The Language of Bees

by Laurie R. King

  Suddenly a tiny brown object flashed towards where I sat and began to snap and growl furiously at my boot-laces. I quelled the impulse to kick the beast over the cliff, and received the apologies of its owner with little sympathy.

  “If that dog gets in among the sheep,” I told the girl, “don't be surprised if it feels the end of a shepherd's crook.”

  Her boy-friend began to object, then noticed that I was actually a female and toned down his remarks somewhat.

  I rose, and continued with my literary stroll.

  The language of bees is one of the great mysteries left us in this age, the means by which this genus communicate. For speak they do, to tell their hive-mates of food, to warn of invasion, to exchange the password of identity, to reassure that all is well. Speech among humans is a complex interaction between tongue and teeth, lungs and larynx, driven by mind and a thousand generations of tradition.

  But what if we humans had developed along another line than that of primate? What if, instead of manipulative digits and opposing thumbs, we were given only arms, teeth, and wings? If in place of fist and weapon we were given a defence that required us to lay down our own lives? If we lacked the lungs and trachea that gave rise to speech, how would we preserve the intelligence of our own community?

  Humans convey meaning in a multitude of ways: the lift of a shoulder, the sideways slip of a gaze, the tensing of small muscles, or the quantity of air passing through the vocal cords. How much more must this be so in a complex hive-mind that lacks the brute communication of words?

  One finds common sense and intelligence in the newest of hives and the rawest of virgin queens, a discernment that goes far past mere dumb survival. No beekeeper doubts that the creatures in his charge have their own language, as immediate and real as that which might be found in a village composed entirely of brothers and sisters. However, whether bees communicate by odour, by subtle emanations, by faint song, or by infinitesimal gestures we have yet to discover.

  A loud voice greeted me from a few feet away, and I looked up, startled, to see a group of at least twenty young women determinedly equipped for mountain-climbing—all had hiking poles, all sweated under sturdy trousers and heavy Alpine boots. Their leader, a stout bespectacled woman of forty, had hailed me. I paused politely with the book closed over my finger.

  “Do you know where we might take some refreshment?” she asked with a touch of desperation.

  I looked to see where I was, then pointed towards the distant rise. “You see that tower there? Keep going past it and you'll come to an hotel. I'm sure they'll have ices and tea.”

  The entire group thanked me and marched away, their boots thudding on the bare path like so many cattle hooves. I shook my head and resumed my solitary way.

  The massacre of the males is a yearly occurrence in the hive—“Delivering over to executioners pale the lazy yawning drone.” When the days close in and the last nectar ceases, the workers cast their gaze upon the drones, whom they have willingly fed and cosseted all the year long, but who are now only a burden on the food reserves, a threat to the future of the hive. So the females rise against the useless males and exterminate them every one, viciously ripping their former charges to pieces and driving any survivors out into the cold.

  The female is generally the more practical member of any species.

  What might we say of the intelligence of bees? On the one hand, it beggars the imagination that an entire species would permit itself to be enslaved, penned up, pushed about, and systematically pillaged for the hard-fought product of a year's labours.

  Yet is this so remarkably different from the majority of human workers? Are they not enslaved to the coal face or the office desk, told where to go and what to do by forces outside their control? Do not the government and those who control prices in the market-place systematically rob human workers of all but a thin measure of the year's earnings?

  I laughed aloud at this last paragraph, only to be startled by yet another voice, this one nearly on top of me.

  “Good day, madam.”

  I jolted to a stop and looked at the man who had addressed me, a dapper figure with pure white hair underneath the straw boater he was lifting in greeting.

  “Hullo,” I answered.

  “I wonder if you might know the shortest path to the Tiger Inn, in East Dean? I am supposed—”

  “There,” I said, pointing repressively. This fashion for countryside rambles looked to have severe drawbacks, particularly at this time of year.

  When the white-haired gentleman had left, I checked my position again and found that I had just about run out of cliff-side path: Below me lay Eastbourne with its frothy pier-top pleasure palace and sea-front hotels. Its long curve of shingle beach was thick with holiday-makers and umbrellas, the waves dark with splashing bodies large and small.

  Less than five miles up the coast from that frivolous piece of architecture, on a sunny September morning 858 years before, half a thousand ships had come to shore, carrying a king, a flag, and enough men and horses to seize England's future.

  I glanced around me warily, and abandoned the public footpaths for the pastures of sheep and gorse, reading in solitary contentment until a shadow fell upon the page: My feet had brought me home. I let myself through the gate, to stand beneath trees heavy with summer fruit; the air was thick with fragrance, and with the throb of activity from the hives. Lulu's bicycle still leant on the wall near by the kitchen door, so I cleared away some rotting apples and settled down with my back against a tree.

  Beekeeping would appear to be a hobby for the tin-pot god, the man who seeks to keep an entire race under his control. In point of fact, a mere human has little control over bees: He shelters them, he takes their honey, he drives away pests, but in the end, he merely hopes for the best.

