Telling the Bees (19 page)

Twenty-nine

T
HE QUEEN’S BURDEN:
The life span of a queen is four to five years, compared to the six to seven weeks of her daughters. Her color is more golden. Her sting is more curved. The facets of her eyes, however, are fewer by several thousand, and though her brain is smaller her ovaries are enormous.

I
t was an unusually steamy night, even for August, when the nightly ocean breeze generally finds a way to work its magic on all but the most obdurate daytime heat even this far inland, and as I recall the music was reverberating off the walls of my room and people were shouting and laughing as they always did on Saturday nights at the Harmony Ballroom. Between the noise and the heat, it was next to impossible to sleep, and so even though it was well past midnight I decided I might as well get dressed and take a walk out to our number fifteen hive to retrieve the smoker can and gloves I’d carelessly left behind earlier that day. I didn’t want my father to discover my mistake. He was, I must admit, a bit of a stickler for order.

“A place for everything and everything in its place,” my father always said.

I was still sitting on my back porch steps, lacing up my shoes, when I saw a white blur dash through the trees beyond my mother’s garden. It was none of my affair, I told myself, as I wove slowly through the orderly rows of orange trees that converged into darkness beneath the dim illumination of the rising moon. The night air was thick with the aroma of ripe oranges, and I had to duck to avoid being struck by low-hanging clusters of fruit. I was bent over in just such an evasive maneuver, in fact, when I was startled out of my own reveries by the sharp braying sound of a man’s laugh followed by a flurry of low whispers coming from somewhere nearby. I hesitated a moment, but then I realized one of the two voices was Claire’s, clear as the silver moonlight that shone through the trees.

“
Hola
yourself, kiddo,” she said, and I looked up just in time to see a lean, hard-looking man in a dark long-sleeved shirt with embroidered white trim and a woven leather tie with silver tips that matched the pointed toes of his black leather boots that tipped out from beneath the cuffs of his dark trousers. Claire threw her slender arms around the man’s neck, and the moonlight reflecting off her dazzling white gown cast both figures in an otherworldly glow that drew my unwilling eyes to them like a moth to a flame.

Transfixed for the moment, I watched with revulsion as the dark-clad man loosened the leather band from around his neck and lifted it slowly over his head as he unbuttoned his shirt with his other hand. Then he slipped the tie around Claire’s neck and pulled her closer to him. With her lips nearly brushing his, she whispered something else I could not hear and I turned to go. But as I did, a twig snapped sharply under my foot, and I froze when both their heads turned in the direction of the sound. Partially concealed by the trunk of a tree and the darkness all around me, I remained for the moment undetected. To move, I realized, would be to risk giving myself away. And so reluctantly I stayed, and I saw more in the next few moments than I could erase in a lifetime.

I cannot say if it was the first—or even the only—time Claire met this man in the grove. I only can say that he was not one of her “regular” callers, who for the most part had already fallen by the wayside by this time. I will venture, however, that there was a swagger and self-assuredness to this man’s movements that the previous callow young men had lacked. This man seemed older—nearly old enough, in fact, to be her father. But where her father was reed thin, milk pale, and distant in bearing, this man, though still lean, was more robust, swarthy even, and given to bursts of raucous laughter where no good reason for mirth existed that I could detect.

Little that might be construed as tenderness or even true affection seemed to pass between the two of them either before or after their unholy coupling. Whereas the man expressed his lust in a chorus of grunts and guttural moans, Claire bore her defilement in relative silence, with only an occasional whimper emitting from her lips as the force of the man’s excitement drove him to the edge, it seemed to me, of abandoning all senses. Repelled by what I saw yet unable to turn away, I welcomed the sharp sting of tears that diffused my vision until the act was finished and the man collapsed onto the perfect white mounds of Claire’s exposed breasts even as a small sigh of relief escaped unbidden from my own trembling lips.

And then it was over.

With very little conversation between them, they presently drew themselves apart. I held close to the tree trunk as Claire, cool as ice, slid her dress back down over her head, slipped her shoes on, and scurried past me into the night. I waited a few more moments to allow the man time to pull up his pants, buckle his belt, smooth his hair, and saunter back toward the Harmony Ballroom. Then I hastily retrieved my smoker can and gloves and finally, under the cover of darkness, I returned home to my bed and an uneasy sleep.

Four months later, Claire, Hilda, and their mother went off to Alabama to take care of a poor unmarried relation. And six months after that, they brought David Gilbert home. Dark and brazen, he grew up calling the elder Straussmans Pappa and Nana Straussman. The younger women he referred to as Aunt Claire and Aunt Hilda, more out of deference to the gap in years than anything else, I believe, as their relationship was always portrayed to outsiders as that of distant cousins.

David Gilbert was raised as a shame baby, but the true shame was conveniently deflected from Mrs. Straussman’s willful daughter onto the illusory Suzanna Gilbert. Despite the family’s machinations to the contrary, I believe there were many in the neighborhood that suspected David Gilbert’s true origins, though none came forward to confront the Straussmans or the child directly to my knowledge.

I am not one to judge.

I believe the Straussmans did what they thought they must do, given the indelicate circumstances and prevailing social strictures of the day. And of course in hindsight, given the chance to do it over again, I do not think I would have allowed myself to be insinuated into this untenable situation as I seemed to have set all manner of tragic events in motion despite my best intentions. In truth, I had sought only to bring presumptive mother and son closer together, but to my everlasting regret all my well-intended words tore asunder what few familial bonds they had stubbornly clung to, inauthentic as they may have been.

Thirty

T
HE
L
ANGSTROTH HIVE:
Patented in 1851 by Reverend Lorenzo Lorraine Langstroth, it has become the standard in modern hive design. Incorporating the concept of bee space, this boxlike, stackable structure contains removable frames to which bees attach their wax honeycombs.

M
y new neighbors construct strange memorial displays on their lawn because they have chosen to believe that truth lies within the pulse of electromagnetic signals. They record names and dates on tiny crosses as if these simple inscriptions are the sole measure of a person’s life and death. But life is not a simple arithmetic equation. Life is algorithmic in its complications. The flap of a drab moth’s wing may have as many consequences—if not more—than the flutter of her infinitely more ethereal cousin’s. Have my neighbors, through their tawdry memorial displays, convinced me that the power lines that now strangle the sky above my home are responsible for all the deaths in our little community? I think not.

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 appeared 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.