Word: mckay
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...when the McKay expedition sets out, the West seemed a welcoming, fertile frontier. McMahon so skillfully intertwines fact and fiction that the experience of his protagonist is not merely typical; it is vivid, and exacting, and the two strands are often hard to sort out from one another...
...McKay's Bees has perhaps a roomful of such figures--Henry David Thoreau comments on the biology of Louis Agassiz. Agassiz terrorizes his students and commits indiscretions with his housemaid. John Brown and his gang of Missouri border ruffians wage war on free-staters in Kansas. Even President Pierce gives an audience or two, once weeping, once belligerent...
Thomas McMahon choose less domineering figures to make his entrance into historical fiction. McKay himself, the owner of the bees, was a contemporary of this crowd, though not of the same public stature, in fact, very little has been written about him: he made a fortune in shoe-manufacturing, and the Pusey Library archives hold a slim volume on the gigantic endowments he left to Harvard. Though he arrives at his true life circumstances by the end of the novel, McKay first undertakes a long fictional journey to Kansas and back. McMahon has given him depth, complicated his life...
...McKay "based his plan for a new city in the West on bees because of their energy." He gathers up his family, his wife's twin brother, and a crowd of German clockmakers, and heads for Kansas. And the bees of course; once in the prairie, the labors of the bees will be the foundation of the community. The Germans would process their honey, and in the winter they could make clocks. By careful calculation, McKay determined that in five years, his ten hives would multiply to 10,000. Such were his prospects...
Once settled in his new town, Equilibrium, Kansas, McKay falters. The bees become diseased, his wife unfaithful and unhappy, and the Germans never get over the strangeness of the land. The process of discovery is both exciting and fearful--and relentless. By putting himself at the frontier, McKay, along with those who accompanied him, has relinquished the possibility of retreat. He has himself face to face with the challenge of nature; the bees bring it home...