Telling the Bees

by Peggy Hesketh

  But have I noticed that my hives that lie directly beneath the transformers from which the power lines emanate consistently produce less honey than the others? Perhaps.

  Don’t get me wrong. I understand that there is a difference between causation and correlation, and that it often takes time to discern the difference. Yet I believe it is no small coincidence that so many of the world’s most accomplished thinkers have arrived at great truths by studying the complicated laws, labors, and physical discourse of the honeybee.

  Such truths are not easily won. The esteemed poet Virgil concluded after much serious thought that bees collected their embryos like dewdrops from leaves and sweet plants. The Roman scholar Varo thought that bees collected wax not from the labors of their sisters but from the excrement of flowers, and Pliny the Elder wrote that echoes could kill bees.

  To his credit, Aristotle was the first ancient to study bees scientifically, and he was the first to discard the long-held belief that bees were the products of autogenesis, spontaneously born from the carcasses of dead oxen. He persisted, however, in the mistaken belief that the hive was a patriarchal society, a notion with political correspondence in humankind that persisted into the seventeenth century when an English beekeeper named Butler reported that the “Kingbee” was really a queen because he had seen her deposit eggs. It took the Dutch savant Swammerdam to confirm this observation and to overthrow once and for all the rule of kingship in the hive with his invention of the microscope, which he used to examine the internal organs of dissected bees.

  Within the grand scope of human learning, the very idea that a queen bee is born and raised for the sole purpose of populating the hive is a fairly modern concept. So, too, is the recognition that drones are born for the singular task of fertilizing the queen’s eggs and hence spend the greater bulk of their short lives eating and carousing and making a general nuisance of themselves in exchange for that one purposeful moment on earth when they will be called upon by death-defying instinct and biochemical attraction to pursue their virgin queen high into the dazzling afternoon sky to mate with Her Royal Highness on the fly.

  The German poet Wilhelm Busch referred to drones as “lazy, stupid, fat, and greedy.” But considering the unhappy fate of those brazen few strong enough and determined enough to fulfill their carnal destiny in one simultaneous instant of ecstasy and disembowelment—and that their remaining brothers, their collective purpose served, will be cast out of the hive by their unsympathetic sisters and left to freeze to death or to starve as soon as the winter chill arrives—such judgment seems overly harsh to me.

  Claire was well schooled in these basic facts of bee behavior, but like Busch and my cross-bearing neighbors today she often failed to grasp the underlying truth behind the facts.

  And so Claire made mistakes. Not so much out of ignorance as arrogance. False pride. Vanity. Call it what you will, but I never heard her once admit that she was wrong. About anything or anyone. And, sadly, I observed the direst of consequences in this regard the day I witnessed firsthand the sort of familial damage to David Gilbert’s fragile psyche that I had only imagined having been heaped upon her. In Claire’s defense I must say that I understood then as I still do now the source of her considerable wrath. Through David Gilbert’s carelessness and neglect, he had caused the needless death of thousands upon thousands of precious bees—bees that Claire had lovingly acquired and scrupulously attended to for no other reason than to indulge her most genuine but sadly unacknowledged affection for the boy. To come unexpectedly upon the terrible devastation of her hives that awful afternoon must have been a cruel blow that no doubt pushed her over the brink of reason into the lower realm of unbridled emotion.

  It was the raw fury of her cry that caused me to drop what I was doing without a second thought to my own bees’ welfare and race immediately to her side that awful day.

  While I was not privy to his demeanor within the four walls of their abode, it seemed that while David Gilbert was considerably darker in outward appearance he was correspondingly more lighthearted and generally less gloomy in spirit than I remember any of his elders to have been save Claire herself—or at least the Claire I remembered in the flower of her youth. David Gilbert had that same spark when he was young. On many a morning, I had watched him scurry cheerily off in the company of two or three equally carefree young fellows who made a habit of stopping off and whistling for him in front of his house on their way to school. And just as often I would observe this same group of youngsters take their insouciant leave from him each afternoon at the very same spot.

  In this regard, I suppose, some things never change. While the elder Mrs. Straussman, as she grew ever larger and less mobile, was less apt to accost the neighborhood children who chanced to pass by her house, by the time David Gilbert reached school age the mere mention of her name held the same dark sense of foreboding among this new generation of children as it had with mine. I never saw a single one of his young friends venture onto the Straussmans’ front lawn, let alone breach the inner sanctum of that cursed house. That particular feat of youthful valor remains mine alone to claim.

  But that is neither here nor there. On the particular afternoon of David Gilbert’s unintentional transgression, his school chums had already bid their good-byes and he had gone into the house when Claire called for him to join her in the backyard. This I saw with my own eyes, as I was sitting on my back porch doing my clumsy best to mend a small tear in the elbow of my sweater, and from what I was able to gather from the shouting and recriminations that came later it was during this conversation that Claire had mentioned to David Gilbert that the oil in their hive pans had grown dangerously overrun with leaves and debris and she asked him to walk to the store to buy several new cans of motor oil with which to replace the contaminated supply. He promised that he would, and, in fact, he was well on his way to fulfilling his promise when he happened upon a pair of his schoolmates on the road to the store. The boys were hurrying to the Straussman house to ask if he could come out to play a game of baseball with them as one of their regular teammates had been injured the day before. David Gilbert said he informed them of the errand he had to run first, but his young friends insisted that the game was about to start. They begged him to come along at once.

