The Honeybee Mystery

by Gertrude Chandler Warner

  “Do the bees still use it?” Violet asked.

  “I don’t think so,” Clay said. “I see them going in there sometimes, but once they build a hive in one of these boxes, that’s where they stay. I just keep that one around as sort of an antique.”

  Jessie nodded. “That’s neat.”

  “When you work with the bees, do you have to touch them?” Benny asked.

  Dottie said, “We sure do. We have to move the hives around once in a while and remove the honeycomb frames to get the honey out.”

  “But you wear gloves, right?”

  “No, gloves are too hard to work with. They get sticky and dirty, and you can’t really feel anything with them on.” She wiggled her fingers. “We need to be able to feel the bees in case they get caught under our hands.”

  “But don’t they sting you?” Benny asked, alarmed.

  Clay smiled. “Every now and then you get a sting, but that’s rare. The main rule is to move slowly. Quick movements frighten the bees, and when they sting it’s almost always because they’re scared.”

  “Bees are much more peaceful and gentle than most people think,” Dottie told the Aldens. “They don’t want to sting anyone. They only do that when they feel they have to. If you treat them with respect, they’ll treat you with respect.”

  “I haven’t been stung in ages,” Clay added.

  Then he said, “So, do you want to see how all this works?”

  “We sure do,” Jessie replied.

  “Okay.…”

  He put on the protective headgear that he’d brought along. It really wasn’t much more than a hat with a net hanging down to protect his face and neck.

  He looked at the Alden children and smiled. “Like something from outer space, huh?”

  “Yeah, creepy!” Benny said.

  “This is just for safety. Getting stung on the hand is one thing. Getting stung on the face is worse.”

  He went over to see one of the hives and gently removed the lid from the top box. The buzzing sound became a bit louder. As Clay set the lid against the side of the hive, hundreds of bees turned their attention to him. They crawled on his arms and legs and around the netting on his hat.

  “The first time I did this, I was so scared I was shaking.”

  Jessie brushed some imaginary bees off her body. “Ooo, I don’t think I’d like that feeling at all!”

  “Oh, I don’t know,” Violet said. “There’s something special about it, being so close to animals like that.”

  “I have to admit,” Dottie said, particularly to Jessie, “I didn’t like the idea at first, either. But I got used to it. As long as the bees aren’t mad at you, you get the feeling they’re kind of … well, affectionate.”

  “I wonder if they know who you are,” Henry said.

  Clay said, “I sometimes wonder that, too. If so, I’m sure they’re plenty used to Dottie and me by now.”

  He reached into the hive box, even more slowly this time, and took out what looked like a picture frame. But instead of a picture, it held a honeycomb that was alive with hundreds of bees.

  “This is called a comb,” he said. “I keep ten of these in each hive, and each one contains about six thousand cells. Each cell has six sides.”

  “Do the bees live in those cells?” Benny asked.

  “Yes and no,” Dottie replied. “They live in the hive, and they certainly go into the cells a lot. But mostly they use the cells to store honey and wax, and the queen lays eggs that hatch into more worker bees.”

  “Worker bees?” Jessie said. “What are they?”

  “Every hive has the queen, the drones, and the workers,” Clay told her. “The queen lays the eggs and is the leader of the group. The drones do their part, too, but it’s the workers that do most of the actual work, as you can guess by their name.”

  “What kind of work?” Violet asked.

  “They fly out and collect nectar,” Dottie told her. “They build the combs, make the honey and wax, feed the queen, and care for her eggs.”

  “Sounds like a lot,” Benny said.

  Dottie nodded. “It sure is.”

  Henry, who was thinking about the mystery at hand, asked, “So how exactly does the honey-making process work?”

  Clay looked up and smiled. “See that other hat?” he asked, pointing toward the tree stump where it lay.

  “Yeah.”

  “Put it on and I’ll show you.”

  Henry’s eyes widened. “Really?”

  “Sure. You’re the oldest. Think you can do it?”

