The Queen Bee

The sight of the bees forming Ross’s face and deadly nightshade unnerved Emma. Prior to witnessing it, Emma assumed Joan exaggerated her bees’ picture-making skills, and Emma adjusted to it. Forming Ross’s face was extraordinary. To productively procrastinate in the apiary, she dusted and swept, and waited for Joan to find her.

The first year Emma worked at the apiary, Joan said that she had a weird array of precocious bee colonies, but loved them too much to alert scientists, who would take them away or interrupt their work. Joan quickly decided Emma was the right kind of person to keep her bees. Most other beekeepers were best suited to normal bees.

Upon hiring Emma, Joan said that only certain people, especially children, could see the bees’ shapes. Paige said that unimaginative adults outgrew it, which Emma wanted to believe. Emma wondered if some adults were children at heart.

“Why can they do that?” Emma asked.

“Do what?” Joan asked.

“Make faces.”

“I haven’t the faintest idea. We shan’t collect any honey from their hive this year, and next year, we must destroy the comb and honey. Too late in the year to do it now.” Joan got out her bee genealogy book and sat down.

“Did they come from a testing facility or something?”

“The bees simply became more intelligent over the years. But I’m glad you saw them and you can help me watch for funny honey.” Joan sighed. “They don’t understand Paige’s situation. It is a bit beyond them, to be honest. Please, don’t tell Melanie about them. She has enough to worry about, and you’ve probably noticed by now she doesn’t particularly like bees.” Joan worried about being a dotty old lady whose children would take her beloved colonies away and send her to a home. Ross’s face agitated her concerns. She said, “And I just need to check the colony’s family tree.

Emma proceeded with her normal work as Joan searched her genealogical records, which, especially regarding her own bees, rivaled Debrett’s Peerage & Baronetage. She and her younger daughter, Melissa, tracked hive queens as thoroughly as European royalty monitored each other’s successions. They even tracked down the bees she sold, but generally, investigating their offspring required a time machine. Many died without swarming. Joan spread out several of her other books, binders, and notebooks and continued researching.

“Do you know about my first husband?” Joan asked when Emma returned to the shed.

“Mum said not to mention him unless you did,” Emma said.

“Paige's bees trace back to a swarm from a particular hive. The hive had the same queen during the swarm and when the bees murdered Clarence."

Joan was born in a small row house with a garden too small and shadowy for a victory garden. Her parents kept a beehive to support the war effort. The queen bee filled the hive with normal, hardworking, healthy bees. Pollinating bees were essential for proper agriculture in the best or worst outcome of the War; Joan’s family’s bees might not have routinely reached the countryside, but families planted gardens across town and might already tend orchard trees. Later, Joan wondered if her bees traveled the maximum distance to do their bit. She spent most of her childhood under sugar rationing, but due to the family beehive, she or one of her siblings took turns having a birthday cake.

Soon after sugar rationing ended, Joan’s parents intended to stop beekeeping, but they let Joan maintain the hive herself. She sold honey and wished for more space. But her descendants of wartime bees seemed happy in the cramped garden. As a teenager, Joan must have noticed clever, storybook-like bees. Their intelligence and emotional microevolution were probably unobservable outside a laboratory. Shortly before Joan met Clarence, she noticed her bees were particularly vivacious compared to other beekeepers’ and she wondered if loving the bees biased her.

Even though Clarence despised bees and considered honey disgusting, he tolerated bees for Joan’s sake and admitted the world needed pollinators. He was not scared of bees and avoided them like they were a dog’s mess. Joan and Clarence loved each other anyway and married. When Joan told the bees, she gave them a slice of wedding cake. Clarence considered it and her many folksy ways silly, but he rarely outwardly objected to them. He gravitated towards the modern, developed world.

When Joan became pregnant with Melanie, Clarence vetoed the name Melissa—Joan excitedly pointed out the etymology before she stopped herself—and, therefore, he and Joan compromised with Melanie. Joan warned the bees when contractions began. She doubted Clarence intended to tell the bees on her behalf, but she visited the bees daily and the long interruption might discombobulate them like the rare days she felt too sick to notify them.

Clarence and Joan bought a house with a larger garden and he built a wooden fence around Joan’s bee yard and gave her a corner of the cellar. She kept three hives. She struggled to acquire books and scholarly bee research. The scientific articles baffled her and she had little opportunity to study science.

