The Honey Season Rules

• Chapter 1 Smoke and Mirrors
• Chapter 2 The Scent of Sweet Rivalry
• Chapter 3 Sugar Water Sabotage
• Chapter 4 Across the Fence Line
• Chapter 5 Hive Inspections and Cheap Shots
• Chapter 6 Sticky Fingers
• Chapter 7 The Brood Box Blues
• Chapter 8 Buzzing with Contempt
• Chapter 9 Fair Ambitions
• Chapter 10 Stung by the Truth
• Chapter 11 Midnight at the Apiary
• Chapter 12 Regicide in the Meadow
• Chapter 13 The Empty Throne
• Chapter 14 Truce Under the Veil
• Chapter 15 The Combined Method
• Chapter 16 Newspaper Layers
• Chapter 17 Pheromones and Proximity
• Chapter 18 Shared Frames
• Chapter 19 Tasting the Harvest
• Chapter 20 Swarm Warning
• Chapter 21 Working the Same Flow
• Chapter 22 The Lost Queen Cell
• Chapter 23 Ribbon Stakes
• Chapter 24 Judging Day at the Fair
• Chapter 25 Golden Extraction
• Chapter 26 A Unified Hive

The secret to lighting a bee smoker without burning down three counties is dry pine needles and stubborn patience. Maysie Bell shoved another handful of crisp loblolly tinder into the metal canister, worked the leather bellows with rhythmic wheezes, and blew a thin spark into a thick, choking funnel of gray-white vapor.

The heat bloomed against her denim jacket. June in Georgia meant the air was already as heavy as wet wool, but standing over a cylinder of burning pine while zipped into a canvas suit made a person question their life choices. She pulled the wire mesh veil down over her face, adjusted the elastic under her armpits, and latched the smoker’s hooked lid shut.

Behind her, the apiary sloped gently toward the creek bed. Ten Langstroth hives stood in a tidy, white-painted row along the timberline of her grandfather’s orchard. Each stack of boxes was pristine, level on cinderblocks, and facing southeast so the morning sun would hit the landing boards early and urge the field bees out into the clover. Maysie had painted every wooden super herself with non-toxic exterior latex, alternating the rim colors with cornflower blue and sunflower yellow so her girls wouldn’t drift into the wrong address when they came home heavy with nectar.

She loved the bees. She tolerated the heat. But what made her teeth grind behind the safety of her wire mesh was the rusted barbed-wire fence twenty yards to her left—and the boy currently leaning over it with a smoker that smelled like cheap cedar shavings and pure arrogance.

"You’re choking them, Bell," Cole Dawson called out, his voice cutting clearly through the lazy, ninety-degree hum of the meadow.

Cole didn’t have his veil on yet. It hung limp around his shoulders like an unzipped hoodie, showing off a mop of dark hair damp with sweat and a smug, crooked grin that suggested he thought the sun rose specifically to tan his shoulders. He was propped against an old cedar post, idly pumping his own shiny copper smoker. Cole’s family ran the Dawson Honey Company, a commercial outfit with four hundred hives scattered across the county. He acted like tending sixty thousand stinging insects was about as demanding as running a lawnmower.

"It’s cool smoke, Dawson," Maysie retorted, not turning her head. You never showed weakness, and you never showed distraction when you were working the brood chambers. "If you paid attention to combustion temperatures instead of styling your hair in the reflection of your hive tool, your bees wouldn't abscond every August."

"They didn't abscond. They made an executive decision to find better pasture," Cole said, pushing himself off the fence. He hitched up his white coveralls and stepped through the sagging wire where a rusted top strand had snapped three summers ago. He walked across the no-man's-land of bitterweed and thistles that separated her grandfather’s property from his father's back pasture. "Besides, my girls know where the sourwood is. Yours are still wasting flight time on dandelions."

"Clover, actually," Maysie said coldly. She picked up her hive tool—the ten-inch piece of sharpened steel she used to pry apart the frames glued tight with sticky propolis—and approached Hive Number Four. "And unlike your dad's blended industrial syrup, my comb is going to be clear as church glass. The Tri-County Fair judges actually value clarity over sheer gallonage."

Cole stopped three feet away, just outside the flight path of the entrance. It was close enough that she could smell the pine pitch on his gloves and the sweet, waxy tang that soaked into the clothes of anyone who spent their life around bees. It was the same smell that followed her into high school hallways, the one her classmates sometimes wrinkled their noses at before asking if she had any honey sticks in her locker.

