Telling the Bees

by Peggy Hesketh

“Of course there’s nothing special about alfalfa honey,” she said. “It’s not the honey but what the bee has to do to extract the honey from the flower that is so fascinating.”

  Claire described in surprisingly intricate detail how this wily flower was designed so that if a bee were to sip its nectar directly from the blossom as is customary with other blossoms, it would shut on the bee’s tongue, and she would be hard-pressed to free herself. Claire explained that after several such awkward snares, the honeybee learns to approach the blossom from the side to sip the nectar without tripping the blossom. This, Claire said, proved that the honeybee was infinitely more intelligent than most creatures in the animal kingdom.

  “And how is that?” my father prodded.

  “Well, Mr. Honig, she can measure and interpret information and she is able to learn from her mistakes. I think this makes her nearly human in her ability to reason,” Claire said, and with an unseemly glint in her eyes added, “Of course the drone shows no such signs of intelligent life.”

  Surprised by her sudden erudition on the subject of bee science and the passion with which it was imparted, my father asked, “Wherever did you come up with such a thing?”

  “There are some things philosophers can’t teach you,” she replied, directing her gaze at me instead of my father, who seemed oblivious to her barb.

  I could not help wondering what had happened to the shy young girl who had flitted so obsequiously about the kitchen, serving tea and refreshments to her mother and me, at our first meeting only four years earlier. Over a single summer’s span, Claire had added a level of haughtiness that could, with very little imagination, be construed as false pride, or so it seemed to me at the time. And, regretfully, I responded in kind, wishing to show my father, I suppose, that I was as learned in apian anatomy as our young neighbor suddenly appeared to be.

  “Speaking of bees’ tongues, why do you suppose it is that while the queen bee is larger and stronger, and her wings are by far more powerful than her offspring’s, her tongue is only half as long as that of a worker bee?” I said, directing my query at Claire. When she did not respond right away, I offered that since the queen’s services are not required for gathering pollen or nectar, there is no need for her to have an overly developed organ for this specialized function, while the worker bees must.

  “Or just maybe discretion is the operating imperative here,” Claire added with another sly wink aimed at my father as if he could appreciate her wit more than I. “A true queen, after all, would never kiss and tell.”

  “Tell what?” I demanded. Claire seemed startled by the vehemence of my tone, as, in truth, was I.

  “Never mind,” she said.

  But I did mind. I can’t say why, but I did.

  I would like to state for the record that while I certainly disagreed then—and still do—with Aristotle’s belief that woman is but an inferior man, I wholeheartedly support his contention that all human actions have behind them one or more of these seven causes: chance, nature, compulsion, habit, reason, passion, and desire.

  Certainly in Claire’s case I would postulate that six out of the seven causes were mustered into action with the most dire of consequences—if not that fateful summer, then soon enough afterward.

  Twenty-eight

  DRONE CONGREGATION AREA: Where sexually mature drones from many colonies gather to mate with virgin queens. When a queen approaches, several drones copulate with her on the fly and eviscerate themselves in the process. It is not clear why drones choose a particular area to congregate, only that they will gather there year after year whether a queen is present or not.

  Saint Augustine, in the passion of his youth, had been sorely tempted by the lure of the flesh, and by his own admission on many occasions he found his self-restraint wanting. But Augustine repented his former ways. God made man a rational animal, composed of body and soul, he realized. God permitted man to sin, he then wrote, but not with impunity. And God pursued man with His mercy. He let man share a life of generation in common with the trees and a life of the senses with the beasts of the fields, but He made the singular distinction that man shares a life of intelligence only with angels.

  When I was young and blinded by the fire of my affection, I believed that Claire was that rare blend of beauty and intelligence that could elevate her to the realm of the spirit. But a change came over her after her visit to Detroit. I say Detroit now, of course, because Detective Grayson was clever enough to discover the truth of Claire’s whereabouts posthumously, but at the time of her return midway through her twenty-second year I only knew that she had gone away my dearest friend and had come back profoundly more worldly. When on the rare occasions we found ourselves alone, we rarely spoke as we once had, as only young innocents can.

