The Honey Bus

by Meredith May

  He entered Mom’s house only to use the bathroom and to change from pajamas to school clothes in the mornings in front of the plug-in heater. I made myself equally scarce, entering only to sleep, or for the occasional surreptitious meal when Matthew and I cooked macaroni and cheese or microwaved tacos in the kitchen when she wasn’t home, being careful to clean and return everything to its spot afterward so we wouldn’t provoke her.

  When we did encounter Mom, our interactions had the forced courtesy of housemates bound by financial circumstances to share living space, but never went beyond a quick hello. She didn’t ask questions about our lives, and we didn’t inquire about hers. It was tacitly understood that Mom expected only occasional updates from us, and our grandparents could handle anything that we needed. As far as Mom was concerned, at twelve and fourteen, we were old enough to look after ourselves.

  Granny stepped in to fill the void with busyness, packing our schedules with baseball and scouting, swimming lessons and art classes, and while all that activity insulated us from loneliness, it was another way to push our feelings to a far place where we couldn’t access them, or even know that we should have them. We learned how to keep going, and to keep quiet.

  Grandpa took Matthew and me with him to Big Sur every chance he could, and brought both of us into the honey bus during harvest season. As I got older, I detected a more serious undertone to his hive lessons—a gentle prodding to think beyond Via Contenta and to consider what we wanted, instead of what Mom needed. He spoke in metaphors, using the bees as examples of the proper way to behave. What he found noble and admirable in the way bees lived translated into his moral code for humankind, and in his subtle way, he encouraged us to embrace, rather than recede from, life. He reminded us that bees live for a purpose far grander than themselves, each of their small contributions combining to create collective strength. Rather than withdrawing from the daunting task of living, as our mother had done, honeybees make themselves essential through their generosity. By giving more than they took, bees ensured their survival and reached what might be considered a state of grace.

  One summer morning Grandpa and I took the back way to his Big Sur hives, sloshing through Garrapata Creek and chugging over an abandoned logging road because he was tired of going the easy way through the eucalyptus and redwood groves of Palo Colorado Canyon Road. This off-road route was more exciting, because it was quite possible we could get the truck stuck in a ditch.

  Branches of bay leaf and poison oak scraped our windows as he four-wheeled through the thicket, and poor Rita shot out from her bed beneath his seat and hopped into my lap. I wrapped my arm around her trembling body and pulled her close. Our tires slipped on the dirt lane that was slick in places where spring water seeped out of the mountainside, and we bounced over a small rock slide that had tumbled down and scattered across our path. We managed to make it this time without getting stuck and having to call one of the Trotter brothers to rescue us with the winch.

  As Grandpa got his gear out of the back of the truck, Rita and I headed for the creek to go hunt for tracks and scents left behind by animals. I was hoping to get lucky and find another keepsake, like that time I found a snakeskin.

  When Grandpa was ready for my help, he whistled and the sound reverberated down the canyon. I stood up from some raccoon paw prints I was inspecting, and jogged back to the apiary. I put on the veil and Grandpa handed me the smoker. I sent a few puffs into the bottom entrance of the first hive, and the guard bees scurried back inside. Grandpa pried up the inner cover, and I heard the propolis seal give way with a sticky crack, exposing the ten hanging honeycomb frames inside the box.

  The bees aligned themselves in rows in the open space between each honeycomb frame—each narrow gap precisely designed to be three-eighths of an inch to permit bee passage, but prevent the bees from building wax bridges and fuse the honeycomb sheets together. They poked just their heads above the top bars of the frames, to see who was breaking into their house. Their black heads all lined up looked like little shiny beans.

  We waited a moment for the bees to adjust to the sudden loss of their roof. They stared at us cautiously, then a few brave ones broke ranks and crawled up to the top bars of the frames to swivel their antennae and assess the situation. It took only a second or two before they decided the threat was over, relayed the information to the other bees, and all of them began moving again, returning to work and ignoring Grandpa and me. Grandpa lifted the first honeycomb frame out, loaded down on both sides with bees, and gave it to me to hold so he could loosen the next frame.

  By now I could hold a frame covered in bees and differentiate their individual job titles just by watching their behavior. I saw some housekeepers cleaning crystalized bits of honey from hexagon cells and receiver bees storing nectar in others, and builders repairing cracks in the wax comb. But my attention was drawn to one corner of the frame, where a single bee shook vigorously side to side, like it was being zapped with electricity. Its wings beat so fast they disappeared from view, and its body blurred to a black smudge. Then it suddenly stopped, as if catching its breath, took a few steps, then vibrated again. A group of bees had gathered to watch. I held the frame out to Grandpa and pointed.

  “What’s wrong with that one?”

  “Nothing. There’s your dancing bee.”

  Grandpa knelt down for a better look, and interpreted the dance for me.

  “It’s a field bee, and she found a really good food source, and she’s telling the other bees how to find it,” he said.