"Clarity doesn't pay out a ten-thousand-dollar agricultural scholarship, Maysie," Cole said, dropping the casual banter for half a second. His blue-gray eyes narrowed through the heat shimmer. "The judge this year is Harlan Vance. He looks at volume, moisture content, and weight. Clean extraction. My supers are already two boxes heavier than yours."

Maysie felt a cold knot tighten under her ribs, right where her anxiety liked to nest. The North Georgia Agricultural Youth Endowment was the only reason she was out here in a ninety-degree canvas furnace instead of sitting in the air-conditioned library studying for her AP exams or taking a lifeguarding shift at the municipal pool. Ten thousand dollars was four semesters of tuition at the state university. It meant not having to sell her grandfather’s extraction centrifuge to pay for freshman dorm fees.

Cole Dawson didn't need the money. His dad drove a new F-250 every two years and shipped pallets of bulk clover honey to regional grocery chains across three states. For Cole, the youth ribbon was just another silver-plated trophy to stick on the Dawson mantle between the county wrestling plaques and his father’s Farm Bureau commendations.

"Vance values frame presentation," Maysie said evenly, keeping her hands steady as she puffed three soft clouds of smoke across the entrance of Hive Four. The low, irritable drone of the hive shifted down an octave, turning into a hollow, rumbling sigh as the guard bees signaled to the colony that there was fire in the woods. Instantly, thousands of workers dove their heads into the honey cells, gorging themselves on reserves in case they had to abandon the home. Full bees were lethargic bees. Full bees rarely stung. "He wants to see clean cappings. No burr comb. No crossed wax. You run your extractor so fast you shred the wax foundations."

"I run an efficient harvest," Cole countered. He pulled his veil up over his face and tucked the bib securely into his collar. "Want to bet on it?"

"We already have a bet, Dawson. It’s called entering the fair."

"A side bet," Cole murmured, leaning in slightly. The black nylon netting of his veil smoothed out the sharp edges of his jaw. "If my single-frame display scores higher on moisture and color than your best super, you have to wear a Dawson Honey ballcap when they take the winner's photo for the county paper."

Maysie pried the telescoping outer cover off the hive with a sharp crack of breaking bee glue. "And when I beat you?"

"When you beat me," Cole said, the word when dripping with enough skepticism to drown an army, "I will spend the entire second week of the fair working your grandfather's tasting booth in the exhibition hall. In a full worker bee costume. Antennae included."

Maysie paused, the heavy wooden lid balanced in her gloved hands. The thought of Cole Dawson—six feet of athletic self-importance and county pride—standing by the honey straws wearing yellow felt stripes and wire wings almost made the heat bearable.

"Deal," she said, setting the lid down upside down on the grass to create a clean surface. "Now get back on your side of the weeds. You’re standing in my flight line, and the foragers are bunching up."

Cole didn’t move immediately. He looked at the hive she was exposing. Beneath the inner cover, the wooden frames were lined up like file folders in a drawer, covered with a bustling, undulating carpet of golden-brown Italian bees. They crawled over one another in a seamless, purposeful river of movement, cleaning, feeding, fanning their wings to cure the thin nectar into rich honey.

"Hive’s quiet," Cole observed quietly. The competitive sneer slipped from his tone, replaced by the involuntary instinct of an apiarist who knew what healthy comb looked like. "Italian strain?"

"Cordovan cross," Maysie muttered, annoyed that he could tell so quickly. "Re-queened her in April. She’s throwing solid brood patterns. Edge to edge, barely any drone cells."

Cole nodded once, an almost imperceptible gesture of professional respect that he immediately ruined by adding, "Pity your smoker technique is so clumsy. You’re going to sour the taste of the comb with all that burnt pine rosin."

"Go away, Cole."

"I'm going. Some of us have three yards to check before noon." He turned toward the rusted fence, snagged his heavy cotton sleeve on an old barb, cursed under his breath, and yanked himself free. "See you at the 4-H weigh-in, Bell. Try not to drop a frame."

Maysie didn't answer. She waited until the rhythmic squeak of his work boots faded into the high grass of the Dawson lot before she took a deep breath. The inside of her suit smelled of sweat, canvas, and the sharp, medicinal perfume of honey and pine.

