The Hum Only the Beekeeper Could Name

In the apiaries outside Asheville, North Carolina, a retired schoolteacher named Margaret Whitfield spent her first summer as an apprentice beekeeper convinced she would never learn the craft. Her mentor, seventy-two-year-old Earl Coggins, had kept bees for half a century. One August evening, Margaret heard a strange high-pitched piping rising from inside the hive — a sound different from the usual steady hum.…