Telling the Bees (18 page)

Twenty-seven

T
HE PROBOSCIS:
A complex apparatus that includes the maxillae, labia, and glossa, or tongue, which together form a strawlike tube that draws up nectar, honey, and water, or, in reverse, transfers food from bee to bee.

O
ne of the more puzzling aspects of the worker bee’s behavior is her seeming ability to adapt to a succession of diverse responsibilities over the course of her lifetime without obvious training or prior knowledge of the tasks. Even more intriguing is the fact that she undertakes these progressively more complex tasks, as British apiarist Herbert Mace noted, having descended from parents who have never performed the tasks expected of her as neither have the requisite organs or intelligence expected of their daughter. How then, without proper guidance or example, does the worker learn to fulfill her role when the father is a mere depositor of sperm and the queen mother nothing more than the indifferent layer of the fertilized egg?

There are those who theorize that it is through genetic transference, while others look to the worker’s food supply for some unidentified secretion or dietary element that is passed along to trigger the instincts and organ growth necessary for her to know how and when to perform the tasks she does. The irony is that in the course of her lifetime she may perform every task necessary for the survival of the hive save one: She cannot produce viable, full-functioning offspring. That task alone is reserved for the queen.

Just as the worker bee fulfills many roles during her lifetime, so, too, a man or woman may develop many roles and levels of human interaction depending upon his or her particular stage in life. I say this only because while the warm bond of friendship that Claire and I had forged in our early adolescence had begun to fray a bit around the edges during the summer of 1936, the common regard for our cherished bees continued to hold strong, and Claire continued to work in our family’s apiary during the day, though, as I said, our customary evening rendezvous became ever more infrequent as we left our childish years behind.

As I think back now, I think I might have been less kind than I should have been.

It was during this period of diminishing camaraderie that Claire began to offer up in conversation occasional tidbits of arcane information about the care and habits of honeybees of which even my father was forced to admit he had been unaware.

I recall, for example, an instance when she and I took up what had developed over the summer into an intractable debate as to the merits of alfalfa honey over jasmine. We were helping my father uncap and load a brace of foundation frames into our honey extractor, and as usual I had taken the side of jasmine while Claire stuck stubbornly to her preference for alfalfa.

“It is so utterly common,” I insisted as I had a thousand times before. “There is nothing in its color or flavor that is of special worth.”

“Of course there’s nothing special about alfalfa honey,” she said. “It’s not the honey but what the bee has to do to extract the honey from the flower that is so fascinating.”

Claire described in surprisingly intricate detail how this wily flower was designed so that if a bee were to sip its nectar directly from the blossom as is customary with other blossoms, it would shut on the bee’s tongue, and she would be hard-pressed to free herself. Claire explained that after several such awkward snares, the honeybee learns to approach the blossom from the side to sip the nectar without tripping the blossom. This, Claire said, proved that the honeybee was infinitely more intelligent than most creatures in the animal kingdom.

“And how is that?” my father prodded.

“Well, Mr. Honig, she can measure and interpret information and she is able to learn from her mistakes. I think this makes her nearly human in her ability to reason,” Claire said, and with an unseemly glint in her eyes added, “Of course the drone shows no such signs of intelligent life.”

Surprised by her sudden erudition on the subject of bee science and the passion with which it was imparted, my father asked, “Wherever did you come up with such a thing?”

“There are some things philosophers can’t teach you,” she replied, directing her gaze at me instead of my father, who seemed oblivious to her barb.

I could not help wondering what had happened to the shy young girl who had flitted so obsequiously about the kitchen, serving tea and refreshments to her mother and me, at our first meeting only four years earlier. Over a single summer’s span, Claire had added a level of haughtiness that could, with very little imagination, be construed as false pride, or so it seemed to me at the time. And, regretfully, I responded in kind, wishing to show my father, I suppose, that I was as learned in apian anatomy as our young neighbor suddenly appeared to be.