Joan sold the excess honey and harvested more beeswax than she needed or could give away. Concerning beeswax, she was more likely to break even than profit. Clarence discouraged her from expanding the bee business, or trying to sell the excess beeswax, or spending money on processing the disturbing beeswax. She sold bees, to his relief. Her bees evolved to the point Joan worried her sold bees alarmed beekeepers. Along with normal quarantine practices, she blocked their convenient view of other bees with a muslin screen.

Joan longed to expand the bee business somehow and suggested building hives. However, she needed to learn the necessary carpentry skills (Clarence refused to teach her), he disliked people borrowing his tools and deemed another set too expensive, and the idea was a probably an unprofitable, expensive venture. Then Joan suggested a cookbook—knowing full well that Clarence objected to honey-contaminated food since only she and sometimes Melanie ate it. Finally, Joan suggested renting hives to farmers. The hives spent the growing season on the farmer’s land and in the garden through the winter, when nobody bothered with the garden. However, Clarence refused. In his opinion, Joan had more worthwhile activities than bee enterprises and Joan considered herself capable of both.

Over the generations, the bees began to respond to her, and she thought they understood some of what she said. They coordinated their flying into shapes and pictures. She considered herself incapable of experimenting on the bees. When Joan showed Melanie the pretty pictures, the bees scared Melanie. Joan expected it to appeal to children. She habitually did not tell Clarence bee matters, but this time, she needed to tell him. He declared the whole idea ridiculous and that Joan made up a nice story upon which Melanie’s imagination expanded.

To read, think, nap, or have some time to herself undisturbed, Joan sat in the bee yard. Her bees required less attention than Clarence thought. Often, she vented in a whisper to the bees—nobody could read it in her diary, overhear her because nobody else went near the bees, and there were no worries of spreading gossip or leading to a petty quarrel.

Melanie agreed with her father’s bee opinions more than Joan’s, possibly because Joan rarely contradicted Clarence. Keeping her opinions and facts to herself was easier and better for a good home life. She and Clarence usually had a good, peaceful home and a happy marriage, tensions arose from the bees.

Clarence gradually noticed the bees’ extraordinary behavior, hence Joan’s insistence they reveal themselves privately to select people. He thought it best Joan got rid of all her bees and, since he long ago resigned himself to her bees, begin again with a fresh strain. Knowing extermination distressed Joan, he suggested sending them to the government. The bees absconded and Joan spent several days searching for them and reassuring them of their safety. It convinced Clarence they needed to stay—he dreaded freaky bees swarming the countryside. Also, he insisted Joan stop selling swarms; she cooperated. She never sold swarms again.

Bee issues and their influence on other issues grew worse, but Clarence and Joan tried to work them out. Neither considered divorce. In her head, never to the bees, Joan wondered if she ought to exterminate the hives. Melanie and the bees seemed aware of the problems. As much as Joan and Clarence comforted Melanie, Joan theoretically comforted the bees.

One Sunday, Clarence was sick. Joan and Melanie walked to church and he stayed home. Joan finished cooking lunch and sent Melanie to find Clarence. Melanie found her father stung to death by bees. She screamed and cried incoherently, prompting Joan to search for her husband, still in his pajamas. Thousands of dead and dying honeybees surrounded and covered him. The garden hose continued running. It tangled around his legs and the medical examiner determined it tripped him. The medical examiner found bees in his ears, nose, and throat and stings directly on his eyeballs and tongue.

However, Joan had taught Clarence to defend himself from attacking honeybees.

The medical examiner called Clarence’s death an accident. Joan confessed to the police her bees had killed him. She could not prove it, except for a mostly empty hive from which she did not expect a swarm, but the police named her bees as the most likely suspect and that it was an accident. Joan wished the bees communicated more coherently to humans—the queen bee knew why the bees swarmed. She certainly never asked the bees to kill anybody, let alone want Clarence dead. Perhaps he provoked them. Just in case they attacked first, Joan banned stinging people to death.

Promptly, Joan euthanized the colony. Because the colonies which swarmed from it had not hurt anybody, she left them alone.

Joan brought a bit of funeral biscuit to the hives and draped them in black cloth. Sneakily at night, Melanie attempted to knock off the biscuits and tear down the cloth. Every flying bee flew far from the beehives; Melanie believed they intended to sting her to death. She ran to the house.

Then Joan bought her farm and a tractor and increased her bee business while working in town. Carefully, she placed the hives out of sight of the cottage and road. Bright violet fences marked a boundary beyond which she allowed synchronized flight only in emergencies.

Joan met Norman and quickly, she showed him the bees. Norman bolted into her apiary shed, but he met Joan halfway up the path. He apologized for his rudeness to Joan and the bees. Soon, Joan and Norman married. He and Joan brought a slice of wedding cake to the bees. While Joan recovered from delivering Melissa, he personally informed the bees.