Working bees alone was therapeutic when you didn't have a smug neighbor breathing down your neck. Maysie reached into Hive Four with the flat edge of her hive tool, gently levering the second frame from the outside wall loose from its neighbors. Propolis crackled like tearing velcro. She lifted the frame by its wooden ears, holding it steady so she didn't roll or crush any bees against the adjacent comb.

The frame was magnificent.

The center was an uninterrupted circle of capped worker brood—pale tan, paper-dry cappings that concealed developing pupae just days away from chewing their way out into the world. Surrounding the brood was a neat rainbow band of multi-colored pollen: bright sunflower yellow, dull maple green, and rusty orange. Outside the pollen band, filling the upper corners of the wooden rectangle, the bees had packed fresh nectar and sealed it under snow-white wax cappings that looked like fine porcelain lace.

This was what the Tri-County Fair judges looked for in the Comb Honey division. It was pure perfection. No irregular gaps, no dirty travel stains from muddy bee feet, no protruding drone domes ruining the flat plane of the foundation.

"Good girls," Maysie whispered through the veil.

She turned the frame slowly to inspect the reverse side. The queen had done her job flawlessly. But as Maysie’s eyes tracked across the bottom bar of the wooden frame, her heart gave an unpleasant, violent skip.

There, hanging from the lower margin of the wax like miniature, wrinkled peanuts, were three downward-pointing wax cups.

Queen cells.

Maysie froze, the wooden frame suddenly feeling twice as heavy in her hands.

A queen cell was a royal nursery, built only when a hive had decided its current ruler was failing—or, far more likely in the middle of a heavy June honey flow, when the colony had outgrown its space and was preparing to swarm. If this hive swarmed, the old queen would take half the worker force, gorge on all the honey they could carry, and fly away to an hollow oak tree somewhere miles down the creek.

She would lose half her livestock. She would lose the production force right at the peak of the sourwood bloom. And worst of all, Hive Four—her prize-winning, blue-ribbon candidate for the scholarship—would be left decimated, its honey production halted for a month while the young virgin queen hatched, mated, and slowly built back the workforce.

"No, no, no," she muttered, angling the frame toward the sun to peer down into the open peanut-shaped cups.

At the bottom of the deepest cup, floating in a white puddle of royal jelly, was a tiny, pearlescent grub. The cell was charged. They weren't just practicing. They had committed to the coup.

She lowered the frame back into the box with agonizing care, her hands shaking slightly against the wood. Why were they swarming? She had given them two empty shallow supers on top just last week to ensure they had plenty of storage room. They shouldn't have felt crowded.

She peeled open the top super—the storage box she had set above the queen excluder.

The box was completely empty. Not a single bee was drawing out the fresh wax foundation.

Maysie stepped back, her mind racing through the biological mechanics. If the bees refused to move up through the queen excluder—the plastic grid designed to keep the larger queen in the bottom boxes while letting the smaller workers pass through to store honey up top—the lower chamber would become honey-bound. The queen would run out of empty cells to lay eggs, the workers would assume the nest was hopelessly crowded, and the swarm clock would start ticking.

She leaned down and pulled the white plastic excluder grid off the brood box.

A sharp, synthetic smell hit her nose, cutting straight through the fragrance of pine smoke and wax.

It was faint, but unmistakable. It smelled like almond paste.

Maysie pulled her right glove off with her teeth and touched the corner of the plastic grid. Her fingers came away slightly tacky. She lifted her hand to her veil and sniffed.

Benzaldehyde. Bee repellent. The chemical commercial beekeepers used on fume boards when they wanted to clear bees out of supers in a hurry for industrial harvest.

Someone had sprayed bee repellent along the upper surface of her queen excluder. The workers on the brood frames below, repelled by the noxious almond vapor, had refused to cross the plastic barrier into the top boxes. Trapped in the bottom chambers, they had choked their own nursery with honey, convinced themselves the box was bursting at the seams, and started building swarm cells to abandon ship.

Maysie turned slowly, her gaze cutting across the weed-choked ditch to where Cole Dawson was loading yellow wooden supers into the bed of his father’s truck.

The Dawsons bought benzaldehyde by the five-gallon drum.

"You absolute snake," she hissed under her breath.

She glanced down at the open hive. The bees were beginning to roar again, the calming effect of the cool smoke wearing off. She had maybe four days before those queen cells were capped. Once they were capped, the swarm would take off on the first warm, sunny morning, carrying her college tuition straight into the timber.