  And so David Gilbert put off his trip to the store until after the ball game. To his credit, he had scurried back to fill the hive pans with water before running off with his friends to the ballpark, assuming these makeshift moats would keep any marauding ants away from the hives just as well as oil, at least until the game was over.

  To be fair, they were never really David Gilbert’s bees, despite Claire’s best intentions. It had been Hilda, and not he, who Claire had enlisted from the start to care for the hives she’d acquired as a present for his fifth birthday. In fact, I was surprised that David Gilbert had been asked to put the oil in the pans that day. It was only later that I learned that Hilda had taken to bed the day before with a light-headedness that was subsequently diagnosed as the onset of diabetes, the same illness that had so debilitated her mother.

  In retrospect, I think perhaps that it wasn’t so much David Gilbert’s understandable mistake that angered Claire as much as it was his growing indifference to the things that mattered to her.

  Hilda may not have understood Claire’s passions, but she always indulged them. I recalled the moment a handful of years earlier when, despite her fear of bees, Hilda had agreed to help Claire perform the ritual transferring of ownership of our colony of bees to them.

  “Our bees are sensitive creatures who crave order in their lives. When that order is disrupted, we find that something sweet will soothe their agitation,” I’d told Claire the day after my father and I had given her one of our hives so that she might start an apiary of her own. I gave Claire one of my mother’s leftover scones, which she’d wrapped in a tea towel.

  “Order, schmorder,” Claire had sniffed as she’d reached back and clutched Hilda’s hand, who ap
peared reluctant to stand so close to the new hive.

  As much for Hilda’s benefit as anything, I expounded on the orderly progression of labor in the hive that was in the purest sense a natural affirmation of the Hegelian system of order within the universe, explaining in precise detail the stages and purpose of each bee, from worker to drone to queen.

  “For God’s sake, Albert, don’t you think I know your so-called Hegelian hierarchy of the bees by heart by now?” Claire said. “But just because you say it’s so doesn’t mean it’s true.”

  Indeed, she proceeded to inform me in a somewhat opprobrious manner that there had recently emerged a new school of thought that allowed for more specificity and individuality of labor within the hive, which some scientists believed was due, she said, to the genetic diversity implicit in the multiple partners a queen bee instinctively takes in the course of her nuptial flight.

  “All of which proves what?” I prodded only after she at last deigned to conclude her exegesis on bee colony propagation.

  “It proves,” she replied, “that even within your precious ordered society diversity is needed.”

  “Within reason, of course,” I agreed.

  “Reason be damned!” she exclaimed. “It’s what every hive needs. It’s what we all need. New blood. New experiences. Otherwise, we just wither away and . . .”

  “And what?” I pressed. There had to be a point to her speculative digression.

  “I don’t know,” she said. “I just think that order can’t be the end all and be all of existence. It seems to me the universe has a way of upsetting everything just when you think you have it all figured out.”

  “Do you mean me particularly or humanity as a whole?”

  “Oh, for God’s sake, Albert . . .”

  Though I did not approve of the irreverence of her language, I was convinced of the passion behind Claire’s conviction. I waited for her to clarify her notion, but she had no more to say, and the silence seemed to set like amber around her.

  “In the best of all worlds,” I conceded, “the introduction of new blood may strengthen a declining hive, but it has been my experience that just as often it destroys it.”

  “That’s what I love about you, Albert,” Claire said, shattering her stony silence with a sudden sharp laugh. She dropped Hilda’s hand and took my mine in hers. They felt as smooth and cool as I imagined her mother’s satin gown felt to her so very long ago. “You’re so safe and secure in your own little world, you almost make me feel safe there, too.”

  “So what about the bees?” Hilda interjected out of the blue—or so it seemed after having been all but ignored for the better part of the morning. In my own defense, I can say only that Hilda had always appeared content to remain in her sister’s shadow.

  “That’s what I’m about to explain,” I said, feeling my cheeks redden as I slipped my hands from Claire’s before turning purposely to face Hilda. “Thanks to our rapping on their hive last evening, these bees know that something is out of order in their world. That is why you must welcome them to their new home this morning by letting them know they have a new mistress now.”

  And, even as I spoke, a few field bees had already begun to poke through the grass at the entrance of their hive. I instructed Claire to unwrap the scone I had handed her earlier and to break off a few small chunks and place them on and around the grass thatching. Then I handed Claire my father’s key ring, which he’d given me that morning for just this purpose, and I told Claire to shake the keys at the hive as she repeated the following phrase three times:

  “Little brownies, little brownies, your mistress is here.”

  Hilda issued a skeptical little snort, which seemed contagious—at least to her sister.

  “Are you sure?” Claire said.

  “It will only take a moment,” I urged. I believe that if Hilda had not been there, or if my father had been there instead, Claire might not have hesitated at all. “Please, Claire. If for nothing else, for my father’s peace of mind.”