  “I guess so.”

  Clay added, “A real detective would want to know everything he could firsthand.”

  Henry nodded. “That’s true. Okay.” He walked over and carefully put on the net hat. His brother and sisters giggled at him.

  “You look like a spaceman!” Benny teased.

  “Very funny. What do I do now?”

  “Come on over here,” Clay said, “and I’ll show you what happens.”

  Henry was a little nervous, but he trusted Clay and moved slowly. Still, as that buzzing sound grew louder and louder, and the bees started landing on his bare arms …

  “The first thing a bee does to make honey is fly out into that field of wildflowers. It lands on a flower and collects the flower’s nectar. Then the worker bee flies back here. Now hold this comb up so everyone can see it.”

  Clay carefully handed the comb to Henry, who made a point of moving very slowly. He took care to make sure there were no bees under his fingers when he took the frame. The bees seemed less interested in Clay now and more interested in Henry. It wasn’t long before they were crawling all over him.

  “You doing okay?” Clay asked.

  Henry smiled, but was careful not to move his body. “Yeah, sure. Doing great.”

  “Good, good.”

  Jessie shivered. “I don’t know if I could keep so still!”

  “I think it’s neat,” Violet said, her eyes sparkling with excitement.

  “Don’t sneeze, Henry!” Benny said. “And don’t itch, either.”

  “Thanks, Benny,” Henry said. “I’ll try to remember that.”

  Benny turned and peered into the old-fashioned, igloo-shaped beehive behind them. “Is there any honey in here?”

  Henry, Jessie, and Violet turned and looked more closely at the old straw skep.

  “I doubt that, Benny,” said Clay. Smiling, he continued, “Once a worker bee has a full honey stomach, it flies back to the hive and deposits the nectar into one of these cells.” He pointed to one of the empty ones. It was about the size of the holes on the side of a piece of notebook paper.

  “How does it get the nectar out of its honey stomach?” Benny asked.

  “Well, if you must know … it sort of spits it out.”

  Jessie made a face and put a hand on her own stomach. “Lovely.”

  Clay shrugged. “What can I tell you? That’s how they do it. Anyway, they put the nectar into one of these cells, and then they seal the cell with wax. Bees also make wax, by the way. I guess you figured that out on your own.”

  “We knew about beeswax,” Jessie said. “We’ve heard people say, ‘Mind your own beeswax.’”

  “I say that to Clay all the time,” Dottie said. Everyone laughed, even Henry.

  “That’s right, she does,” Clay replied. “And that’s when I come out here.”

  “Very funny, Clay,” Dottie said.

  “Thank you, dear.”

  “What happens to the nectar once it’s in the cell?” Violet asked.

  “While the nectar is in the bee’s honey stomach, certain chemicals are added to it. Then, while the nectar is in the cell, the water in the nectar disappears and the chemicals from the bee’s stomach blend with the nectar to create honey. It’s actually pretty simple.”

  Henry said, “But obviously that’s not happening here, right?”

  Clay nodded. “That’s right. For some reason the honey isn’t forming.” Clay reached un
der one of the hive boxes and pulled out a tray. It was filled with an off-white fluid that looked like watery milk.

  “This is what I’ve been getting instead of honey. It’s not getting thick.” He poured it onto the ground and replaced the tray.

  “What a mess!” Benny said.

  “Sure is. This stuff keeps flooding the trays, and the bees aren’t too happy, I’m sure. But I don’t know why it’s happening. That’s the mystery.

  “But anyway, now that you all understand the basics of beekeeping, what do you think? Any ideas?” He took the comb back from Henry and returned it to the hive box. Once all the bees had flown away, Henry removed his hat and gave a big sigh of relief.

  “I think we should follow the order of how the bees make their honey to look for clues,” Jessie announced.

  “Sounds like a smart plan,” Dottie said.

  “I agree,” Henry added. “If we sort of follow the bees through each step, we might come across something unusual.”

  “So where do we start?” Benny asked.

