Telling the Bees

by Peggy Hesketh

  “Albert?” Detective Grayson said. “Not the Bee Man?”

  “No,” I said, “just Albert.”

  “So how come?” the detective prodded, nodding toward the clutch of hives sprinkled throughout my backyard and on into the small orange grove that extended beyond it.

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “I’m just wondering why you have two little old ladies with a few hives in their backyard and everybody calls them the Bee Ladies, but here you are, right next door, and from what I can see you’ve got triple, maybe four times as many, hives and you’re just plain old Albert. How come?”

  “I don’t know,” I replied. I’d never thought to ask myself this question before. How does one acquire a nickname? Having never been called by anything but my given name, I could only speculate.

  “Perhaps because no one knew what else to call them?” I ventured. “They rather liked to keep to themselves.”

  “Fair enough,” the detective said. “So how come you know what to call them?”

  “As I said yesterday, we grew up together. We were friends once.”

  I paused for a moment with my hand on the porch railing as the detective’s eyes scanned the sky above him for imagined hordes of murderous bees. I noticed that the veins in my hand seemed quite blue and pronounced beneath my sun-roughened skin. I was struck by how much my hands reminded me of my father’s, especially late in life. His fingers had been long and tapered like my own. Musician’s hands, my mother used to say, though neither of us could play more than a clumsy note or two on any instrument to speak of. Hopelessly tone-deaf, my mother used to call us.

  “Would you care to join me inside for a cool glass of lemonade?” I asked, certain the detective would take me up on my offer of refuge, if not refreshment.

  “Don’t go to any trouble,” Detective Grayson said with a final nervous glance at the nearest stand of hives as he strode past me onto the porch stairs. He made it clear with only the slightest nod of his head that he was used to taking the lead in any given situation and that it was only out of courtesy that he paused at the screen door to allow me to enter first. This I acknowledged with a nod of my own as I passed.

  Like the Straussmans’ house, my back door opens into a small service porch leading into the kitchen. A stack of unopened mail lay next to the morning paper on my dinette table, and I was most regretfully aware of Detective Grayson’s observational eye lingering over the dirty dishes I had left on the counter.

  “Forgive the mess,” I said, quickly rinsing the dishes and stacking them in the sink as I spoke. “I hurried through my breakfast to get an early start on my daily chores, whereupon I found a band of marauding ants preparing an assault on my number three hive.”

  The detective turned his attention from the clutter in my sink to me.

  “Which means what?” he said. I noticed that in the early-afternoon light his hazel eyes were streaked with silver.

  “One of the greatest problems facing beekeepers here in this region are brown ants. They overrun our hives from time to time, yet the poison many beekeepers use to prevent such invasions presents an even greater hazard to the very hives we seek to protect.

  “It would be a grave mistake to rid the premises of ants entirely because during the greater part of the year, these tiny insects perform a useful service keeping our yards and apiary clean. This is especially true during peak honeyflow season, when the hardworking field bees labor so strenuously that they live only a short four to six weeks. If they chance to die in the hive, some hive bees take it upon themselves to carry the deceased worker out into the yard where they drop her to the ground. As soon as she is abandoned, the ants rush in, seemingly from nowhere, to strip the carcass of all edible flesh. This natural arrangement works well, unless a nest of ants grows so greedy as to overstep its bounds and attempt to avail itself of the honey cached within the hives. This is when the prudent beekeeper must intervene.”

  Detective Grayson, who had meanwhile taken a seat at the kitchen table, began to sweep a clutter of errant toast crumbs into a tiny pile and then off the tabletop into his cupped palm.

  “My father first hit upon the idea of making moats out of pie tins to repel the invading forces,” I told the detective as I held out my hand. He brushed the crumbs into it, and I rinsed them off into the sink.

  “You were saying?” he said.

  “The moats are made by sawing off all four hive stands’ legs midway up their length and nailing pie tins to the top of the separated leg segments and then reattaching each one to its mated stub with the pie tin between.

