It started, as most things in my life do, with a book. A seventh grader returned a book about honeybees with a note in it that said "This is the best book in the library." I read it that night to see what the fuss was about, and then I read everything else we had, and then I started on the county library's shelf, and by Christmas of 1997 Robert said, "You know you could just get some."

So I did it properly. The county beekeepers' club runs a beginners' class every winter, eight Tuesday nights in a church basement, and I signed up for January. I took notes in a three-ring binder with tabs. (I am aware of how that sounds.) We learned the parts of the hive, the life of the colony, how to light a smoker, what to plant, and what can go wrong, which turned out to be quite a lot.

The hive is a Langstroth hive, the stack of white wooden boxes you've probably seen at the edge of a farm field. It's named for the Rev. Lorenzo Langstroth, who patented it in 1852. His great discovery was "bee space," a gap of about three-eighths of an inch. Leave the bees a gap that size and they'll walk through it. Make it smaller and they glue it shut, make it bigger and they fill it with comb. With the right spacing he could hang the comb on frames that lift out like files from a drawer, so you can look at every frame in the hive without tearing it apart. Every hive I've ever seen is built on his idea.

From the bottom up, mine goes: a bottom board, two deep brood boxes (where the queen lays and the bees keep their own food), a queen excluder (a grate the workers can squeeze through but the queen can't), the shallower honey supers on top, where the extra honey goes, and then an inner cover and a lid.

My bees arrived on Saturday, April 18, 1998, a three-pound package of bees in a wooden box with screen sides, humming like a refrigerator, with their queen in her own little cage. A member of the club named Buford Hawkins, who is 71 and has kept bees since the Truman administration, came over to stand next to me while I put them in. I believe he was there mostly to keep me from fainting. I didn't faint. I did shake a little. He said that was the right amount of shaking.

I wear a veil every single time, and a smoker goes with me to the hive. A few puffs of cool smoke at the entrance and under the lid calms them down. The way it was explained to us, the smoke covers up the alarm scent the guard bees give off, and it makes the bees think about filling up on honey instead of about you. Either way, it works.

The first year, I'm told, you shouldn't expect any honey, because the colony is spending everything it has building comb and growing big enough to live through the winter. They did, and I didn't take any, and I spent the whole winter going out to the hive on warm afternoons to put my ear to the side of it. (If you knock gently and listen, a healthy winter colony answers with a hum. This is the best sound in the world in February.)

Dewey came through the winter strong. That was the first big relief of year two. The second one was learning to find the queen. She's longer than the workers, with a long tapering abdomen, and she moves differently, slow and stately, with a little ring of attendants all facing her. In a box of forty or fifty thousand bees she can still be very hard to spot. I've gotten better. On a good day in June she can lay something like fifteen hundred eggs.

Nearly all the bees you'll ever see are workers, and every one of them is female, which is why beekeepers call them the girls. In summer a worker lives only about six weeks, and she works her way up through the jobs: cleaning cells, feeding the young, making wax, guarding the door, and finally flying out to forage. The males are the drones, big-eyed and stingless, and their only job is to mate with a queen from some other hive. In the fall the girls push them out the door. Robert finds this part of the story upsetting.

Mites. The real worry for every beekeeper in 1999 is the varroa mite, a tiny reddish-brown mite, about the size of a pinhead, that rides on the bees and breeds in the capped brood cells. It turned up in this country in 1987 and it has been terrible for bees ever since. The club says a colony with a lot of mites can collapse in the fall in a matter of weeks, and that most of the wild colonies in hollow trees around here are gone. Hearing that in class was the moment I understood this wasn't only a cute hobby.

I check for mites with a sticky board, a sheet of white cardboard coated with a sticky film, slid in under a screen on the bottom of the hive. You leave it a few days and count the mites that fall on it. When the count says so, I use the mite strips the club recommends, exactly as the label says: only after the honey supers come off, never with honey on the hive that we're going to eat, and taken out on the day the label says. I'll be honest, I don't love putting chemicals in my hive. But I love an empty hive even less. We're hearing that in some places the mites are getting harder to kill with the strips, which worries everybody, and the old-timers at the club talk about it at every meeting.

I knew all about swarming from the books. A strong colony in spring gets crowded, the bees raise some new queens, and just before the new ones come out, the old queen leaves with a big part of the colony to start over somewhere else. It's how honeybee colonies reproduce. The books tell you what to look for (queen cells along the bottoms of the frames) and how to head it off (give them more room). I had read every word. I also had a school book fair that week and didn't open the hive for nine days.

That Sunday after church I was in the kitchen when Robert called me to the back window in a strange voice. The air over the backyard was full of bees, thousands of them, spinning around in a big loose cloud with a roar like a highway. I went out in my church dress and just stood in the middle of it. It didn't feel dangerous at all. It felt like being inside a celebration.

After about fifteen minutes they all settled on a low branch of the maple in a big hanging cluster the size of a football, and things got quiet. A swarm clustered on a branch is usually very gentle. They've filled up on honey before they left, they don't have a home to defend yet, and they're waiting while their scouts go house hunting. That's your chance.