  A bee has no loyalty to the keeper, only to the hive; no commitment to the place, only to the community. A queen has no conversation for her human counterpart, and she or any other bee will attack the human protector if he makes a gesture that can be read as threat.

  Despite millennia of close history, in the end, the best a beekeeper can hope for is that he be ignored by his bees.

  In the hive, there can be but one ruler. The queen (Virgil, here, got it wrong, and imagined a bee king) is permitted a sole outing in her long life, one brief foray into the blue heights. She chooses a day of singular warmth and clarity, and sings her anticipation, stirring the hive into a state of excitement before she finally launches herself into the sky, pulling the males after her like the tail of a comet. Only the fastest can catch the queen, with her long wings and great strength, which ensures the vigour of their future progeny.

  Then she returns to her hive where, if the beekeeper has his way, she spends the remainder of her days, never to fly, never to use her wings, never to see the sky again.

  When one watches that queen, dutifully planting her eggs in the cells prepared for them, surrounded at every moment by attentive workers, fed and cleaned and urged to ever greater production, one can only wonder: Does she remember? Does some part of that mind live forever in the soaring blue, inhabiting freedom in the way a prisoner will imagine a rich meal with such detail his mouth waters? Or does the endless song of the hive fill her mind, compensating for the drudgery of her lot?

  Perhaps that freedom is why the queen is the hive's one true warrior, jealously guarding her position against her unborn rivals until the regal powers wane, her production falters.

  But a queen does not die of old age. If she does not fall in royal battle, or of the cold, her daughters will eventually turn against her. They gather, hundreds of them, to surround her in a living mass, smothering her and crushing her. And when they have finished, they discard her lifeless body and begin the business of raising up another queen.

  The queen is dead, long live the queen.

  That is the way of the hive.

  My attention was caught here by motion at the top of the book: a bee, come to explore the
possibilities of the printed page. Or more likely, taking advantage of a temporary resting place, for her leg sacs bulged with pollen, a load that the most doughty of aeronauts might reconsider. She walked along the blue binding, as heedless of me as I was of the sky overhead; reaching the spine, she gathered herself and flashed off in the direction of the white Langstroth box thirty feet away, in the shade of Mrs Hudson's beloved Cox's Orange Pippin.

  I pocketed the book and followed the bee.

  Holmes had situated the hive to be warmed by the morning sun but shaded by the apple tree during the afternoon. I knelt nearby, avoiding a wasp that was working at a fallen apple, and watched the bees come and go.

  The Langstroth hive was a wooden structure roughly twenty inches on a side. On the outside it was a stack of plain, whitewashed boxes, but within lay a technological marvel of precise measurements and moving parts, all of them aimed at providing the bees with such perfect surroundings, they would stay put and work. One hive could produce hundreds of pounds of honey, under the right conditions, from bees that would be just as pleased with a hollow tree.

  At the bottom front of the box was a long entrance slit with a porch on which the workers landed. Or, as on this hot day, stood facing the outer world while whirring their wings enthusiastically—this was the draught that Holmes had written about, air pushed through the hive to exit, hotter and damper than it had entered, through vents at the upper back. The sound this made struck the neophyte as a warning of high danger, as if the hive was about to erupt in fury and search for a human target for its wrath.

  I knew Holmes' bees well enough, however, to hear that this was merely the roar of a hard-working hive, putting away its wealth, one minuscule drop at a time—until the beekeeper ripped off the top of their universe and pillaged the community's resources for his own savage needs.

  One queen; a handful of males who spent their lives in toil-free luxury awaiting a call to shoot skyward in a mating flight; and thousand upon thousand of hard-labouring females, who moved up the ranks from nursery attendants to nectar-gatherers before their brief lives were spent. An organic machine, entirely designed to provide for the next generation.

  Which when one thinks about it, is pretty much what all creatures are designed for.

  And now, yet again, my thoughts had circled around to Damian Adler and his young daughter. In irritation, I rose and brushed off my knees: At last, Lulu's bicycle had gone.

  I used my key on the French doors from the terrace—as Lulu had noted, it was idiosyncratic for rural dwellers to lock a house with such care, but Holmes and I never knew when London would follow us home. In the kitchen, every surface gleamed. I put my empty bottle in the box under the sink and went to the sitting room to take off my boots.

  It was very quiet. When was the last time I had been alone in this house? Unlike Lulu, Mrs Hudson lived here, so it would have been some rare occasion when she was away at market and Holmes was off doing whatever Holmes did. Years, probably, since I had been all by myself there for more than an hour or two.

  Normally, one is only conscious of the room around one, but when no-one else is present, one's awareness is free to fill all the spaces. I stood for a time and listened to the heavy old flint walls around me: silent; quiescent; welcoming. Passing from room to room, I threw open all the doors and windows. In the laboratory, I located a screw-driver, and carried it and the mezuzah downstairs, to mount it on the front door-jamb. I touched it with my fingers, saying the prayer and welcoming it to its new home, then took myself out to a shaded corner of the terrace to read.