Norman wanted Joan to keep bees if she liked it, and so she proceeded with her bee enterprises. He helped her in his spare time. People were familiar with Auntie Joan and her delicious honey and precious bees. She wished they called Norman Uncle Norman, but people practically ignored him; he did not mind.

For decades, Joan rented hives to farmers. Their crops noticeably benefited from her bees, and to a certain extent, the bees avoided cross-pollination. She positively forbade rented bees to make shapes under any circumstances. Melanie doubted they followed her instructions. Still, Joan never received a complaint or heard, “I think I almost saw the bees doing the oddest thing…” While collecting a swarm, Joan fell and the farmer helped her up approximately an hour later, wondering what took so long. Meanwhile, outside Norman’s office window, a swarm of bees bumped gently against the glass to get his attention. He followed it in the direction of the farm. Joan stopped renting hives. It explained why Joan told Emma, if a swarm of honeybees were in an unlikely new hive site, to follow the bees.

Local people believed from sheer lack of evidence that Joan’s bees were normal bees who made good honey, guaranteed to taste exactly as the pink and brown label said. Artisans ranked her pure beeswax among the best. Oddly, Joan refused to enter competitions; she said she was not competitive enough, but she also thought her honey was average.

Thanks to Joan’s bee-decline awareness pamphlets, school talks, and giveaway bee habitats, native bees repopulated the village and neighboring areas. They were perfectly normal, like the wild bees in Joan’s previous homes.

Nobody (or, at least, cynically theorizing, nobody other than Melanie, who would rather become a nude, avant-garde, interactive, eventually deadly public art installation than imply Joan’s bees were unusual) said, “Be nice to Auntie Joan or a bee will sting your eyeball.”

“Why are the bees protecting Paige?” Emma asked.

“They love her,” Joan said. Looking through her notebooks and books, she said, “And ones in that hive are hers, but her mum doesn’t want people to see them. But I heard Paige repeat Anglo-Saxon bee charms as she played outside. But who knows what else she said.”

“Magic isn’t real.”

“But the bees believe what they are told. I thought they were like nursery rhymes for bees, but children believe nursery rhymes as well. Here ‘tis. Two charms for swarming bees, but the bees wouldn’t know its purpose.” Joan read the English translation of the first charm:

“‘I take under foot, I have found it.

Verily earth avails against every creature,

And against mischief and mindlessness,

And against the great tongue of man.’”

“Paige memorized that?” Emma asked, skeptically.

“Or she substituted words quite close. She enjoys old books,” Joan said, and read the second translated charm.

“‘Sit ye, victor-dames, sink to earth,

Never to fly wild to the wood!

Be as mindful of my good

As every man is of food and estate.’”

“How do they know it’s about bees?” Emma asked.

“They know when we speak to them,” Joan said.

Joan, Paige, and Emma talked to the bees and she and the beekeepers talked to each other. Emma considered a one-sided conversation with insects silly until she started. In addition to Joan’s wealth of bee folklore, stories, songs, quotations, and facts, on boring drudgery days, she reminisced about her family, sang songs, and told stories. She memorized some of it, promised it on their breaks if they worked quickly, or, when feeble, read aloud from her garden chair. Otherwise, unless it disturbed the bees, they listened to music, audiobooks, and the radio.

“Your bees swarm,” Emma said.

“Yes, but they always return or tell me they require a new hive. But they could have misinterpreted the words. My bees pass down information through the generations, or they might have understood enough to misinterpret it. My bees understand more than they communicate, like babies.”

Emma did not believe Joan’s full explanation. However, Emma certainly believed the bees wanted to murder Mr. Andrews and that Joan worried deeply. Joan’s worry scared Emma. And she did not want to be around murderous bees, but Joan did not seem worried for her and Emma’s safety. If she was, she would send Emma home or give her extremely specific instructions.

“Why don’t you go home until all this is sorted out?” Joan asked.

“You have a stressful time and a lot to do, so I want to help,” Emma said.

“Very sweet. Thanks. But if the bees scare you, you can leave. And, of course, come back to work when it is all sorted.”

“I’m all right.”

“And you can change your mind.”

“Thanks.”

Throughout the day, Emma considered quitting her job, but Joan might be too old to handle the situation and Norman was in a wheelchair. After discovering Norman’s body, Melanie might be too scared; Emma wondered if her trauma caused her hatred of bees, and so it now seemed a reasonable opinion.