by Meredith May
It was a relief to talk about my trip with someone who was really listening. I asked him how the bees were, and he said he’d been busy catching swarms. Three of them.
“One was really high up in the rafters of a house,” he said. “I could have used you to hold the ladder.”
“Where did you put the swarm?”
“In the backyard, with the other hives.”
He looked up from his work and saw what I was going to say before I said it. He set down his tools, stood and hiked up his sagging pants, and reached for my hand.
“Okay, let’s go look at ’em.”
His hand engulfed mine, and I felt his calluses pressing into my palm, and knew that this was the right choice.
10
Foulbrood
1978
Mom called out to me from the bedroom. She did this sometimes when she wanted more water or aspirin, so that’s what I figured it was—she needed me to bring her something. But when I came in, she was rummaging around in the closet, pushing boxes and sweaters aside on the top shelf. She pulled out a board game and handed it down to me.
“I need you to play with me,” she said, getting back into bed and reaching for the box. She took off the lid and pulled the game out.
“What is it?”
“Ouija,” she said, pausing to take a long suck on a Fresca soda, while simultaneously balancing a cigarette between her pale fingers.
She patted the bedspread, indicating for me to sit next to her. She placed the board in front of us, and I saw it had a moon in one uppermost corner and a sun in the other. In the center was the alphabet in a western font, curved above a row of numbers. On the bottom were the words No, Yes, Goodbye. Oddly, there were no cards, no dice and no playing pieces. This game looked like it would be exceptionally boring.
“How do you play?”
“You use it to communicate with spirits,” Mom said. “Like my dead granny.”
It took me a second to absorb what she’d just said. She wanted to talk to the ghost of her dead grandmother. With me. I had no interest in poking around in the afterlife, because everyone knows ghosts don’t like to be bothered, and they have the upper hand when it comes to revenge. But Mom wasn’t joking. Her instructions were matter-of-fact, as if she really believed she could do this. At some point while studying the star charts in bed, she had advanced from astrology to séance. I did not see this coming. I wondered if maybe she had been in her room so long that she was starting to make up imaginary friends. I didn’t know what to say.
“I had a granny, too, you know,” she continued. “I loved my granny—she was the only one who was ever nice to me. Too bad you never got to meet her.” A wistful expression flickered across her face. “She died just before you were born.”
She tapped the ash off the tip of her cigarette into the ashtray and held up a spade-shaped piece of white plastic with a small round window embedded in it.
“You and I both have to put two fingers on this. Then you close your eyes and stay very still. It will start to move when the spirits want to say something. They will spell it out.”
This did not sound very sane. But Mom was inviting me to do something with her and this was rare, and possibly a sign of improvement. Despite my trepidation, I put two fingers on the planchette next to hers. Our fingers touched, and it felt like a little embrace, a more intentional gesture of love than when she spooned me groggily in bed. We waited like that for several minutes, both hands on the plastic reader, staring at it, willing it to move. It felt nice to sit this close with my mother, and I really didn’t care if the reader moved or not. She had asked me to be with her, and that was enough.
Finally, I felt the tiniest vibration beneath my fingertips.
“Are you moving it?” I asked.
“Shhhh, I’m making contact. Granny, are you here?”
The planchette picked up speed and swung in an arc, stopping over the word Yes.
A shiver coursed through me. I was certain that I wasn’t moving it, and if Mom wasn’t either, that meant some invisible presence was really taking control of the disc. I went limp just to be extra sure I wasn’t moving it by accident. I could hear Mom’s breath pick up.
“Do you have a message for me?” she whispered.
The reader sliced back and forth across the board, so fast we had to lurch to keep up with it. Mom bent over the board to make out the letters through the clear circle on the reader, sounding them out one by one to decode the message.
I M-I-S-S Y-O-U.