  “The tins are filled with motor oil. Oil is more difficult for ants to cross than plain water, and if one is careful to keep the pans filled to capacity at all times, and free of leaves and twigs, which ants are clever enough to use as natural bridges, such an arrangement is usually successful in keeping both populations separated.”

  I explained all this as I collected two clean glasses from the kitchen cabinet and a pitcher of lemonade from my icebox.

  “Let’s go into the other room, shall we?”

  Detective Grayson nodded and stood, wiping his palms on his pant legs, and I led him into the dining room, where he eased his heavy frame into a seat at the polished mahogany table facing the front window.

  “Just half a glass, Mr. Honig,” he said, running his hand through his robust thatch of curls and unbuttoning his jacket—a rumpled gray one every bit as formless as the brown jacket he’d worn the day before. His crisp, paisley-patterned tie seemed once again almost dapper by contrast. The detective fidgeted in his chair as if to find a spot of comfort that was by nature beyond his reach.

  Pouring a half glass for him and a full glass for myself, I waited for Detective Grayson to disclose the reason for his visit, as clearly, by his growing agitation, he had some business to which he wished to attend.

  “We got the coroner’s preliminary report this morning,” he said finally, taking a small sip of lemonade and nodding appreciatively. “It appears your neighbors were dead at least forty-eight hours before you found them. The coroner says they essentially suffocated. Whoever put that tape over their mouths didn’t leave much room for them to breathe.”

  I did not want to know this. I did not want to imagine the rising terror that Claire and Hilda must have felt as they watched each other’s chests heave and struggle in vain to fill their lungs with air. I closed my eyes but could not erase the memory of their glassy stares.

  “Mr. Honig?”

  I opened my eyes to find the detective leaning forward, his narrowed eyes staring directly into mine.

  “I know you told me you didn’t see anything suspicious yesterday, but I wonder whether you might have noticed anything out of the ordinary on Friday?”

  I thought for a moment about what I had been doing just three days earlier.

  “Nothing that I can recall,” I said after some consideration. I explained to the detective that I had observed a week earlier the telltale signs of several large cells being constructed to prepare for the birth of a new queen bee and so my attention had been thus preoccupied.

  “This is all very interesting, Mr. Honig . . .”

  “Indeed it is,” I agreed. “This wondrous process is begun when a colony’s queen grows old and her egg production begins to lag. Did you know, Detective, that queen bees are no different genetically than any other worker bee?”

  Taking his silence as tacit acknowledgment of his ignorance in the ways of bees, I proceeded to lay out for him the process of differentiation that occurs in the hive, a process that begins, as any apiarist knows, once the eggs are laid into the queen cells. I explained how, as soon as the eggs hatch, the nurse bees begin to feed the larvae a specially prepared mixture of regurgitated honey and pollen called royal jelly.

  “This royal jelly is what causes certain organs and characteristics to develop in these young bees that transforms each one from an ordinary worker bee into a virgin queen . . .”

&nbs
p; “Mr. Honig,” the detective interjected. I paused, waiting for him to speak, but after a moment of silence he simply shook his head, and so I continued without offense, explaining that the transformation of a select worker bee into queen has everything to do with the life cycle of the hive.

  “Only the first of these proto-queens to emerge from her cell will live. The others are generally dispatched with a lethal sting by the new regent, who then does the same to her weaker queen mother. Of course in the rare instances when the young queen is unable to perform the requisite matricide, or if she herself proves flawed, the hive workers are quick to surround the doomed queen, who surrenders without a fight to suffocation by the rabble.

  “It is the law of the hive that only a queen may sting another queen,” I explained. “And the queen will sting none but her own.”