  “For your father, then,” Claire said. Taking a deep breath, she stepped toward the hive, jangled the keys softly, leaned her face in close to the hive, and began to whisper so softly I almost couldn’t hear her words, but clearly it wasn’t to me she was speaking. As I’ve often said, Claire had a transcendent gift for the language of bees, and this occasion was no exception as almost as soon as she had uttered the first words of the phrase I’d just taught her bees began issuing from the hive in groups of twos and threes, many brushing her lips as they flew by. By the time she’d said it a second time, a cloud of bees had surrounded her, and before she could move an inch they had covered most of her head like a living crown. Out of the corner of my eye I saw Hilda open her mouth as if to scream, but an urgent look from me thankfully stayed her voice.

  “Stay still as you can, Claire,” I said in my most soothing tone.

  But Claire showed no sign of fear. In fact, she broke into a broad smile, and her voice was strong and clear as she intoned for the third and final time: “Little brownies, little brownies, your mistress is here.”

  Hilda, meanwhile, had raised her hand to her mouth as if to stifle any sound that might escape, and I noticed that a few bees had broken away from Claire to circle the space above Hilda’s head. And then, as if satisfied that Hilda posed no threat, the bees circled back around to Claire to rejoin their sisters, who clustered now upon Claire’s head and arms and upper torso. Finally, when it looked as though Hilda would burst from stoppered horror, the bees began to depart in a slow stream toward the Straussmans’ blossoming almond grove to the west of the clearing.

  “I’m fine,” Claire assured Hilda, who had begun tugging at the collar and sleeves of her sister’s summer blouse convinced she would find a sea of welts on the exposed skin of Claire’s neck and arms. Even I had to admit I had been worried.

  “See? No stings,” Claire declared as she turned her arms over and back again. “They just wanted to get to know me.”

  All these years later, I still wonder if her bees were the only ones who ever truly knew Claire. I do know that as hard as I tried, I always seemed to come up short in her eyes. I suppose it also goes without saying that despite Claire’s oblique encouragement, very little new blood was introduced into my immediate family—or hers, for that matter—and what did flow served to disrupt rather than strengthen either.

  From the very beginning, David Gilbert never stood a chance.

  When David Gilbert returned home from his ball game, elated by a game-winning clout that had crowned him hero for the day, he found Claire, beside herself with anger and despair, bent over thousands of drowned bees floating in the water-filled hive pans.

  “One thing!” Claire had wailed as I crossed the break in the hedgerow. Her voice seemed unnaturally shrill in the absence of the customary background hum of her hives. “All I asked you to do was one simple thing.”

  “I swear, Aunt Claire, I was going to take care of it right after the game,” David Gilbert said sullenly.

  “One thing,” she repeated. “And for what? A game?”

  “It’s not just a game,” he countered, a brash note of defiance shading his words. “It’s baseball. The Big Train got his start here. Right here. Do you even know who Walter Johnson is?”

  “One of your silly ballplayers?”

  “Your bees are what’s silly, that’s what!”

  “My bees?” she said, her voice rising like white-hot ash.

  “I hate them,” he said. Though she raised her hand to the boy, to her credit Claire did not strike him.

  “I hate you,” she said instead.

  And I watched David Gilbert’s eyes flitter and his jaw set as Claire drew a quick, sharp breath as if she could somehow call back the only three words that I ever saw her regret.

  Judgment, as my father would say, is the province of the Lord, and so I would not for the life of me condemn Claire outright. I will say, however, that had I been faced with a similar disaster, I can
only pray that I might have acted with more Christian restraint than Claire was able to muster toward the boy that day. As it was, my well-intentioned attempt to intervene on his behalf was met with nearly the same level of fury that his original transgression had provoked.

  “Boys will be boys, Claire,” I said as delicately as I could, though I must admit I possessed no particular affinity for typical boyhood pursuits such as our national pastime. Clearly David Gilbert had not intended to harm the bees, I tried to tell her, but to no avail.

  “You stay out of this, you pompous old busybody,” Claire said to me. And then she turned to the boy and grasped his thin shoulders and called into question his intelligence and his trustworthiness. For a moment I feared she would shake the very life out of him. Instead, she simply sighed.

  “What were you thinking?” she said at last, her voice sounding more weary than angry. “What were you thinking?”

  “Nothing, Aunt Claire,” he said sullenly as Claire released her grip on him. “Nothing at all.”

  Which I believe was true enough, as I do not believe there was any conscious intention on David Gilbert’s part to blatantly disobey Claire’s command. But as is so often the case when a child does not understand the reason behind a particular dictum, he may not foresee the harm in skirting around it. To his way of thinking, he had merely done the next best thing by filling the trays with water instead of oil.

  “The bees are drawn to the water, David Gilbert,” I explained as calmly as I could once I was sure Claire’s anger had truly abated. Clearly this was a point of bee nature that Claire had neglected to impart to him. “They fly into the pans for a drink, but they can’t stay afloat for more than a moment before their wings are soaked and, unable to fly away, they soon drown. Bees don’t like the smell of motor oil. They try never to land in oil.”