Maysie grabbed her hive tool, scraped the contaminated plastic grid clean, and hurled it into the grass. She took three deep, steadying breaths to keep her hands from trembling. Bees could smell adrenaline; they reacted to fear and fury as if it were poison.

She had to break down the swarm cells, swap the congested frames, and air out the hive before the queen caught wind of the rebellion. But more importantly, she had to balance the ledger. Cole Dawson thought he could play back-meadow games with industrial chemicals and skate through to the ribbon on his family’s industrial credentials.

Maysie looked over at the boundary line, where a row of Dawson’s newly baited swarm traps hung high in the sweetgum trees along the fence.

Two could play at manipulation. And unlike Cole, Maysie actually understood bee chemistry.

The thing about honeybees is that their entire universe is written in vapor. They do not navigate by road signs, nor do they hold grudges using words. To an Italian worker bee, love, duty, home, and war are all dictated by microscopic plumes of airborne chemistry. A single whiff of isopentyl acetate—which smelled uncomfortably like artificial banana flavoring—could muster ten thousand suicidal defenders willing to drive their barbed stingers through heavy leather. Conversely, a gentle mist of citral and geraniol was an open invitation to a banquet, whispering of nectar flows and safe passage.

Maysie Bell spent the three hours following Cole’s departure doing damage control on Hive Four. She used the notched edge of her hive tool to ruthlessly destroy the three swarm cups, scooping out the rich, milky royal jelly with the tip of her thumb. It felt like vandalism against her own property, but leaving even one charged cup meant signing over half her workforce to the wind. She exchanged the repellent-soaked plastic excluder for a clean, untreated wire grid from the bed of her grandfather’s rusted flatbed, then manually shifted two frames of heavy, sealed honey out of the lower brood chamber and replaced them with fresh, empty drawn comb right in the center of the laying cluster.

"There," she muttered, wiping her sticky palms on her coveralls as she latched down the outer lid with a flat brick. "Room to lay, you ungrateful little aristocrats. Stop packing your bags."

Her heart was still thumping against her ribs, driven by a cocktail of summer heat and cold adrenaline. She glanced over her shoulder toward the tree line that marked the Dawson territory. Cole’s truck was gone, the red dust cloud from his departure having long settled into the blackberry brambles. But the oily tang of benzaldehyde still lingered in the back of her throat, a persistent ghost of sabotage that tasted like rotten marzipan.

If Cole thought a little synthetic intimidation would cause her to drop out of the 4-H division, he had entirely forgotten who taught him how to graft queen larvae in middle school.

Maysie stripped out of her bee suit in the shelter of the honey house, letting the oscillating fan on the workbench blast cool, propolis-scented air over her damp neck. Her grandfather, Frank Bell, was sitting by the sink with a magnifying visor pushed up on his forehead, painstakingly cleaning the brass spigot of an antique bottling tank with warm water and vinegar. He was eighty-one, moved with the deliberate pace of a glacier, and possessed the uncanny ability to identify the floral source of honey by simply rolling a droplet across his lower lip.

"You're stomping around like a heifer with a horsefly, Maysie," Frank said without looking up from the threads of the spigot. "Hive Four give you grief?"

"They're fine," Maysie lied smoothly, grabbing a cold bottle of well water from the miniature fridge under the bench. She drank half of it in three gulps, feeling the ice-cold shock in her chest. "Just congested. I gave them some drawn foundation in the brood nest."

"Good girl. Harlan Vance is coming by to calibrate the district refractometers on Tuesday. If your water content isn't under eighteen percent, he won't even look at your comb color. You remember that."

"I know, Grandfather."

"And keep away from the fence line," Frank added, finally looking at her through his thick lenses, which magnified his pale hazel eyes into giant, wise saucers. "Jack Dawson called me this morning about his western out-yard. Said he thinks some black bear scouted his perimeter down near the swamp. Keep your eyes open."

"Jack Dawson worries about everything that doesn't show up on a corporate balance sheet," Maysie said. "I'm going to run into town for some fuel supplies."

"Take the truck. Transmission's slipping in reverse, so don't park nose-down in the hardware store lot."

