Animal, Vegetable, Miracle_ A Year of Food Life - Barbara Kingsolver [45]
Bees? Ho-hum, just an ordinary day at our P.O. I adjusted my notion of myself as a special-needs postal customer.
Lily bent over the bee cages, peering at the trembling masses of worker bees humming against the wire mesh sides of the boxes. The sticky substance dripping out was actually sugar water sent along to sustain the bees through their journey. Down below the buzzing clots of worker bees sat the queen bees with their enormous hind ends, each carefully encapsulated in her own special chamber. These big-bootied ladies were replacement queens ordered by local beekeepers from a bee supply company, to jump-start hives whose previous queens were dead or otherwise inadequate.
But Lily quickly turned to the box with her name on it: a small cardboard mailing crate with dime-sized holes on all sides and twenty-eight loud voices inside: the noise-density quotient of one kindergarten packed into a shoebox. Lily picked it up and started crooning like a new mother. This was the beginning of a flock she’d been planning for many months and will be tending, I presume, until we see her off to college. Because we knew the chicks were coming this morning, I had allowed her to stay home from school to wait for the call. She wasn’t sure the principal would consider this an excused absence. I assured her it was a responsibility large enough to justify a few hours of missed class. I hadn’t even known we’d be having lessons in the birds and the bees.
Once she’d brought them home, taken her twenty-eight chicks out of that tiny box, and started each one on its path to a new life under her care, Lily was ready to get back to third grade. When we signed her in at the principal’s office, the secretary needed a reason for Lily’s tardiness. Lily threw back her shoulders and announced, “I had to start my own chicken business this morning.”
The secretary said without blinking, “Oh, okay, farming,” and entered the code for “Excused, Agriculture.” Just another day at our elementary school, where education comes in many boxes.
I already knew what we’d be in for when we got the baby chicks home. I’d been through the same drill a week earlier with my own poultry project: fifteen baby turkeys. I’d lifted each one out of the box and they hit the ground running, ready to explore the newspaper-lined crate I’d set up in the garage. Right away they set about pecking at every newsprint comma and period they could find. These peeps were hungry, which meant they were born two days earlier. Poultry hatchlings don’t need to eat or drink for the first forty-eight hours of life, as they are born with a margin of safety called the yolk sac—the yolk of the egg absorbed into the chick’s belly just before hatching. This adaptation comes in handy for birds like chickens and turkeys that have to get up and walk right away, following Mom around to look for something edible. (Other baby birds live in a nest for the first weeks, waiting for a parent to bring takeout.) Newborn poultry can safely be put in a box right after hatching and shipped anyplace they’ll reach in two days. Some animal-rights groups have tried to make an issue of it, but mail-order chicks from reputable hatcheries have virtually a 100 percent survival rate.
Until I opened up the box and let in the sunlight, my poultry babies must have presumed they’d spent their last two days of incubation in an upgraded, community egg. Now they were out, with yolk-sac tummies crying, Time’s up! I scattered a handful of feed around the bottom of their crate. Some of the less gifted pushed the food aside so they could keep pecking at the attractive newsprint dots. Oh, well, we don’t grow them for their brains. I filled a shallow water container and showed them how to drink, which they aren’t born knowing how to do. They are born, in fact, knowing a good deal of the nothing a turkey brain will ever really grasp, but at this stage their witlessness was lovable.