  “In the field of flowers,” Violet answered. “Right?”

  “Right,” Henry said with a single nod.

  “While you’re doing that,” Clay said, “I’ve got to go take care of some things in the barn.”

  “And I’ve got to do some work in the house,” Dottie added.

  “Maybe I can lend a hand while my grandchildren do their clue hunting,” Grandfather said. “What do you say, Clay? Could you use some help?”

  “Sure,” Clay answered, patting Grandfather on the back. “Come on.”

  CHAPTER 3

  The First Clue

  The field of wildflowers was much bigger than it first looked, as the Alden children quickly found out. They split up in order to cover more ground and agreed to meet back at the beehives in an hour.

  By the time Violet, who was almost to the very end of the field, first checked her watch, the hour was nearly up. She hadn’t found anything unusual and was already beginning to think maybe the first clue was waiting for them in the next step — after the bees brought the nectar back to the hive and put it in the honeycomb cells.

  Even though she was officially looking for clues to a new mystery, she had to admit she was enjoying this walk through all these bright and colorful flowers, and on such a beautiful blue day, too! More than once she wished she’d brought along her sketch pad and pencils.

  She reached the spot where the flowers ended and the pine forest began, took a quick look around, and saw nothing.

  “Well, that’s that,” she said to herself. “I guess I should —”

  No, wait, what’s that over there?

  She walked to the corner of the field and was surprised to find a small patch of wild-flowers that were not very colorful at all — in fact, they were dried and shriveled, very much dead. What happened here? Was this a clue?

  Anything unusual could be a clue, her detective’s voice reminded her.

  She knelt down, picked up one of the dead flowers, and rubbed it between her fingers. Then she gave it a sniff. Nothing unusual there, but then she wasn’t a plant expert. She wasn’t even sure what she should be looking for.

  She checked her watch again and saw that the hour was up. So she gathered up a handful of the dead flowers and headed back.

  “Hmm, I’ve never seen a dead patch in the meadow before,” Clay said, stroking his chin. “How about you, Dot?”

  “No, this is new to me.” She was sitting at the kitchen table with one of the flowers laid out neatly on a sheet of white paper. Her glasses were down almost to the tip of her nose.

  “Do you ever use any pesticides?” Henry asked. “Anything that might have this kind of effect on wildflowers?”

  “What are pesticides?” Benny asked.

  “They’re chemicals used to kill bugs that eat the crops,” Jessie told him. “Some bugs will destroy entire fields of fruits and vegetables if they’re not sprayed with pesticides, isn’t that right?”

  “Exactly right,” Dottie told her.

  “Oh, I get it,” Benny said.

  Clay shook his head. “But we don’t use them much anymore,” he said. “Sometimes in the spring if the bugs are really bad, but not now. And certainly not on the wild-flowers.”

  “That would have a bad effect on the nectar, right?” Violet asked.

  “Not just that,” Dottie told her. “The bees would probably die.”

  “That wouldn’t be very nice,” Benny decided.

  “No, it wouldn’t,” Dottie agreed.

  “What about accidentally?” Violet suggested. “Maybe the wind carried some of the chemicals down to the flowers while you were spraying one day.”

  Clay shrugged his shoulders. “I suppose it’s possible.”

  Henry shook his head. “But not in this case, because why would only that one spot be affected? Why not the whole field? And like Mrs. Sherman said, the bees would have died.”

  Dottie nodded. “Henry’s right, Clay. If pesticides did this, most of our bees would have died.”

  “So that rules out pesticides,” Jessie said. She rubbed some of the dead leaves between her fingers. It left a chalky yellow coloring. “Violet, did you notice this?”

  “What?”

  “This yellow stuff.”

  Violet looked closely at her sister’s fingers. “No, I didn’t. That’s unusual. I did the same thing, and that didn’t happen to me.”

  “It’s not on all of them,” Jessie said. “Just some.”

  Clay took one of the yellowed flowers and gave it a sniff. “Ooo, that smells awful!”

