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into the back of Zeb’s truck and held his hand out for me. “I’ll be right there, walking you through it.”
    I grabbed hold and swung myself up into the truck bed beside him.
    “Ever seen a swarm scooped from a tree crook?” Zeb asked Ollie.
    Ollie shook her head.
    “No?” Zeb’s expression was the same as if she’d shaken her head no to his asking about whether or not she’d ever seen the ocean. “Well, then, I guess we’ll have to go ahead and make a day of it.”
    He brought her around to the front of the truck and opened the passenger door. As she climbed in, Zeb said, “Did you know that the ancient Egyptians thought bees were messengers sent from the sun god Ra? The Greeks, though, now they believed bees were souls of the dead come back to keep the rest of us company.”
    “Don’t tell her things like that,” I said.
    Zeb came around to the back of the truck again and lifted first my bike, then Ollie’s, up to Bear, who found a place for them beside the beekeeping equipment.
    “No harm in thinking there’s some place to go after we’re done with this life, is there, Sam?” Zeb shut the tailgate, walked around to the driver’s side, and climbed in.
    The back window of the cab was open. Ollie had her head forward, looking through the windshield, but I knew she was listening. I said, “It’s bad enough already, her thinking she can see ghosts. She doesn’t need any more excuses for not talking.”
    “But maybe she does see ghosts.”
    “There’s no such thing.” I sat down on the raised wheel hub, grabbing hold of the side for balance.
    Zeb started the engine. He shouted, “Maybe there is. Maybe you’ve just never seen one is all.”
    I looked at Bear, wanting him to defend me, to say I was right and Ollie didn’t need to hear any more made-up stories about spirits and souls and life going on after you’re dead, but his head was tipped back and he was staring at a vulture circling high above us. If Mom was here, she’d agree with me. She’d tell Ollie the truth: Once you’re dead, you’re dead. There’s just no coming back from that.
    We bumped along the dirt road and then down another single track toward the apple orchard. Ollie stuck her arm out the open passenger window and moved her hand up and down, a rising and falling wave in the wind.
    It only took a few minutes to get there. Zeb parked the truck twenty feet from the tree where the swarm gathered and turned off the engine.
    “Hear that?” he said to Ollie, holding his head out the window and cupping his hand around his ear. “Bunch of old souls singing about heaven.”
    “It’s just bees, Ollie,” I said. “Moving the air so fast with their wings we can hear their vibrations.”
    “Sounds like music to me,” said Zeb.
    I grabbed the sugar water and my bee suit and jumped out of the truck. Bear unloaded the rest of the equipment and joined me under the apple tree. Ollie stayed behind with Zeb.
    Bees swarm whenever the colony grows too big for the hive and they get to feeling like they need more elbow room. The queen and thousands of workers fly off together to find some new place to call home, while the ones who stay behind in the original hive hatch a new queen and carry on about their honey-making business. Bear’s colonies had swarmed only a few times, but he’d always caught them and set them up in newer, bigger hives before they’d gotten too far away. Sometimes, though, swarms showed up out of nowhere, maybe from another keeper’s hives, maybe from a wild colony. Even though bees were their most gentle selves during a swarm, there was still something ominous and disturbing about the way they clumped together on a tree limb or under the eaves of a house. A shifting, dark mass sending out a low and constant drone, the sound of ten thousand wings beating an uncertain rhythm.
    This swarm was balled together, hanging from a thin limb about fifteen feet off the ground. It could have been worse. Once Bear had to