“Speaking of bees’ tongues, why do you suppose it is that while the queen bee is larger and stronger, and her wings are by far more powerful than her offspring’s, her tongue is only half as long as that of a worker bee?” I said, directing my query at Claire. When she did not respond right away, I offered that since the queen’s services are not required for gathering pollen or nectar, there is no need for her to have an overly developed organ for this specialized function, while the worker bees must.

“Or just maybe discretion is the operating imperative here,” Claire added with another sly wink aimed at my father as if he could appreciate her wit more than I. “A true queen, after all, would never kiss and tell.”

“Tell what?” I demanded. Claire seemed startled by the vehemence of my tone, as, in truth, was I.

“Never mind,” she said.

But I did mind. I can’t say why, but I did.

I would like to state for the record that while I certainly disagreed then—and still do—with Aristotle’s belief that woman is but an inferior man, I wholeheartedly support his contention that all human actions have behind them one or more of these seven causes: chance, nature, compulsion, habit, reason, passion, and desire.

Certainly in Claire’s case I would postulate that six out of the seven causes were mustered into action with the most dire of consequences—if not that fateful summer, then soon enough afterward.

Twenty-eight

D
RONE CONGREGATION AREA:
Where sexually mature drones from many colonies gather to mate with virgin queens. When a queen approaches, several drones copulate with her on the fly and eviscerate themselves in the process. It is not clear why drones choose a particular area to congregate, only that they will gather there year after year whether a queen is present or not.

S
aint Augustine, in the passion of his youth, had been sorely tempted by the lure of the flesh, and by his own admission on many occasions he found his self-restraint wanting. But Augustine repented his former ways. God made man a rational animal, composed of body and soul, he realized. God permitted man to sin, he then wrote, but not with impunity. And God pursued man with His mercy. He let man share a life of generation in common with the trees and a life of the senses with the beasts of the fields, but He made the singular distinction that man shares a life of intelligence only with angels.

When I was young and blinded by the fire of my affection, I believed that Claire was that rare blend of beauty and intelligence that could elevate her to the realm of the spirit. But a change came over her after her visit to Detroit. I say Detroit now, of course, because Detective Grayson was clever enough to discover the truth of Claire’s whereabouts posthumously, but at the time of her return midway through her twenty-second year I only knew that she had gone away my dearest friend and had come back profoundly more worldly. When on the rare occasions we found ourselves alone, we rarely spoke as we once had, as only young innocents can.

It was shortly after Claire’s return that a steady stream of suitors began to come calling, though I observed that no particular young man came often enough to be called steady.

It became easy to discern when Claire was expecting a new beau. She would emerge from her front door in a fashionable dress with matching shoes and handbag, her hair piled up on her head and her lips and fingernails painted red. And before long she would begin to pace a wide figure eight back and forth across the porch until one young man or another pulled up in front of her house in his spit-and-polish roadster. She hardly gave any of these suitors time to turn the motor off before she bounded lightly down the porch stairs, then waited for him to come around to her side of the car to open the passenger door for her. As always, Claire commanded a certain level of respect even from these casual acquaintances.

I noticed only one young man who for a time frequented Claire’s company more than the rest. But even he ceased his attentions shortly after making the unexpected acquaintance of the formidable Mrs. Straussman.

It was early December, and I was sitting on my front porch, enjoying the cool ocean breeze, when I saw Claire come out her front door. I nodded my head in greeting as Claire happened to turn her head, but before she could respond Mrs. Straussman came around the side of the house at the very moment Claire’s gentleman caller pulled up in his roadster and bleated his horn to announce his arrival. As I believe I’ve mentioned before, Mrs. Straussman had lost her lower left leg to diabetes when Claire was still in her teens, but she’d since been fitted with an artificial limb that when used in conjunction with her sturdy badger cane provided her with some measure of mobility. I had grown to admire Mrs. Straussman’s ability to move around with seeming aplomb despite her looming bulk, so I cannot say who was more surprised by the sudden tumble she took right in front of the porch, me or the startled young man who had just dashed around the front of his car to open the door for Claire. Needless to say, the young man’s courtly intentions were quickly diverted from Claire to her mother as he rushed to the fallen woman’s side and began fanning her face with a silk kerchief he pulled from the breast pocket of his suit. At least, I assume it was silk, judging by his otherwise dandified appearance.