  “Is it anything familiar?” Henry asked.

  “No,” said Clay, “I don’t think so.”

  Grandfather, who had been standing by the back door, snapped his fingers. “I’ve got an idea! There’s a chemical lab in town. The daughter of a friend of mine works there, a nice young woman named Renee Trowbridge. She might be able to tell us what that stuff is.”

  “Do you think she’d mind?” Clay said.

  “No, not at all.”

  “Well, if she can help us, I’ll give her some honey, too.”

  “Oh, boy, a real laboratory!” Benny said with a big smile. “Cool!”

  “It’s really very interesting,” his grandfather told him. “Would you care to come along?” he asked the Shermans.

  “We certainly would,” Dottie replied. “The sooner we can get to the bottom of this, the better.”

  “Okay, let’s go.”

  Benny had seen a chemical laboratory only once, and that was in a spooky movie that he and Henry watched one night. There were lots of bubbling, smoking liquids in glass tubes, and lightning bolts kept flashing outside. The mad scientist who worked there was scary, with wild hair and an evil chuckle.

  But there were no mad scientists working at ChemCo, which was the name of the lab in town. Instead there was a young woman with blond hair and a warm smile. This was Renee, Grandfather’s friend. She wore a long white lab coat and had a pair of goggles hanging from a strap around her neck. Much to Benny’s relief, she didn’t have an evil laugh.

  “You say you found these in a field of flowers that were otherwise healthy?” she asked.

  Violet nodded. “That’s right. There was a patch about this wide.” She spread her arms as far as they would go. “All the flowers in there were dead. They were lying on the ground, all yellowed and curled. But all the other flowers around this spot were fine.”

  “Hmmm.” Renee got up onto a tall stool behind one of the heavy lab tables. There was a microscope on it. Much to Benny’s delight, there also were rows of glass tubes containing colorful chemical liquids. None of them smoked or bubbled, though. “That’s very strange, I have to admit,” Re-nee said.

  She tore off a small piece of the dead flower and trapped it between two glass slides. Each slide was about the size and shape of a stick of gum. Then she slipped it under the microscope and twisted a little knob to focus it.

  “Okay,
let’s see now … I see the yellow stuff you mentioned. It doesn’t look like something the flower would make, so it must have come from somewhere else.”

  She got up and went to a steel cabinet, from which she took three small plastic bottles. Each contained a different colored liquid. Then she returned to the table and tore off another piece of the dead flower.

  “What’s that you’re doing?” Jessie asked.

  “A few little tests,” Renee said. “Maybe I can determine what that yellow stuff is.”

  She held the first bottle over the sample and squeezed out a single drop of clear fluid. Then she put the slide back into the microscope.

  “Anything?” Clay asked.

  “Mmm … no, not really. No reaction at all.” She looked up and smiled.

  She did the same thing using the next bottle, which had a pink fluid. “Hmmm, that’s interesting,” she mumbled to herself.

  “What? What’s interesting?” Jessie asked.

  “Hang on. One more test.…”

  The liquid in the last bottle was a sky-blue color. Very pretty, Violet thought, wondering what it was.

  Renee’s smile faded when she looked into the microscope this time. The others noticed this and fell silent.

  “Oh, my goodness. These flowers have been sprayed with Menadrin!”

  Jessie’s face crumpled with confusion. “Menadrin? What’s that?”

  “It’s an experimental chemical created a few years ago. It was supposed to make farm crops grow more quickly and produce larger fruits and vegetables, but government tests showed that it was unsafe, so they wouldn’t allow it to be sold anywhere.”

  “Would it have any effect on bees?” Henry asked.

  “Bees? I’m not sure.”

  “How about on the way they make honey?”

  Renee thought for a moment, then nodded. “Yes, I think it would. Honey would go from being like glue to —”

  “Being more like water?” Jessie suggested.

  “Yes, something like that.”

  Grandfather snapped his fingers. “Now we’re getting somewhere!”