  Having finished the last of his lemonade, the detective began to run his thick forefinger around the rim of his empty glass, producing a high-pitched squeal that was louder, but lower, than that of a newly hatched queen. I pointed out that by whatever means the coup is accomplished, the new virgin queen must next wait for the first sunny day to take wing, where she is quickly followed by a score or so of young drones who pursue her fifty or more feet into the air to mate with her on the fly. The handful of young drones that are successful in their ardor are eviscerated during the mating process. The others are usually cast out of the hive, or killed outright, by the worker bees sometime in early fall, when the drones, having already outlived the only useful purpose for which they were born, are deemed expendable.

  “In the beehive, the age-old maxim ‘He who does not work does not eat’ is strictly adhered to.”

  “Truly fascinating, Mr. Honig,” the detective said somewhat drily to my ear. Pushing his lemonade glass aside, he extracted his notebook from his suit jacket and laid it open in front of him.

  “Now, about last Friday . . .”

  Six

  THE QUEEN BEE: The mother of all bees in the hive, she has two functions: to lay as many eggs as she can and to emit the pheromone that will produce the next queen.

  This is what I’ve been trying to explain,” I said, offering to refill Detective Grayson’s lemonade. He cupped his palm over his glass. “I was far too preoccupied requeening my cross-tempered number four hive to have paid any attention to the goings-on at my neighbors’ house that unfortunate day.”

  Beehives, like any human household, have a temperament every bit as distinctive as the dominant personalities that reside within.

  “While there are devices we can employ to keep our bees gentle enough to accommodate, and in some cases even relish, our presence, there is only so much a conscientious beekeeper can do before more drastic measures must be taken,” I said.

  “Just how drastic?” Detective Grayson asked. His voice rose to suggest curiosity, but I suspected it was more from investigative reflex than any genuine apian interest.

  “Requeening the cross hive,” I said. “Requeening is never my first choice. I usually try hanging a wave cloth near the flyway of a particularly testy hive. The constant flapping of the cloth in the breeze helps the bees to become accustomed to motion. This discourages them from rising forth to defend their hive from the occasional passerby. I have also found that several good puffs from a smoker can do much to calm an agitated hive when working in close quarters. But when all else fails, a cantankerous queen must be replaced.”

  Detective Grayson nodded for me to continue as his eyes flickered about the room before coming to rest on the large picture window that dominated my dining room’s west wall.

  “You must understand that the queen sets the overall tone of the hive,” I said, my eyes instinctively following the detective’s. “Just as a gentle queen usually produces a hive of workers and drones as even-tempered as she, a cantankerous queen more often than not holds court over a hive that is easily frightened or offended no matter what care we take to placate it.

  “Come the first warm days of spring, it is the cross-tempered hives that are the first to swarm. This is why extra vigilance is required when a new queen is expected to emerge from such a hive,” I explained. “The last thing I want is another bad-tempered hive to go with the one I already have.”

  Detective Grayson continued to stare past me and out the window. I took another sip of lemonade before recounting how, having heard the stirrings of a new brood of queens from my number sixteen hive the night before, my plan was to be up and outside first thing in the morning to watch for a gentle new queen to emerge so that I might use her to requeen my increasingly ill-tempered number four. I was about to explain exactly how such an operation was accomplished when the detective drew a conspicuous breath and refocused his eyes on mine.

  “Are you sure you didn’t notice anything unusual over at the Straussmans’ when you first got up?”

  “Nothing that I can recall.”

  “Think a little harder. How about when you were eating breakfast?” the good detective pressed. “Maybe you noticed something then?”

  I told him that I hardly remembered my repast at all, so anxious had I been to get on with my morning’s plan. “Why do you ask?”

  “We think the old ladies must have died shortly after breakfast, judging from what the coroner found in their stomachs—bits of toast and egg and some undigested chunks of wax,” Detective Grayson said, flipping through the pages of the notebook he had withdrawn from his jacket pocket. “What do you make of the wax?”