  It was shortly after Claire’s return that a steady stream of suitors began to come calling, though I observed that no particular young man came often enough to be called steady.

  It became easy to discern when Claire was expecting a new beau. She would emerge from her front door in a fashionable dress with matching shoes and handbag, her hair piled up on her head and her lips and fingernails painted red. And before long she would begin to pace a wide figure eight back and forth across the porch until one young man or another pulled up in front of her house in his spit-and-polish roadster. She hardly gave any of these suitors time to turn the motor off before she bounded lightly down the porch stairs, then waited for him to come around to her side of the car to open the passenger door for her. As always, Claire commanded a certain level of respect even from these casual acquaintances.

  I noticed only one young man who for a time frequented Claire’s company more than the rest. But even he ceased his attentions shortly after making the unexpected acquaintance of the formidable Mrs. Straussman.

  It was early December, and I was sitting on my front porch, enjoying the cool ocean breeze, when I saw Claire come out her front door. I nodded my head in greeting as Claire happened to turn her head, but before she could respond Mrs. Straussman came around the side of the house at the very moment Claire’s gentleman caller pulled up in his roadster and bleated his horn to announce his arrival. As I believe I’ve mentioned before, Mrs. Straussman had lost her lower left leg to diabetes when Claire was still in her teens, but she’d since been fitted with an artificial limb that when used in conjunction with her sturdy badger cane provided her with some measure of mobility. I had grown to admire Mrs. Straussman’s ability to move around with seeming aplomb despite her looming bulk, so I cannot say who was more surprised by the sudden tumble she took right in front of the porch, me or the startled young man who had just dashed around the front of his car to open the door for Claire. Needless to say, the young man’s courtly intentions were quickly diverted from Claire to her mother as he rushed to the fallen woman’s side and began fanning her face with a silk kerchief he pulled from the breast pocket of his suit. At least, I assume it was silk, judging by his otherwise dandified appearance.

  Claire, meanwhile, continued to stand by the car door as if she expected her young man to simply abandon Mrs. Straussman, who lay prostrate on the ground. That’s when the young man looked up in desperation and spotted me sitting on my front porch.

  “You, there,” he shouted, a bit rudely perhaps but understandable given the extreme circumstances. “Come give me a hand.”

  Of course I obliged, and with no small effort the young man and I eventually helped Mrs. Straussman up onto the porch and into her customary rattan rocker. Once she was comfortably seated, the young man dashed back to retrieve the cane abandoned in the grass.

  “I’ll be all right, now,” Mrs. Straussman said. The young man handed the cane to her, and I must admit that despite her fall, she looked as hale as she ever did, though a bit winded, perhaps, and just a little flush in her ample cheeks. “It’s the sugar, you know.”

  “Sugar?”

  “Diabetes, lad. It makes me a wee bit light-headed from time to time.”

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nbsp; Claire, meanwhile, hadn’t budged from her station by the car, and I could see that this had caused her beau considerable consternation.

  “Run along now, young man. Don’t you worry about me,” Mrs. Straussman said, sighing heavily as she caressed the handle of her cane. “I’ll be just fine.”

  And of course she was, although the same could not be said of the couple whose evening she had so precipitously interrupted. While I couldn’t catch their words exactly, it was clear from their tone that a disagreement had sprung up between Claire and her gentleman caller over her apparent indifference to her mother’s infirmity, and soon enough he climbed back into the car and drove away, leaving Claire standing alone at the edge of the roadway.

  “Don’t you say a word,” she said as she strode past me into her house, and I was left alone on the porch with Mrs. Straussman for a moment longer until she said once again that she was quite all right.

  “Go on home, now,” she said, straightening the folds of her heavy black dress. “Clarinda can take care of me.”

  I stopped briefly on my own front porch to wave good night. I never saw that particular young man again, and after a time most of the others gradually stopped coming around as well.

