Sergei's beehive

Sergeyich’s beehives are not merely equipment for producing honey: they are the homes of colonies he protects, studies and carries through wartime displacement. Their need for warmth, careful transport and a safe place to forage dictates his movements; in turn, the bees’ work gives him food, trade and a daily purpose. As the hives pass from his village to a forest campsite and onward to Crimea, they become the material center of a life repeatedly uprooted but rebuilt around their care.

Construction, Care, and Winter Survival

The hives are working homes that maintain their own warmth through the bees’ activity. Sergeyich explains that the interior stays at thirty-seven degrees, so the colonies do not need the shed heated. In winter, the bees cannot simply sleep through the cold: they keep working to maintain the hive temperature. This routine makes the hives at once shelter and a collective task, an arrangement Sergeyich understands through his experience as a beekeeper.

His care extends beyond keeping the colonies alive. He monitors their health, removes wasps, uncaps combs to extract honey, and gathers wax and bee pollen. He does not direct the bees’ internal social life; he considers their relations their own business, while watching for the loss of a queen or other danger. The distinction matters: the hives depend on his attention, but their life is not his to command.

Transport and a New Apiary

When Sergeyich prepares to leave his village, he plans the journey around the hives’ physical needs. He will close their entrances so the bees do not scatter, load the boxes onto a flatbed trailer, cover them with a tarpaulin against the rain and secure them with straps. Cool, rainy weather is suitable for travel: bumpy roads can agitate bees and raise the temperature inside a hive, creating a risk of overheating. He also packs jars of honey, which he regards as a durable form of value, more reliable than goods whose prices fluctuate.

At a forest campsite, the plan meets the limits of Sergeyich’s body. He parks beneath an oak and checks a hive, but when he tries to lift it from the trailer, pain and weakness force him to set it down gently. He cannot unload the boxes alone. Galya helps, taking much of the weight as they move the hives to their marked positions. They arrange six boxes in two staggered rows, with space between them so the bees have a view around the apiary. The precise placement turns an unfamiliar patch of forest into a workable home for the colonies.

The hives also make a new exchange possible. Sergeyich gives honey to Galya to sell at Nadya’s shop; when he cannot take enough groceries to equal its value, she extends him credit worth 560 hryvnias. Later, she pays cash in advance for further honey. A local beekeeper brings an extractor to the campsite, helps process a harvest of almost one hundred kilos, and asks only fifty hryvnias for fuel. The honey’s conversion into food and money restores practical stability, while the hives themselves remain the basis of Sergeyich’s livelihood rather than simply a commodity.

The Apiary as Home and Work

Settled beside his hives, Sergeyich comes to imagine a peaceful spring life under the sun and trees, near people who are sometimes friendly and always close to the bees. The colonies keep working while he eats; he sees their care as a reciprocal bond, since they ask for little beyond the attention and knowledge he has given them. Their buzzing becomes evidence of their health and, in his reflection, of his own presence. The apiary gives his days a structure that survives the move from home: tending, observing, gathering and exchanging.

Summer makes that relationship more visible. Sergeyich watches the workers and drones, the queens’ succession, the collection of nectar and pollen, and the wasps that try to enter the hives. When he sees guard bees drive drones away from food and out of the colony before cold weather, he compares the spectacle with human life and judges people by the standards he sees in nature. This is his interpretation of the bees’ conduct, not a claim that their society and human society are identical. Still, the hives provide a recurring vantage point from which he considers labor, dependence and survival.

Inspection, Loss, and Recovery

The hives’ route into Crimea brings them under official scrutiny. Ivan Fyodorovich tells Sergeyich that his bees were not cleared by the health and sanitation department when he entered the country, and that they may carry disease harmful to local bees. Officials examine all six hives and take one away for testing, despite Sergeyich’s explanation that he is preparing to leave. The removal interrupts his apiary and turns the bees’ possible health risk into a matter of state control.

After the hive is returned, Sergeyich checks it as soon as he wakes. At first the scene appears reassuring: bees come and go at the entrance, and he watches them closely. Later, he finds the officially inspected hive empty and silent. The bees have moved away from it, and he hears their buzzing elsewhere. He follows the sound and works to recover them, misting a swarm in a tree with water so its wings are too heavy for flight, then gathering the bees into a trap and returning them to the hive. The method is careful and directed toward keeping the colony together, not destroying it.

The hives’ story reaches its starkest contrast when Sergeyich later discovers a grenade and uses it against a hive associated with grey bees. The explosion leaves a crater where the box had stood. Against the repeated scenes of loading, arranging, inspecting and rescuing colonies, this destruction marks a decisive break: the hive, ordinarily the protected home around which Sergeyich builds continuity, becomes the site of an irreversible act. The bees’ lives and labor have sustained his attempts to make a home under wartime conditions, but that fragile order does not remain untouched by the violence around him.