  Bees feel joy, and outrage, and contentment. Bees play, tossing themselves in flight with no point but for the pleasure of the thing. And bees despair, when hopelessness and loss have become their lot.

  A hive that loses its queen and has no other queen cells to raise up is dead, its future sterile. Workers may continue for a time, but soon listlessness and melancholy overcome them. Their sound changes, from the roar of energetic purpose to a note of anguish and loss. One of the workers may try to summon the energy of the hive and lay her own eggs, as if to conjure up the presence of royalty by enacting its rituals, but every member, drone to new-hatched worker, feels the end upon them.

  For the bee, unlike the human, the future is all: The next generation is the singular purpose of their every motion, their every decision. Not for Apis mellifera the ethical struggles of individual versus community rights, the protest against oppression, the life-long dedication to perfecting an individual's nature and desire. For the hive, there is no individual, merely the all; no present, only the call of the future; no personal contribution, only the accumulated essence of great numbers.

  The sun sloped behind the roof, shadows crept through the orchard, and finally, I closed the covers of Holmes' little book.

  As I'd remembered, it was less “practical handbook” than philosophical treatise. As a girl of fifteen, it had meant little to me. Now, having known the man for nine years and been married to him for three, I found the document astonishing, so revealing of this proud, solitary man that I was amazed he had given it for publication.

  I no longer wondered why he had retired at such an early age; rather, I was grateful that he had turned his back on his fellow man, instead of letting bitterness overcome him.

  The night air moved up towards the Downs, washing over sea and orchard. I breathed it in, and thought that henceforth, loneliness would smell to me like fermenting apples.

  I left the book on a desk in the library and went to find a bottle of last year's honey wine, a beverage not improved by longevity but containing nonetheless a breath of that summer.

  The twelvemonth since Holmes bottled it had been an extraordinary one. The cases had pressed fast upon us, one after another, each with its singular cast of players: Miss Dorothy Ruskin, the mad archaeologist of Palestine, had come to our door a year ago less two days. No sooner had that investigation ended than we were pulled into a mystery on Dartmoor, and on that case's heels we had entered a Berkshire country house inhabited by Bedouins. Afterwards, we had scarcely drawn breath before Mycroft had sent us to India and a middle-aged version of Kipling's Kim; on our way homeward, after a foray into the affairs of the Emperor of Japan, we had landed in San Francisco, where lay the haunts of my own past.

  One calendar year, filled with revelations, hardship, intense friendships, painful losses, and a view into my childhood that left me, three months later, shaken and unsure of myself. Another year like this one, and people would no longer comment on the age difference between my husband and myself.

  I set the wine to cool while I closed up the house against the creatures of the night, then put together a plate of strong cheese, oat biscuits, and summer fruit. I spread some cushions and a travelling rug on the warm stones of the terrace and dined in solitary splendour while the colours came into the sky. I lay with the soft rug around me, watching the azure shift into indigo, and spotted the first meteors.

  It was the annual Perseids shower. We'd seen their harbingers a few nights before when the sea mists lifted, silent lights darting across the heavens, as magical as anything in nature. Tonight the shower was at its height, and despite a near-full moon, their brightness and numbers lit the sky.

  I fell asleep watching them, no doubt assisted by the better part of a bottle of wine.

  Darkness: When such a man comes of age,

  there comes a period of darkness, when emptiness and

  disgust lie all about and there is no beauty in the world.

  The lump of meteor-metal the boy carried went cold

  and empty of Power.

  Testimony, I:4

  DAMIAN, ANY MORE ALCOHOL AND YOUR WITS WILL be the worse for it tomorrow.”

  “I'll be fine.”

  “You will be upright and conversing, but hardly at your peak.”

  “My wits were at a peak today, and what good did it do us?”

  “I did warn you that a round of the hospitals and morgues would be p
ure slog with little hope of success. If you were to permit the police—”

  “No police.”

  “I assure you I am capable of inventing a story to account for my enquiries into one Yolanda Adler.”

  “I came to you because I thought it might let me avoid the police. If you can't do it, say the word and I'll go.”

  “I am merely suggesting that using the established machinery of the official enquiry agents could save us time.”

  “No police. Yolanda and Estelle have just begun to settle in here. To start out life with a police enquiry and a scandal would be too much.”

  “I appreciate your concern. And I am willing to circumvent the police force in order to salvage your privacy. However, it will make things all the more difficult if I am saddled with a bleary-eyed and half-intoxicated partner on the morrow. I ask again, Damian, please stop.”

  “Yes, all right. There. Happy?”

  “Thank you.”

  “It isn't as if you had never indulged.”

  “Yes, thanks to Watson, all the world knows my peccadilloes. Do you wish to bath first, or shall I?”

  “You go ahead. Although I'd have thought we could afford something a bit grander than this hole with a shared bath down the hall.”

  “Inconvenience is the price of invisibility.”