The Language of Bees - Laurie R. King [30]
Bees feel joy, and outrage, and contentment. Bees play, tossing themselves in flight with no point but for the pleasure of the thing. And bees despair, when hopelessness and loss have become their lot.
A hive that loses its queen and has no other queen cells to raise up is dead, its future sterile. Workers may continue for a time, but soon listlessness and melancholy overcome them. Their sound changes, from the roar of energetic purpose to a note of anguish and loss. One of the workers may try to summon the energy of the hive and lay her own eggs, as if to conjure up the presence of royalty by enacting its rituals, but every member, drone to new-hatched worker, feels the end upon them.
For the bee, unlike the human, the future is all: The next generation is the singular purpose of their every motion, their every decision. Not for Apis mellifera the ethical struggles of individual versus community rights, the protest against oppression, the life-long dedication to perfecting an individual's nature and desire. For the hive, there is no individual, merely the all; no present, only the call of the future; no personal contribution, only the accumulated essence of great numbers.
The sun sloped behind the roof, shadows crept through the orchard, and finally, I closed the covers of Holmes' little book.
As I'd remembered, it was less “practical handbook” than philosophical treatise. As a girl of fifteen, it had meant little to me. Now, having known the man for nine years and been married to him for three, I found the document astonishing, so revealing of this proud, solitary man that I was amazed he had given it for publication.
I no longer wondered why he had retired at such an early age; rather, I was grateful that he had turned his back on his fellow man, instead of letting bitterness overcome him.
The night air moved up towards the Downs, washing over sea and orchard. I breathed it in, and thought that henceforth, loneliness would smell to me like fermenting apples.
I left the book on a desk in the library and went to find a bottle of last year's honey wine, a beverage not improved by longevity but containing nonetheless a breath of that summer.
The twelvemonth since Holmes bottled it had been an extraordinary one. The cases had pressed fast upon us, one after another, each with its singular cast of players: Miss Dorothy Ruskin, the mad archaeologist of Palestine, had come to our door a year ago less two days. No sooner had that investigation ended than we were pulled into a mystery on Dartmoor, and on that case's heels we had entered a Berkshire country house inhabited by Bedouins. Afterwards, we had scarcely drawn breath before Mycroft had sent us to India and a middle-aged version of Kipling's Kim; on our way homeward, after a foray into the affairs of the Emperor of Japan, we had landed in San Francisco, where lay the haunts of my own past.
One calendar year, filled with revelations, hardship, intense friendships, painful losses, and a view into my childhood that left me, three months later, shaken and unsure of myself. Another year like this one, and people would no longer comment on the age difference between my husband and myself.
I set the wine to cool while I closed up the house against the creatures of the night, then put together a plate of strong cheese, oat biscuits, and summer fruit. I spread some cushions and a travelling rug on the warm stones of the terrace and dined in solitary splendour while the colours came into the sky. I lay with the soft rug around me, watching the azure