  “That would be their daily dose of honeycomb,” I replied. “Claire and Hilda were particularly fond of comb honey. They said the only way to properly enjoy it was to crush it with a knife and spread it on their morning toast—honey, wax, and bread all mashed together. Hilda swore this practice was what helped her ward off colds and all manners of sinus troubles. Myself, I prefer to cut off a bite-size piece of comb honey, chew it awhile, and then discard the wax, though I can’t say for sure it does me any more good than Hilda’s way during cold and flu season. You know, my grandmother, on the other hand, swore by black walnuts. ‘Crack and eat the meat of six walnuts,’ she’d say, ‘and you will not be sick a day.’”

  Detective Grayson chose not to engage in a debate between the merits of honeycomb versus walnuts.

  “You wouldn’t happen to know what time they normally ate their breakfast?” he prodded.

  “Shortly after sunrise, between six and seven, just as I do,” I said. “Especially at this time of year. The young queens usually begin to hatch first thing in the morning, so it’s best to get an early start on the day’s activities. The earlier, the better.”

  “I take it then that you were up first thing Friday morning, same as the Straussmans were,” Detective Grayson said, scribbling a line or two in his notebook and then pausing. “Think now, Mr. Honig. Maybe you heard something odd?”

  “Nothing that morning that I can recall,” I said. “My number sixteen hive is at the rear of my property, well beyond either eye- or earshot of the Straussmans’ house.”

  “Well, how about the night before? Anything out of the ordinary then?”

  “Nothing more or less extraordinary than the squeaks of the unhatched queen eager to break out of her cell,” I replied.

  Like most people, Detective Grayson knew nothing of the sounds bees make other than the familiar buzz of flight. I enumerated the range of chirps and whines and hums and squeaks emanating from a hive on any given occasion. The prudent beekeeper learns to distinguish which sounds mean what.

  “The young queens, for instance, make a high-pitched squeal, not unlike the note of a distant trumpet, shortly before they emerge from their sealed cells,” I said. “When I hear this clarion call in the evening, I can predict with a fair degree of certainty that a new queen will be born the following morning.”

  This is not the only thing I can predict, but I did not say as much as I watched the good detective sketch crude renderings of cartoonish bees wearing crowns upon their heads in his notebook t
hat he’d laid open on the table between us.

  So many people have come to me over the years to inquire about the best way to get into beekeeping, and, once in, how to refine their beekeeping techniques, that I find myself automatically evaluating the personalities of nearly everyone I meet for their suitability to such an endeavor. Observing Detective Grayson’s careless doodles, I suspected then that he had neither the patience nor the desire to care for bees. I also suspected that while he strove mightily to appear calm and unruffled, there was an aura of excitability beneath his pragmatic manner that was far too easily aroused. Such passions generally render one incompatible with bees. Claire Straussman had been one of the few exceptions to this rule, for while she had a mercurial personality that could set off more sparks than a Fourth of July celebration, she had an uncanny ability to read the nuances of pitch and tone by which bees communicate to one another and, by extension, to anyone outside the hive who cares to listen. This more than offset her unpredictable nature.

  I noticed that Detective Grayson had allowed a small, self-amused smile to creep across his face as he added a trumpet-playing bee to his sketch before setting his pen down and folding his hands atop his notebook. Taking another deliberate breath, he let the corners of his mouth drift back into practiced neutrality.

  “Okay, so you heard your bees squeaking last Thursday night?” he said at last.

  “Indeed I did. Stronger—and louder, as I recall—than any I had ever heard before.”

  I recalled—though I kept this to myself—how once upon a time the anticipated birth of a new queen, especially one heralded by such an uncommon racket, would have sent me hurrying next door to share the glorious news with my neighbors. Claire, in particular, took keen delight in observing the inner lives of our hives, and I had been for many years equally fond of imparting to her the finer points of beekeeping that had been passed on to me by my own father and mother. Sadly, however, such conviviality was no longer the norm between us, and so I had waited in solitude the previous Friday morning for the first young queen to break free from her cell. Detective Grayson did not appear to notice my retreat into private reverie as he returned his attention to the large picture window behind me.