My stomach flipped, and I suddenly felt like I had to pee. Somehow Mom’s dead granny was really talking to us. In less than five minutes, our innocent game had veered into the occult, and I suddenly felt like I was trapped inside a scary movie. I held my breath and checked the room for supernatural signs. I was so spooked that everything made me jump. What was that movement behind the curtain? Did I hear a footfall near the door? Was that a cold breeze, or was it dead Granny floating through the bedroom? I wanted to flee but was too petrified to move. The reader paused on the board, as the presence waited for the next question. Mom sat up and squeezed her eyes tight in concentration.
“Will I find another husband?”
The white disc didn’t budge. She asked the same question, six or seven times more. Nothing. Whatever entity was in the room just moments before had clearly crossed back to the other side. So much for that. Ouija was a dud, I decided.
But Mom wasn’t ready to give up. She remained hunched over the board, with the resolve of a person who was not going to quit until she got some answers.
That’s when I really became truly scared. Worse than a ghost was the realization that my mother might be losing her marbles. She believed Ouija was real. She needed this cheap dime-store oracle to assure her things were going to turn around.
It made me feel sorry for her, to watch her beg the air for a man to make her happy again. She was pleading to the universe, to skeletons, to nothingness, for some small measure of hope. She seemed to be getting more desperate since my summer visit to Dad’s, as if it had only intensified her feeling that she was stuck in place while life moved on without her.
Mom and I kept waiting, but the plastic reader didn’t respond. Mom asked Ouija again, louder this time so the phantoms could hear her. When no answer came, she resorted to bargaining.
“Okay, how about just a boyfriend? Will I get a boyfriend soon?”
We waited some more. My arm was asleep now, and it felt like an anthill burst open at the top of my shoulder, sending an army of insect legs scurrying down to my fingers. Finally my fingers slipped off and knocked the reader to the right.
“Wait! It was moving just now, moving toward Yes.” Mom lunged for my hand and placed it back in play. When the reader remained motionless, she compromised.
“I’m going to take that as a yes. It was moving toward Yes, you saw, right?”
“Definitely,” I said, rubbing out a cramp in my forearm. I heard Grandpa start his truck to let it warm up, and I stood up to go. We had plans to go check the bees down the coast.
“Not yet!” Mom shouted, yanking me back to the bed by my wrist. Her grip was too tight, too urgent, and pinched my skin. It had a trace of roughness to it that was unsettling.
“Ow, Mom, you’re hurting me.”
“Sorry,” she said absentmindedly, without looking up from the board. “Just a little more. Five more minutes.”
I rubbed at the redness on my wrist where her fingers had briefly handcuffed me. I had no choice and I knew it; I had to keep playing until she dismissed me. I was trapped inside my mother’s crumbling mind. I heard Grandpa rev the truck engine, and worried he might have to leave without me.
“About this boyfriend...will he be rich?”
This time I cheated and pushed the reader. Fast and hard over the word Yes. I think both of us knew what I ha
d done, yet neither of us said anything. But I had to get out of the game somehow, because Mom was going to force the ghosts to tell her what she wanted to hear, no matter how long it took. So I came up with a white lie that we both could accept.
Mom’s face relaxed as she put the game back in the box. She handed it to me and I put it back in the closet, burying it under sweaters where I hoped she’d forget it. By the time I turned around, she was napping with a smile on her face. She was content, knowing that good days were just around the corner.
I found Grandpa sitting on his tailgate, picking the mud out of his boots with a hive tool.
“I almost thought you forgot,” he said.
“Mom wanted help with some fortune-telling thing.”
Grandpa tilted his head to one side. “Come again?”
“Wee-gee.”
“Never heard of it.”
“It’s not as good as cribbage,” I said, referring to Grandpa’s favorite game. He was teaching me how to play, using matchsticks for pegs and a piece of wood that he’d drilled with holes for the board. He smiled at my assessment, then opened the passenger-side door of his truck and waved me in with a dramatic bow just like a chauffeur.
