The city's beekeeper spent Monday tying a row of teaspoon-sized bells to each hive, then waited to see whether anyone would use them. "They already knew the way to the clover," he told us, wiping honey from a thumb. "They just needed a way to say they were coming."
We asked at the kiosk by the square. A woman with a bag of marigolds said she heard a ding, a pause, and then a very small hello. "The petunias looked as if they had just checked a mirror," she wrote later in the park notebook. "Pollen in place. Ready for company."
By evening the park keeper posted a card on the fence: visitors may listen, but should not ring the bells themselves. The bees have a system, and the flowerbeds, for the first time all summer, did not look startled when a guest arrived.