I called Buford. He was there in twenty minutes with an empty hive box. Robert got the stepladder. Buford held the box under the cluster, and I took hold of the branch with both hands and gave it one hard shake, and most of the swarm dropped into the box with a sound like a wet towel landing. We put the lid on, left the box under the tree with a crack open, and by evening the rest of the bees had marched inside on their own, fanning at the entrance to call the stragglers in. That meant the queen was in there.

Robert says he'd never seen me so happy. That's the hive called Decimal. She's been building up all summer and she'll need to get through the winter before I take a single spoonful of honey from her.

Lesson learned: the bees do not care about the book fair.

Even after losing half her bees to Decimal, Dewey raised a new queen and filled two honey supers in June and July. It was a dry summer here, as everybody in Pennsylvania knows, and things slowed down after the middle of July, but the girls had done their work early.

You only take frames that are capped, meaning the bees have dried the honey down and sealed each cell with a lid of white wax. Uncapped honey is too wet and can ferment. I took the supers off on Friday evening and drove them to the club's honey house on Saturday morning in the back of the station wagon with all the windows rolled up, because a car full of honey attracts a certain crowd.

The club owns an extractor that members can use. It's a big steel drum with a basket inside that holds the frames. You slice the wax caps off each side of the frame with a heated knife, set the frames in the basket, and crank. The spinning throws the honey out of the cells against the wall of the drum, and it runs down and out a little gate at the bottom, through a strainer and into a bucket. The comb stays in the frame, empty and whole, and goes back to the bees to fill again. They don't have to build it from scratch, which saves them a lot of work.

Buford cranked the first frame for me so I could watch. Then he gave me the handle.

When we weighed the buckets it came to 58 pounds. Fifty-eight pounds! It's a light amber color, and it tastes, to me, like the whole summer: the clover in the hayfield down the road, the basswood by the creek, my own garden. I may be biased.

It's mostly in pint and quart jars in the pantry now. The faculty room got a jar the first week of school and it was gone by Wednesday. Robert has been eating it on everything, including, one morning, scrapple, which I do not recommend.

Before the bees came, I walked up and down the road and told everybody. I think that's only fair, and the club told us to do it. Here is where everyone stands, as of September:

Darlene Willis, next door, was worried at first, mainly about her grandchildren, who visit on weekends. I promised her the hives would face away from her yard, toward the field, and I put up a row of tall sunflowers between us so the bees fly up and over everybody's heads. In two summers nobody at Darlene's has been stung. She has also been given four jars of honey. She now tells people at church about "our bees."

Edward Paris, across the road, is 74 and grew up on a farm where his grandfather kept bees in old straw skeps and wooden boxes. He comes over and leans on the fence and tells me how they did it in the old days, some of which matches the books and some of which very much does not. He told me you have to tell the bees the family news, or they'll leave. I told him about the swarm. He said, "Well, there you go."

The family with the swimming pool down the hill called me in June because there were bees drinking at the edge of their pool. Bees need a lot of water on hot days, and they'll go wherever it is. I put a big shallow pan of water with stones in it next to the hives, so the girls could land and drink without drowning, and in about a week they forgot about the pool. That pan is the busiest spot in my yard. If you keep bees, give them water before they go looking for your neighbor's.

Robert says he's "just the husband," but he built the hive stand, he holds the smoker when I need a third hand, and he has been stung exactly once, on the ankle, while mowing too close to the hives in shorts. Honeybee workers die after they sting, because the stinger is barbed and stays behind. He felt very bad about that. He mows in long pants now.

This is where I am right now, in the second week of September. Honeybees don't sleep through the winter. They pack together in a tight ball in the middle of the hive and shiver their flight muscles to keep warm, with the queen in the center, and slowly eat their way through the honey they've stored. So everything I do this fall comes down to two things: enough bees, and enough food.

• Mites first. The strips went into both hives on Saturday, August 21, the week after the honey came off. They come out in October, on the day the label says. It's on the kitchen calendar in red ink.
• Leave them their honey. The honey in the brood boxes is theirs, not mine. Buford says a hive ready for winter should feel like it's nailed to the stand when you tip up the back. That's the old way to check, called hefting, and it's surprisingly good. Dewey is heavy. Decimal, the swarm, is a little light.
• Feed the light one. Since Labor Day weekend Decimal has been getting sugar syrup, two parts white sugar to one part water, warmed until it dissolves and cooled before it goes on. It goes in a feeder inside the hive under the lid. They take it down and store it like nectar. I'll keep it up until the weather gets too cold for them to take it, and I'll keep hefting.
• Entrances. In October the entrance reducers and mouse guards go on. Mice love a warm hive full of honey in November, and they chew the comb to pieces.
• The wind. Robert is building a windbreak out of straw bales on the north side. He says the bees asked him for it. I believe him.

Then, sometime in November, there's nothing left to do but leave them alone and wait. That's the hardest part for me. I'll be out there on the first warm day in February, knocking on the side of the box and listening for the hum.