Maysie didn't drive into town to buy smoker fuel. Burlap sacks and pine needles were free anywhere between their orchard and the highway. Instead, she drove straight to the feed and seed cooperative on the south bypass, marching past the sacks of sweet feed and pesticide displays to the back aisle where the organic gardening and specialty livestock gear was shoved onto dusty metal shelves.

She knew precisely what she was looking for.

Beekeepers used lemongrass oil to bait swarm traps. Its primary constituents, citral and geraniol, closely mimicked the Nasonov pheromone—the homing beacon released by worker bees from an abdominal scent gland when they wanted to tell their sisters, This is home; this is food; gather here. Under normal circumstances, a couple of drops on a piece of paper towel inside an empty wooden hive box could lure an itinerant swarm straight out of the sky.

But chemistry, like any tool, was entirely a matter of dosage and context.

Maysie bought three small brown-glass bottles of pure, cold-pressed essential lemongrass oil, along with a quart of food-grade mineral oil and an industrial plastic syringe with a blunt needle tip. The teenage cashier barely looked up from his phone as she rang up the items, entirely oblivious to the fact that he was facilitating an act of precision apiary warfare.

By six that evening, the sun had dropped behind the blue ridges of the Cohutta Mountains, casting long, bruised shadows across the valley. The brutal Georgia humidity stayed behind, hugging the grass like a warm, wet flannel. Bees rarely flew after dusk; once the light levels dropped, their compound eyes lost the ability to navigate by polarized sunlight, and the entire colony retreated indoors to cluster, fan nectar, and sleep.

It was the perfect time for an inspection of Dawson land.

Maysie slipped into a pair of dark jeans and a gray canvas work shirt, leaving the white bee veil behind. If she had to move through the thickets, white stood out like an emergency flare. She slipped the small glass bottle and the loaded syringe into the deep pockets of her carpenter pants, slid a small flashlight with a red cellophane lens into her waistband, and walked out the back door of the honey house into the gathering dark.

The boundary fence between the Bell orchard and the Dawson acreage consisted of three strands of barbed wire strung between rotting cedar posts that had been driven into the clay by their respective grandfathers sixty years ago. High weeds choked the ditch: dogfennel, goldenrod, and prickly blackberry vines that grabbed at Maysie’s denim as she ducked beneath the sagging center strand.

Once on the Dawson side, the landscape changed. Where her grandfather let the orchard grow wild with red clover, wild carrot, and vetch, the Dawsons maintained an aggressively manicured operation. Two dozen standard Langstroth hives stood in two neat, parallel ranks along a cleared gravel pad, all of them painted uniform industrial yellow with the black stenciled letters DHC on the front corners. Further down the timberline, hung five feet off the ground from the branches of three mature sweetgum trees, were Cole’s pride and joy: three deep-body swarm traps, intended to catch any early summer swarms drifting out of the mountain hollows.

Maysie approached the sweetgum trees quietly, her sneakers barely rustling the dried leaves.

Cole’s swarm traps were built like miniature fortresses. Each was a five-frame wooden box with an entrance hole the size of a quarter, reinforced with wire mesh to keep out mice and woodpeckers. They were designed to smell irresistibly like an old, well-established hollow tree. Cole had smeared the inner lids with old propolis and hung a commercial pheromone lure inside to catch any passing queen looking for real estate.

If Cole succeeded in catching two or three wild swarms this month, he could easily shake the bees into his production colonies, doubling his foraging numbers right as the mountain sourwood began its brief, furious three-week bloom. More foragers meant more honey. More honey meant a higher chance of blowing her out of the water at the weigh-in.

Maysie reached into her pocket and drew out the syringe loaded with the concentrated lemongrass oil mixture.

She wasn't going to destroy his traps. She wasn't a vandal, and despite her rage over the benzaldehyde, she had too much respect for the honeybees themselves to poison them. She was simply going to create an olfactory catastrophe.

A tiny drop of lemongrass oil was an invitation.

Half an ounce of pure, unadulterated citral oil, squirted directly into the entrance hole and across the landing board, was the equivalent of setting off a botanical siren. It was so overwhelmingly potent that no scout bee with working antennae would dare enter the box; the concentration of vapor would scorch their delicate sensory organs like ammonia. To a bee, it would smell not like a welcoming hollow, but like a toxic chemical spill.

Worse still, the intense aroma would drift down the fence line and catch the attention of every forager in the Dawson apiary the following morning. Confused by the massive false signal of an unfindable nectar source, Cole’s field bees would spend half their morning aggressively investigating an empty wooden box hung in an oak branch, burning precious flight fuel and ignoring the legitimate clover blossoms in the meadow.

