Single-line bee design in gold

Set the oil can down on the third landing and watch them fold against the glass. Their wings flicker in quick, open strokes, like a sketch that has not yet decided on its outline. One lands on the brass rail beside your hand and cleans its antennae with its forelegs, unbothered, as though it has every right to be there. Your aunt's rule was never to move a swarm until it settled. You have no hive on this rock, only a cracked crate on the storeroom shelf and a jar of last year's honey you were saving for nobody.

Through the night the lamp turns and the bees cluster on the warm housing above it, a dark knot that brightens and dims with each sweep of the light. Twice you climb up with a torch and find some have drifted out past the gallery rail, dropping toward the grey water as if they mistook the sea for a meadow. You stay awake and count them back in, one by one, until the count stops making sense and you simply sit with them.

At first light the supply boat is grinding in past the skerry. You lower the crate on a length of rope, tip the swarm into it with a folded sack, and the whole cluster pours down like warm sand. In the log you write wind south-west, visibility good, bees aboard, and beneath it, because there is no one else to tell, that the keeper has finally kept something alive.