  My desire to follow Claire never waned. But neither did my sacred obligation to my home, my family, and of course my bees. Claire and I were different in that regard. She felt burdened by filial duty to home and hearth throughout most of her troubled years on this earth; in her heart of hearts she always desired to be somewhere—anywhere—else. And sadly, as I so often told her in the waning years of our friendship, with her eyes locked on the distant horizon, she seemed sadly unprepared to appreciate the simple bounty that lay before her. At least, that was how I saw it. Claire was just as apt to point out to me that I was blinded to the possibilities of mystery and adventure by my own habit of keeping my nose so to the grindstone. Which is all true enough, I suppose, but as Claire would also no doubt say were she able to speak today, it’s all just so much water under the bridge.

  On the rare occasions Claire deigned to visit with my father and I as we worked together in our apiary, she no longer dove right in with a helping hand like she used to, more often than not quickly retiring to the kitchen, where she spent an inordinate amount of time assisting my mother in the preparation of meals or some other such household chore. I don’t know what they talked about—or even if they talked at all—as my mother adhered to strict rules of female confidentiality regarding anything said between the two of them. And Claire hardly ever spoke directly to me other than to say hello or good-bye or ask about my health or the well-being of our family’s bees.

  Still, I worried about her, and I tried as best I could to watch and protect over her without arousing her considerable ire. Despite her later accusations to the contrary, I never spied on Claire intentionally. Even when I saw her slip out of her house at night, I did not follow her into the grove as I once had. It was only by chance that I stumbled upon her private affairs that one and only time so very long ago.

  Twenty-nine

  THE QUEEN’S BURDEN: The life span of a queen is four to five years, compared to the six to seven weeks of her daughters. Her color is more golden. Her sting is more curved. The facets of her eyes, however, are fewer by several thousand, and though her brain is smaller her ovaries are enormous.

  It was an unusually steamy night, even for August, when the nightly ocean breeze generally finds a way to work its magic on all but the most obdurate daytime heat even this far inland, and as I recall the music was reverberating off the walls of my room and people were shouting and laughing as they always did on Saturday nights at the Harmony Ballroom. Between the noise and the heat, it was next to impossible to sleep, and so even though it was well past midnight I decided I might as well get dressed and take a walk out to our number fifteen hive to retrieve the smoker can and gloves I’d carelessly left behind earlier that day. I didn’t want my father to discover my mistake. He was, I must admit, a bit of a stickler for order.

  “A place for everything and everything in its place,” my father always said.

  I was still sitting on my back porch steps, lacing up my shoes, when I saw a white blur dash through the trees beyond my mother’s garden. It was none of my affair, I told myself, as I wove slowly through the orderly rows of orange trees that converged into darkness beneath the dim illumination of the rising moon. The night air was thick with the aroma of ripe oranges, and I had to duck to avoid being struck by low-hanging clusters of fruit. I was bent over in just such an evasive maneuver, in fact, when I was startled out of my own reveries by the sharp braying sound of a man’s laugh followed by a flurry of low whispers coming from somewhere nearby. I hesitated a moment, but then I realized one of the two voices was Claire’s, clear as the silver moonlight that shone through the trees.

  “Hola yourself, kiddo,” she said, and I looked up just in time to see a lean, hard-looking man in a dark long-sleeved shirt with embroidered white trim and a woven leather tie with silver tips that matched the pointed toes of his black leather boots that tipped out from beneath the cuffs of his dark trousers. Claire threw her slender arms around the man’s neck, and the moonlight reflecting off her dazzling white gown cast both figures in an otherworldly glow that drew my unwilling eyes to them like a moth to a flame.

  Transfixed for the moment, I watched with revulsion as the dark-clad man loosened the leather band from around his neck and lifted it slowly over his head as he unbuttoned his shirt with his other hand. Then he slipped the tie around Claire’s neck and pulled her closer to him. With her lips nearly brushing his, she whispered something else I could not hear and I turned to go. But as I did, a twig snapped sharply under my foot, and I froze when both their heads turned in the direction of the sound. Partially concealed by the trunk of a tree and the darkness all around me, I remained for the moment undetected. To move, I realized, would be to risk giving myself away. And so reluctantly I stayed, and I saw more in the next few moments than I could erase in a lifetime.