Maysie stepped up to the first trap, uncapped the syringe, and leveled the blunt needle at the quarter-sized entrance hole.

"You really don't have a subtle bone in your body, do you, Bell?"

The voice came from directly behind her, dry and startlingly close.

Maysie didn't shriek, but she did drop the syringe. It vanished into the tall carpet of orchard grass with a soft, muffled thud. She whirled around, her hands instinctively coming up into defensive fists, her heart slamming violently against her ribs.

Cole Dawson was leaning against the trunk of an adjacent water oak, his arms crossed over a dark navy t-shirt that showed off the corded forearms of someone who hauled sixty-pound honey supers for eight hours a day. In the dim twilight, the whites of his eyes and the slow, infuriating curl of his mouth were the only distinct features visible beneath the shadow of his baseball cap.

"What are you doing skulking around in the dark?" Maysie demanded, lowering her fists only slightly. Her cheeks were burning with the sudden rush of blood. "You nearly gave me a coronary."

"Skulking?" Cole pushed off the tree trunk and took two long strides toward her, closing the distance until she had to tilt her chin up to maintain eye contact. "I'm standing on Dawson property, twenty feet from my own equipment. You’re the one trespassing with drug paraphernalia."

He bent down with maddening calm, swept his fingers through the grass, and retrieved her plastic syringe. He held it up against the fading pink glow of the western sky, inspecting the pale amber fluid inside the barrel.

"Lemongrass," he said, bringing the tip near his nose without actually sniffing it directly. "A heavy dose, too. What was the plan, Maysie? Were you going to drown my swarm traps or just turn them into air fresheners?"

"You used benzaldehyde on my brood super," she snapped, stepping into his personal space, completely discarding any attempt at denial. The sheer unfairness of the morning came rushing back, wiping away her embarrassment. "You sprayed repellent on my queen excluder! Hive Four was backing up into swarm mode because the workers couldn't get through to the upper frames. You tried to force a split so my production would tank before the fair!"

Cole’s smirk flickered. His eyebrows drew together in a sudden, sharp V of confusion. "What are you talking about?"

"Don't play dumb, Cole. It doesn't suit your carefully cultivated image of corporate efficiency. I smelled the almond oil on the grid. I had to rip three swarm cells off the bottom frames this afternoon. If I hadn't caught it today, half my Italian line would have been hanging from a pine branch by Sunday morning!"

Cole lowered the syringe. The casual, mocking posture he had worn like a second skin completely vanished, replaced by an expression of sharp, genuine irritation.

"I didn't touch your hives, Maysie."

"Oh, right. A wild bottle of industrial bee-go just sprouted wings, flew across the ditch, and selectively dusted my best production colony."

"I don't use benzaldehyde in the home yard," Cole said, his voice dropping into a low, flat register that sounded surprisingly fierce. "My dad uses it on the commercial trucks when they clear supers down in the flatlands, but I don't touch the stuff around here. It taints the wax. If Harlan Vance gets even a micro-gram of chemical residue on a mass-spectrometer test, you're disqualified from the scholarship. I want to beat you fair and square, Bell. I'm not going to win because somebody threw a chemical foul on your frames."

Maysie stared at him through the gloom. His eyes were dead-level, completely unblinking.

Cole Dawson was arrogant, entitled, and entirely too confident about his ability to run a honey business, but in all the years she had known him—ever since they were eight years old trading wax foundations at the county extension office—he had never been a liar. He took a perverse pride in his own competence. Winning on a technicality or through sabotage would have ruined the pleasure of rubbing his victory in her face.

"Then who sprayed it?" she asked, the anger in her voice cracking around the edges, replaced by a cold, prickling unease.

Cole looked past her shoulder, toward the line of white hives visible across the ditch in the twilight. "I don't know. But I found an empty aluminum can of industrial smoker fuel tossed near my water trough this morning. Somebody was through here before dawn."

"Before dawn?" Maysie felt the skin on her arms pebble. "Nobody comes down this road except our families. It's three miles of dirt track off the county road."

"Somebody who knows bees," Cole murmured, looking down at the syringe in his hand. He twirled it between his calloused fingers before holding it out to her, handle first. "And somebody who knows that you and I are the only two entries in the youth division this year."

