The apiary in the rain

Text: an original contemporary nature-feature-style practice extract.

From the path, the apiary seemed to offer very little: eight wooden boxes, wet grass and a strip of mud beneath each entrance. Mara treated these small details as a record. She checked the edges of the lids, noted the time and kept her gloves in her pocket. The rain had made the morning unsuitable for opening the hives, but it had not made observation unnecessary.

At hive four, one bee emerged at 10:12, circled the box and disappeared. Mara wrote exactly that. When her apprentice asked whether the hive was all right, she did not offer a reassuring answer. She read an earlier note, 'entrance quiet after rain', and placed today's observation beside it. The page filled with times, weather and small uncertainties while the wooden boxes remained closed.

Mara explained that lifting a lid in those conditions would show how the hive responded to being opened, not how it had been coping before she arrived. She fastened a loose strap and moved a fallen branch away from the entrances, then put the notebook under her coat. By midday, the row looked as it had at nine. When the apprentice asked what she had achieved, Mara replied, 'I have not turned a question into a fact.'

In this extract, the writer tries to present a beekeeper's decision not to open the hives as responsible work rather than idleness.

Evaluate how successfully this is achieved. Support your views with detailed reference to the extract.