When we reached Big Sur, the sky was a shock of pink and orange above the low morning mist that had not yet pulled away from the coastline. The earth was damp beneath our feet as we made our way toward one of his smaller apiaries at the Grimes Ranch. Grandpa cut a path through a wildflower meadow, and I followed behind with the smoker and our bee veils. This group of hives was the easiest of his bee yards to access, clustered in an empty pasture with a view of Highway 1 and the Pacific. Long ago, one of his cousins who lived at the ranch started beekeeping, but his interest lasted less than a year. The cousin asked Grandpa for advice a few times, which turned into lessons, which turned into bee-sitting, which eventually became a full takeover of the hive. In the intervening years, as bees are wont to do, the colony multiplied, and on this day Grandpa and I were walking into a little clearing with twenty-eight beehives just beginning to hum with the sun’s first rays.
The summer nectar flow was dwindling now, and the nights were coming sooner and colder. The late-autumn harvest would be smaller than the gangbuster summer crop, and Grandpa had to be more careful about how much honey he took from his hives so the bees had enough to eat until the flowers returned in spring. Once it got really cold, his colonies would sit out the winter, huddling together inside the hive and shivering their wing muscles to generate heat. The queen would be given the warmest spot in the nucleus, where she would slow her egg production and conserve energy. When the bees on the outermost edge of the cluster got too cold, they’d crawl inward to thaw, pushing other bees to the exterior, all the bees rotating and taking turns to keep everyone warm. It wasn’t hibernation, exactly, it was more like a slowdown, the bees venturing outside only to relieve themselves or fetch water. The colony planned ahead for this, Grandpa said, by storing large amounts of pollen and honey in the frames closest to the hive walls, where their winter pantries could serve double duty as nutrition and insulation. Grandpa knew the personality and foraging habits of each colony, and which hives could afford to spare honey, which should be left alone and which would starve if Grandpa didn’t feed them.
The hungriest hives got a sticky pollen patty Grandpa bought from the Dadant beekeeping supply catalog, made from pollen and brewer’s yeast that came in flat pancakes the color of peanut butter pressed between waxed paper. He set the patties over the tops of the brood frames where the nurse bees could devour them quickly without having to travel far. Other times Grandpa mixed equal parts water and white sugar, and fed his bees sugar syrup by pouring it into in an old mayonnaise jar, hammering holes in the lid with an awl and then inverting the jar into a wooden block he cut to slide into the hive entrance and serve as a feeder. There was a space cut into the block to allow the bees in to lick the drips that fell from the jar. His third option was to take frames of honey from abundant hives and swap them into hives with paltry honey stores.
Our mission today was to open all his hives and redistribute frames of honey from the strong hives to the weak, and if any honey was left over, we’d take it back to the honey bus for ourselves.
As we approached his bee yard, a flock of birds vaulted from the ground to broadcast our invasion in their own languages: Chickadee, Bushtit, Warbler, Blue jay. All those wings at once sounded like the flags at my school on a windy day, and I stopped for a second, just feeling the sonic power of their collective outburst. Grandpa and I watched them soar toward Garrapata Canyon. When they were out of sight, I looked to the ground to see what the birds had found so interesting.
I felt something crunch under my shoe, and discovered I was standing in the middle of a bee battlefield, the ground littered with expired drones. Some of the male bees weren’t quite yet dead, and dragged themselves in aimless circles through the carnage, toppling over every few steps on legs that were broken or lame. One pitiful drone was trying to get back into his hive, but kept getting pushed back by the bees guarding the entrance. Two bees attacked him, each one biting and pulling on a wing until the trio tumbled to the ground and continued wrestling. I watched aghast as they bit off one of his wings, and one of the guard bees airlifted the feeble drone, carrying it up and away in its clutches to unceremoniously drop it several yards away from the hive.