Maysie hesitated, then reached out and took the plastic barrel. Her fingers brushed his—his skin was rough from propolis and calluses, and warm despite the falling night air. She pulled her hand back quickly, slipping the syringe into her pocket as if it had burned her.

"There's ten thousand dollars on the line," she said quietly. "Who else even cares about the Tri-County fair?"

"Nobody in the youth bracket," Cole said. "Unless somebody wanted to make sure neither of us made the cut. If both our single-frame entries get flagged for contamination or fail the moisture test, the endowment rolls over to the open commercial division."

Maysie’s stomach plummeted. "Your dad?"

"No," Cole said instantly, a flash of defensive heat in his tone. "My dad's hard-headed, but he wouldn't touch my hives. Or yours. He wants the Dawson name on the youth ribbon more than I do." He paused, his jaw working as he chewed on a thought. "What about the Vance family?"

"Harlan Vance is the chief judge!"

"And his nephew, Brody, is running forty hives on the south ridge," Cole pointed out. "Brody entered the open comb division. He's twenty-one. This is his last year of eligibility for the young farmer grant that ties into the fair."

Maysie leaned her back against the rough bark of the sweetgum tree, crossing her arms over her chest. The sweet, sharp aroma of lemongrass oil was leaking out of her pocket, mingling with the natural musk of the damp woods and the faint trace of woodsmoke that always clung to Cole's clothes.

"This is ridiculous," she whispered. "We're talking about honey. It's sugar water produced by bugs. People don't commit corporate espionage over 4-H ribbons."

"People commit felonies over bass fishing tournaments in this state, Maysie," Cole said dryly, stepping closer until he was leaning against the adjacent branch, his shoulder barely inches from hers. "Ten grand pays for an entire year of equipment upgrades, or in your case, your tuition down in Athens."

She looked up at him, surprised. "How do you know I'm going to Athens?"

Cole gave a short, half-strangled laugh. "You've been talking about the UGA agricultural science program since the seventh grade. You wore a Georgia Bulldogs lanyard on your bee-suit keys for four years until the fabric rotted off."

Maysie looked away, feeling an uninvited warmth creep up the back of her neck that had nothing to do with the southern summer. It was disconcerting to realize that while she had been watching him with laser-focused competitive disdain for half a decade, he had been paying attention, too.

"Well," she said, clearing her throat to break the strange stillness that had settled between them. "That doesn't change anything. If someone is messing with my hives, I'm sleeping in the honey house with a shotgun."

"Don't shoot my traps. They're expensive."

"Then don't hang them so close to my property line. The pheromones are bleeding into my meadow."

"That was the idea," Cole said, the familiar, arrogant tilt returning to his lips. "It's called strategic zoning. If your bees prefer the accommodations on this side of the wire, who am I to deny them free will?"

"They don't prefer your accommodations. Your boxes smell like hardware store varnish." Maysie pushed off the tree, turning toward the fence. "I'm going home."

"Maysie."

She stopped, turning back with one hand on the rusted top wire of the fence.

Cole was still standing in the shadow of the sweetgums, his hands shoved deep into his pockets. "Check your queen in Hive Four again tomorrow. If they were that congested, she might have stopped laying. If she slims down too much, she can still fly, swarm cells or no swarm cells."

It was good advice. It was the kind of advice an experienced apiarist gave to a colleague when they weren't trying to cut each other's throats for a ribbon.

"I know how to manage a brood nest, Dawson," she said, keeping her tone brisk to mask the sudden flutter in her pulse.

"Just saying," he replied, his voice softening into the darkness. "I want you in that bee costume at the fair booth. It won't look right if I'm the only one in wings."

"Keep dreaming," she retorted, slipping beneath the barbed wire and dropping down into the cool, tall weeds of her grandfather’s ditch.

She walked quickly back through the darkened orchard, the silent stacks of white boxes standing like tiny ghosts in the moonlight. Behind her, across the timberline, the crickets were starting their rhythmic summer chorus, drowning out the faint, persistent thrum of a hundred thousand wings settling in for the night. Maysie reached into her pocket, fingering the small glass bottle of lemongrass oil, and realized with a start that she had forgotten to check the bottom corners of Cole's traps after all.

Her hands still smelled of sweet citrus, but the air around the hives felt colder now, heavy with a silent, unseen threat that was creeping closer to the fence line with every passing hour.