem’s. A week after Akhtem’s funeral, he finds that the dead man’s bees are still working, apparently undisturbed by their owner’s death. The continuity is poignant precisely because it is not human consolation: the colonies go on with their lives, while Sergeyich must decide what responsibility toward them and Akhtem’s family entails.

Akhtem’s bees and the question of care

The sound of Akhtem’s bees draws Sergeyich into mourning. Sitting beside their hives with honey vodka, he thinks that Akhtem’s death was no accident and wonders why the bees did not protect him or prevent his departure. The questions reveal the limits of his attachment: the colonies are alive and present, but they cannot answer for political violence or restore their keeper. Their uninterrupted activity after Akhtem’s funeral does not mean that nothing has changed; it exposes the difference between a colony’s continued work and a family’s grief.

Sergeyich also fears what happens to bees when their human caretaker is gone. Thinking of Akhtem and his son Bekir, he recognizes that he has no son to inherit his apiary. His daughter, Angelica, takes no interest in bees, and he thinks of her as belonging to his former wife, Vitalina. If something happened to him, he imagines, his colonies might die from disease or parasites or simply be neglected. This fear makes the bees’ future a question of kinship and succession, not only of honey production. His labor has joined his livelihood to the colonies’ survival, but he cannot make that bond automatically pass to another generation.

The state’s scrutiny introduces another threat. Ivan Fyodorovich tells Sergeyich that officials will take one hive for a few days of testing, arguing that the bees were not cleared by the health and sanitation department when he entered the country and could endanger Crimean bees. The scene places the colonies inside the bureaucratic tensions of displacement: they are at once living organisms requiring care and objects subject to official control. Sergeyich’s concern is not abstract. A hive removed from its keeper and tested by authorities is part of a community whose well-being he has spent his life monitoring.

Social order, work, and analogy

At the entrance to a hive, Sergeyich watches worker bees return with pollen and sees guard bees drive out drones that have been weakened by lack of food. He describes the guards pushing them away from the entrance and onto the grass. One drone lies motionless and has turned grey. The scene presents colony life as a concrete process of feeding, exclusion, and seasonal survival, not simply a charming natural tableau.

Sergeyich interprets the expulsion through the language of human labor and class. Workers gather pollen and build combs; drones, in his account, consume without contributing, and the colony drives them out before cold weather so as not to waste honey and syrup. He wonders whether a worker bee can respect a drone. The analogy is his own reading of the scene, shaped by his tendency to compare the wisdom he finds in nature with human life, usually to humanity’s disadvantage. The bees’ behavior thus gives him a way to think about work and dependency, but it does not establish that bee society and human politics are the same. His reflection is a human interpretation of a colony’s seasonal behavior.

That combination of observation and projection is central to the bees’ narrative role. Sergeyich can spend half an hour watching activity at a hive entrance and feels at times that he recognizes individual faces. Yet the novel also gives the colonies needs that are not reducible to his ideas: they must remain warm, gather food, and be protected from overheating and disruption. They are companions and a source of meaning for him, but they are not present only to symbolize human endurance.

Recovery and destruction

Sergeyich’s care for the bees extends to a swarm settling on the trunk of a pear tree. As the insects warm their wings and buzz more loudly, he sprays them from below with water from a flask. The droplets weigh down their wings and quiet the swarm. He then uses a ladder and dustpan to gather them into a trap, watching until the remaining bees crawl in, apparently unwilling to be separated from their queen and the swarm. He covers the trap and carries the bees back toward an empty hive. The episode shows knowledge expressed through precise, patient handling: the goal is to recover a living colony, not merely to collect a useful substance.

The novel’s final violence sharply reverses that work. Sergeyich pulls the pin on a grenade and throws it toward a hive containing grey bees, then lies face-down as the explosion strikes. When he gets up, the third hive is gone; only a crater, broken wood, and a fragment of comb remain, while a bee flies past. The image leaves the destruction tangible and incomplete: the hive has been obliterated, but the passing bee registers life beyond the blast. Across the novel, the bees’ warmth, labor, migration, and vulnerability give material form to the struggle to preserve life. Their importance lies not in a claim that nature can repair human catastrophe, but in the care and responsibility their presence continually demands.