Grandpa must have seen the drones, but he stepped indiscriminately, smashing them underfoot as he went about the business of getting ready, lighting the smoker and putting on his bee veil, as if nothing was amiss. I tugged on his sleeve and pointed at the catastrophe on the ground. He glanced down, then handed me the smoker. I was careful to grab it by the bellows, where it wasn’t hot.
“Winter’s coming,” he said. “Not enough food to go around. Time for the ladies to kick out the men.”
Just then a wasp homed in like a jet fighter, landing its smooth, streamlined body on the back of a fuzzy drone that was struggling to stand. The wasp bit the drone’s head off in two quick moves and devoured the eyes while its headless body continued to twitch. I grimaced and asked Grandpa why the bees had suddenly turned cruel.
Drones get pushed out of every hive, every year, he explained.
“Fewer mouths to feed,” he said.
The drones try their best to fight back, but a hive has tens of thousands of female workers and only hundreds of male bees, so the fellows don’t stand a chance.
“Remember how I told you the drones don’t do any work? They just sit around and beg for food?”
I nodded.
“Well, now it’s payback. If you’re helpful, people will help you back. If you’re only concerned about yourself, then...skeeeeeech!” He drew his index finger slowly across his neck.
“Jeez Louise,” I said, parroting one of Granny’s favorite expressions.
It’s no big deal, Grandpa said, when it warms up again the queen will simply make more drones.
At that moment, I felt very, very relieved to be female. A hive was a matriarchy built on a basic principle of work and reward, but the sisterhood seemed to be taking their power a little too far. It didn’t seem right, to kill your brother. Even if he was lazy. And I’d watched enough nature shows with Grandpa to know that all creatures needed both males and females to make babies. If a hive pushed out all the drones to die in the cold, how could the queen keep laying eggs?
Grandpa took my question and held it for a moment. He helped me secure my bee veil and lowered his voice: “Okay, smarty-pants, drones do have one job. To make the queen pregnant.”
I set the smoker on top of a hive where it wouldn’t catch the grass on fire, sensing a potentially intriguing story coming on. I listened carefully as Grandpa explained the cutthroat competition for the queen’s affections. It all starts, he said, when drones pick up the scent of a virgin queen flying nearby.
“Like when a dog’s
in heat and the other dogs know?”
“Something like that.”
He continued, using hand gestures, to explain that the drones soar into the air and gather into a cloud, getting ready for the virgin queen to arrow through them. When she leaves the hive for her wedding flight, she mates in the air with only the fastest and strongest suitors that can keep up with her. She couples with a dozen or more drones one after the other, and then returns to the hive with their sperm stored in her body. She spends the rest of her life laying eggs and fertilizing them herself.
Because a healthy hive can go for up to five years with the same queen, and hundreds of drones hatch and die each month, the math isn’t in the drones’ favor. Few ever get the chance to actually do the one thing they were born to do. More often, a drone is just an insurance policy, on standby in case a virgin queen suddenly flies by. But even if a drone does get his chance to mate, he won’t survive the encounter, Grandpa said.
It was so quiet I could hear the waves hitting the rocky shore in the distance.
“How come?”
“His man part breaks off and he falls to the ground, dead.”
“Gross!”
Grandpa looked taken aback. I could tell that my squeamishness disappointed him, that all this time spent in Big Sur country should have made me hardier, or at least capable of accepting the laws of nature. My outburst came from a soft, indoor kid.
“Gross? What’s so gross about it? It’s just part of life. If it’s very quiet, you can actually hear it snap off. It makes a little popping sound.”
I shuddered, ready for his story to be over. I grabbed the smoker and began sending puffs of smoke over the hive entrances to calm the bees. I blasted the guard bees with more smoke than usual, feeling the need to even the score for the drones. The bees scuttled back into the hive to get away from the odor of burning cow patty, which masked the banana scent of their alarm pheromone. Grandpa realized that he had lost my interest and pried the lid off one of the hives to peer inside at the honey supply.