  I cannot say if it was the first—or even the only—time Claire met this man in the grove. I only can say that he was not one of her “regular” callers, who for the most part had already fallen by the wayside by this time. I will venture, however, that there was a swagger and self-assuredness to this man’s movements that the previous callow young men had lacked. This man seemed older—nearly old enough, in fact, to be her father. But where her father was reed thin, milk pale, and distant in bearing, this man, though still lean, was more robust, swarthy even, and given to bursts of raucous laughter where no good reason for mirth existed that I could detect.

  Little that might be construed as tenderness or even true affection seemed to pass between the two of them either before or after their unholy coupling. Whereas the man expressed his lust in a chorus of grunts and guttural moans, Claire bore her defilement in relative silence, with only an occasional whimper emitting from her lips as the force of the man’s excitement drove him to the edge, it seemed to me, of abandoning all senses. Repelled by what I saw yet unable to turn away, I welcomed the sharp sting of tears that diffused my vision until the act was finished and the man collapsed onto the perfect white mounds of Claire’s exposed breasts even as a small sigh of relief escaped unbidden from my own trembling lips.

  And then it was over.

  With very little conversation between them, they presently drew themselves apart. I held close to the tree trunk as Claire, cool as ice, slid her dress back down over her head, slipped her shoes on, and scurried past me into the night. I waited a few more moments to allow the man time to pull up his pants, buckle his belt, smooth his hair, and saunter back toward the Harmony Ballroom. Then I hastily retrieved my smoker can and gloves and finally, under the cover of darkness, I returned home to my bed and an uneasy sleep.

  Four months later, Claire, Hilda, and their mother went off to Alabama to take care of a poor unmarried relation. And six months after that, they brought David
Gilbert home. Dark and brazen, he grew up calling the elder Straussmans Pappa and Nana Straussman. The younger women he referred to as Aunt Claire and Aunt Hilda, more out of deference to the gap in years than anything else, I believe, as their relationship was always portrayed to outsiders as that of distant cousins.

  David Gilbert was raised as a shame baby, but the true shame was conveniently deflected from Mrs. Straussman’s willful daughter onto the illusory Suzanna Gilbert. Despite the family’s machinations to the contrary, I believe there were many in the neighborhood that suspected David Gilbert’s true origins, though none came forward to confront the Straussmans or the child directly to my knowledge.

  I am not one to judge.

  I believe the Straussmans did what they thought they must do, given the indelicate circumstances and prevailing social strictures of the day. And of course in hindsight, given the chance to do it over again, I do not think I would have allowed myself to be insinuated into this untenable situation as I seemed to have set all manner of tragic events in motion despite my best intentions. In truth, I had sought only to bring presumptive mother and son closer together, but to my everlasting regret all my well-intended words tore asunder what few familial bonds they had stubbornly clung to, inauthentic as they may have been.

  Thirty

  THE LANGSTROTH HIVE: Patented in 1851 by Reverend Lorenzo Lorraine Langstroth, it has become the standard in modern hive design. Incorporating the concept of bee space, this boxlike, stackable structure contains removable frames to which bees attach their wax honeycombs.

  My new neighbors construct strange memorial displays on their lawn because they have chosen to believe that truth lies within the pulse of electromagnetic signals. They record names and dates on tiny crosses as if these simple inscriptions are the sole measure of a person’s life and death. But life is not a simple arithmetic equation. Life is algorithmic in its complications. The flap of a drab moth’s wing may have as many consequences—if not more—than the flutter of her infinitely more ethereal cousin’s. Have my neighbors, through their tawdry memorial displays, convinced me that the power lines that now strangle the sky above my home are responsible for all the deaths in our little community? I think not.