  I watched the dancer walk in a straight line, making a sound I’d never heard from a bee before, a low rumble of a revving race car. She waggled her abdomen, then abruptly stopped, made a sharp right and circled back to her starting point, forming the capital letter D. Then she repeated her dance again. And again. Sometimes she turned left and made the D backward, but she always came back to the same starting place. Some of the bees cleared the floor for her, while others tripped behind her, trying to follow. She seemed possessed.

  It wasn’t how I’d pictured bee dancing. I thought bees danced together in a group, and more gracefully, maybe bopping up and down or swaying. This bee wheeled about the honeycomb in the grip of what appeared to be a full-blown tremor or crippling panic attack.

  “What’s she saying?”

  Grandpa kept a small library of bee books, dating back to the 1800s, and had read the work of Karl von Frisch, a zoology professor who won the Nobel Prize for first deciphering bee dancing in Germany in 1944. Grandpa knew the dance steps were intentional, and conveyed three things—the direction, distance and quality of nectar and pollen. The angle of her wiggle walk, in relation to an imaginary straight line toward the top of the hive, was like an arrow pointing in the direction the bees should fly relative to the sun. How long she danced conveyed flight time from the hive, and the enthusiasm of her performance signaled the quality of the food. A passionate dance meant a really good discovery, maybe a swath of untapped sage coming into bloom.

  Other field foragers take the directions and fly off to verify the dancer’s information. If they like what they find, they will return to the hive and dance, too, passing the good news along to their hive mates.

  As Grandpa was telling me all this, more bees had gathered for the performance, and soon the dancing bee had a small crowd. When she finally stopped shaking, her audience moved toward her to touch her.

  “She sends a vibration while she dances, and the other bees hear it with their feet and know where to go,” Grandpa said.

  One by one, bees lifted into the air and headed west, deeper into the canyon to go find the treasure. I snapped my head up to meet Grandpa’s eyes. He was grinning. I laughed out loud, pleased with this new wordless language he was teaching me.

  I handed the frame back to him, and he slid it back into the hive.

  “Can you guess what other type of bee dances?” he asked.

>   Right away I crossed off the lazy drones. Also the queen, who was too busy laying eggs to dance. Nurse bees don’t leave the nursery to see what’s outside, so they were unlikely candidates.

  “Give up?”

  I nodded.

  “Scout bees.”

  I remembered Grandpa had explained to me that the scouts were the house hunters. When a growing colony is getting ready to divide, he said, they are the bees that select a new home and lead the swarm to it.

  “Scouts dance to tell the bees where to relocate,” he said.

  Every spring, Grandpa put in overtime as a swarm catcher, so he knew a lot about them. When bee colonies outgrow their nesting space, they naturally divide themselves, with part of the colony flying off with the queen to rebuild a new colony somewhere else, and the rest staying behind to rear a new queen.

  While a bee swarm looks like a disorganized frenzy in the air, Grandpa explained the event is actually planned in advance, with the bees discussing possible routes and withholding food from their queen to thin her for flight. The group must pick a warm day to depart and gorge themselves on honey first, so they won’t die out in the cold while they are in between homes.

  Initially, a swarm doesn’t travel far from its original hive; they typically settle in a nearby tree or bush, and cluster there for a few hours or days until they make a group decision where to permanently nest. While hanging together, the swarm casts out hundreds of scout bees to house-hunt and come back to the group with options. Just like a forager dances on the honeycomb inside a hive to advertise flower patches, the scouts dance on top of the bee cluster to pass along the addresses of hollow trees, rock crevices or sometimes dry cavities within the walls of wood-frame houses as potential dwelling places.

  Like people touring a list of open houses, the bees gather a list of addresses from various dancing scouts and go inspect their options. They fly into the advertised locations, taking measurements, checking the security of the entrance and feeling for drafts. They make their decision and return to the hive to dance with the scout whose home they prefer. As the energy and excitement builds, one scout reaches a tipping point of support, a consensus is reached and the entire swarm takes off with the queen to that scout’s specific location.

  The more I learned about bees, the more astounded I became with their social intelligence. Not only did bees have language, they were democratic. They researched, shared information, discussed options and made collective decisions, all for the betterment of the whole.

  “You’re right,” I said.

  “About what?”

  “Bees are smart.”

  “You already knew that,” he said.

  “I didn’t know they thought about the future.”

  Nothing about a bee colony was spontaneous; bees could see a problem coming and start making a change before it became serious and they perished. If their hive became overcrowded or unsafe, they took initiative to move to someplace better, abandoning a home that is too drafty or damp, too low to the ground where predators can get it, or too small for their growing family. Bees had enough brainpower to envision a better life, and then go out and get it. Even if it involved the risk of living out in the open, defenseless, until they decided together where to relocate. Bees had guts.

  “What about you?” he asked.

  Grandpa continued lifting frames one at a time out of the hive, examining both sides for eggs and larvae, and sliding them back in the box.

  “What about me?”

  “What do you see in your future?”

  It felt like a trick question. “High school graduation,” I said, which was three years away.

