The Bees in the Tree Tops

Wake-up feel: 7.

A restless night. Awake earlier than usual.

Days now of moving stones, of the pathway. The body seems to be getting used to it.

Exercises. Shower. Out.

Quiet. Peaceful. The stream sounding up through the trees — the steep gorge of it carrying the water the whole way. The first birds greeting the dawn. The moon still high. The air still warm.

Below, the valley filling with fog — rising off the Black Cheremosh, the whole floor of it gone under. Above the fog, in the distance, the tops of the highest mountains, holding their ground.

The small pastures between the trees, not so colourful any more. The flowers have had their cycle. The bees are in the tree tops now — the buzzing comes from above.

Every beekeeper in these mountains knows that sound. In a summer this dry the meadows give out early, and the bees go up into the fir and the spruce, where small insects on bark and needle leave a sweetness behind them. The honey that comes of it is dark, near bitter, and comes only in the dry years. Forest honey. Honey Spas is a fortnight gone, the first combs already blessed at the church door. The old order of the season runs so: the honey carried in, then the meadows fading, then the bees to the trees. God's little fly, the people here call the bee. The old belief lets the soul leave a sleeper the same way — as a bee, and back before waking.

I did not see one. I heard where they were.

Water again today, the whole day. The moon three nights past the full, its light waning, its arc climbing. Venus in the evening, Mars and Saturn through the night, Jupiter before the dawn.

The people who made this calendar say the moon works on water, and a body is mostly water. The old ones here said it without the book: timber on the old moon, in the cold; the calf, the hen, the knife — by the moon. On the climbing arc the sap goes up. Cut what grows above. Graft. Take honey on the flower days; leave the hive alone on the water days. Honey is gathered sun, they say. In the Lion's month. Honey in the lion, the old book says — out of the strong came forth sweetness.

The year breathed out to midsummer; since then it draws back in, toward midwinter — the old picture. The last sweetness no longer on the ground but in the trees. After the trees, nothing till spring. The dark moon on the eleventh, on the old-style Holovosiky — John's day, whose food in the wilderness the gospel gives in one line: locusts and wild honey.

The fog rising off the river. The sound rising up the gorge. The bees gone up into the trees. The moon's arc climbing. All of it upward, on the morning the calendar calls ascending. I saw it before I read it.

Dark honey in a year like this, and the highest tops holding their ground.

Day 72
Verkhovyna, Carpathian Mountains, Ukraine
© 2026 Michel Garand | A Pilgrim's Journey | CC BY-SA 4.0
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