Claire, meanwhile, continued to stand by the car door as if she expected her young man to simply abandon Mrs. Straussman, who lay prostrate on the ground. That’s when the young man looked up in desperation and spotted me sitting on my front porch.

“You, there,” he shouted, a bit rudely perhaps but understandable given the extreme circumstances. “Come give me a hand.”

Of course I obliged, and with no small effort the young man and I eventually helped Mrs. Straussman up onto the porch and into her customary rattan rocker. Once she was comfortably seated, the young man dashed back to retrieve the cane abandoned in the grass.

“I’ll be all right, now,” Mrs. Straussman said. The young man handed the cane to her, and I must admit that despite her fall, she looked as hale as she ever did, though a bit winded, perhaps, and just a little flush in her ample cheeks. “It’s the sugar, you know.”

“Sugar?”

“Diabetes, lad. It makes me a wee bit light-headed from time to time.”

Claire, meanwhile, hadn’t budged from her station by the car, and I could see that this had caused her beau considerable consternation.

“Run along now, young man. Don’t you worry about me,” Mrs. Straussman said, sighing heavily as she caressed the handle of her cane. “I’ll be just fine.”

And of course she was, although the same could not be said of the couple whose evening she had so precipitously interrupted. While I couldn’t catch their words exactly, it was clear from their tone that a disagreement had sprung up between Claire and her gentleman caller over her apparent indifference to her mother’s infirmity, and soon enough he climbed back into the car and drove away, leaving Claire standing alone at the edge of the roadway.

“Don’t you say a word,” she said as she strode past me into her house, and I was left alone on the porch with Mrs. Straussman for a moment longer until she said once again that she was quite all right.

“Go on home, now,” she said, straightening the folds of her heavy black dress. “Clarinda can take care of me.”

I stopped briefly on my own front porch to wave good night. I never saw that particular young man again, and after a time most of the others gradually stopped coming around as well.

My desire to follow Claire never waned. But neither did my sacred obligation to my home, my family, and of course my bees. Claire and I were different in that regard. She felt burdened by filial duty to home and hearth throughout most of her troubled years on this earth; in her heart of hearts she always desired to be somewhere—anywhere—else. And sadly, as I so often told her in the waning years of our friendship, with her eyes locked on the distant horizon, she seemed sadly unprepared to appreciate the simple bounty that lay before her. At least, that was how I saw it. Claire was just as apt to point out to me that I was blinded to the possibilities of mystery and adventure by my own habit of keeping my nose so to the grindstone. Which is all true enough, I suppose, but as Claire would also no doubt say were she able to speak today, it’s all just so much water under the bridge.

On the rare occasions Claire deigned to visit with my father and I as we worked together in our apiary, she no longer dove right in with a helping hand like she used to, more often than not quickly retiring to the kitchen, where she spent an inordinate amount of time assisting my mother in the preparation of meals or some other such household chore. I don’t know what they talked about—or even if they talked at all—as my mother adhered to strict rules of female confidentiality regarding anything said between the two of them. And Claire hardly ever spoke directly to me other than to say hello or good-bye or ask about my health or the well-being of our family’s bees.

Still, I worried about her, and I tried as best I could to watch and protect over her without arousing her considerable ire. Despite her later accusations to the contrary, I never spied on Claire intentionally. Even when I saw her slip out of her house at night, I did not follow her into the grove as I once had. It was only by chance that I stumbled upon her private affairs that one and only time so very long ago.