  Grandpa put his hive tool into his back pocket, led me a short distance from the hives and untied my bee veil. He tilted it off my head so he could look into my eyes. I could tell something was heavy on his mind.

  “That’s not what I mean,” he said. “Have you thought about what you want to be someday?”

  I realized with a sudden panic that I hadn’t given it any thought. Grandpa was encouraging me to take a cue from the scout bees, and start planning now for my future. My grandparents’ home was never intended to be more than a temporary stopgap, even though it had now been almost a decade. I couldn’t live with him forever. And I could not live with Mom, ever. I was dangerously without a plan.

  Grandpa was trying to tell me that I had to go out and find what I wanted, and then dance like hell for it.

  “I’ll go to college?” I offered.

  “Now you’re thinking,” he said.

  After our hive talk, I threw myself into high school. Every test, every essay, every science experiment was a chance to get a good grade, and the more A’s I collected, the better the odds that a college would offer me a scholarship. I cared less about which school accepted me or even what I studied; I saw college more as a way to escape my living situation. The mere threat of spending the rest of my life on Via Contenta made me evangelical about homework.

  I became a champion studier, turning in my book reports early to leave a good impression on my teachers. When I told Granny that colleges liked students with a lot of extracurricular activities, she posed as me and wrote a letter to the Carmel Pinecone offering to write a youth column for free. Not surprisingly, I got the job. Every two weeks I typed a story on Granny’s typewriter about high school events, she edited and fact-checked, and then I delivered the pages by hand to the editor in Carmel. A school counselor suggested athletics looked good on college applications, so I shifted sports teams with the seasons: diving, softball and field hockey. I lived in a whirlwind of my own making.

  I dreamed of going to college but worried how to pay for it, so I got a job at the one place in Carmel Valley where teenagers could make decent tips—the local steakhouse. Will’s Fargo was an old adobe roadhouse that Granny had lived in when she and her mother first landed in Carmel Valley in the twenties. It was a beloved favorite among the locals, kept in its original cowboy style, with a dimly lit saloon furnished with red velvet curtains, a fireplace, and mounted wild boar heads grimacing from the walls. Before sitting down, diners ordered their meals at a butcher station by pointing to the cut of meat they wanted, and the butcher sliced their steak, weighed it on a scale and pierced it with a wooden tag bearing the customer’s name. The butcher slid the meat through a small door in the wall behind him, where the chef was waiting on the other side at the grill.

  I was the dishwasher. I hosed dirty plates with a sprayer that dangled from the ceiling, then arranged them into a square plastic tray and slid it down a stainless-steel trough into a steaming industrial washer. It was equivalent to standing for eight hours in a sauna, not including the multiple trips hauling garbage bags to the dumpsters behind the restaurant. But I was thrilled to do it. I was a willing Sisyphus—no matter how many dishes I washed, the waiters came blowing through the swinging kitchen doors in their Western vests and bow ties and dropped more plates into my sink. It was exhausting work that made the skin on my fingers peel, but the thought of college numbed the pain.

  Waiters gave me a portion of their tips at the end of the night, supplementing my minimum wage paycheck. The money wasn’t a lot, but the job also came with a huge perk. Before every shift, the chef fed the staff, and we could choose between steak, abalone or chicken, and the chef always made a soup and salad. I felt very grown-up, figuring out a way to feed myself and save for college at the same time. And the hours were ideal. I started at four in the afternoon and worked until midnight—ensuring Mom was fast asleep by the time I finished. I worked as many shifts as they wanted to give me.

  As far as I was concerned, there was nothing I needed from my mother anymore.

  Until I got my period.

  I was almost fifteen and still had not had menstruation explained to me. I’d somehow missed out on any sex education, at home or at school, and aside from the bits of information
I’d gleaned from friends about getting cramps and headaches, no one had prepared me for what to do when my time came. Although I wouldn’t admit this to anyone, I didn’t understand the physiology of where in my body the blood originated from, nor why. I knew in a vague way that it meant I was a woman and able to have babies, but that’s where my knowledge stopped. I needed some type of feminine product, but I was unclear on what the different kinds were and which I needed. Granny seemed way too old to be able to help me with this one.

  I found Mom in the living room, standing on a chair wearing three-inch Candies sandals identical to the ones Olivia Newton-John wore in Grease, misting her hanging spider ferns. She had just dyed her hair, and had a plastic bag stretched around her head and a towel with brown stains draped around her neck. She startled at the sight of me, and stopped in midspray.

  “What’s wrong?”

  “I think I got my period.”

  “What do you mean, you think?”

  “Well, I’m pretty sure.”

  “Is there blood?”

  I nodded.

  “Huh.”

  We stood there looking at each other, neither of us moving.

  “Hang on,” she said.

  Mom stepped carefully off the chair and walked to her room, returning a moment later with her purse. She pawed through it and handed me a wadded-up five-dollar bill.

  “Walk down to Jim’s and get something for it.”