The Language of Bees - Laurie R. King [38]
The pan would not deceive Mrs Hudson, so I would have to take another pass at its surface before she returned, but at least the smoke had cleared. I latched the windows and put on my boots.
I had decided during the night that there was no reason I should leave the abandoned hive's honey to be raided by human or insect thieves, and that a day's hard labour would do me good. It was righteous good will, not boredom—how could I be bored, in this place?—that had me loading up the hand-cart and trundling it across the dewy grass to the far-off hive.
The laden frames had been heavy enough one at a time, but together, they weighed a young ton. Plus that, I had neglected to bring gloves, which meant that when I reached the garden shed again, hours later, my palms were raw and my back ached with fighting the cart over the uneven ground. I staggered to the house, gulping three glasses of cool water at the kitchen sink and letting the tap run across my hot face. I chipped off a hunk of ice from the block in the ice-box to cool a fourth glass, and took it outside to the shade of the apple tree. This time the busy bees were less companions than they were haughty reminders of a job ahead. I scowled at the workers.
“If Holmes isn't back to deal with you lot, you'll just have to keep packing the nectar in until the place bursts,” I told them.
They answered not.
After a while, I returned to the house to fetch Holmes' strong magnifying glass. I could have waited until the cool of the evening, which on a day like this would still be plenty warm to encourage the flow of honey, but I wanted light to study the evidence in the comb. Before attacking each frame, I carried it into the sun to study with the glass, hoping for a clue to the hive's aberrant behaviour. I found none. The earlier frames were neatly filled, side to side; when I had finished examining each one, I took it back into the shed and ran the hot knife over its comb, setting it into place in Holmes' homemade, hand-cranked centrifuge.
The later frames were less perfect, and darker as the nectar changed colour with summer's ripening. In the frames to which the queen had been limited by the excluder frame, I could trace her progress: growing brood, ready for hatching; smaller pupae, still subsisting on their pollen store; then mere eggs, laid, supplied with food, and sealed into their wax wombs. After that, nothing.
I counted no fewer than twenty-one empty queen cells drooping around the bottom levels of the hive, their larger dimensions pushing the neat hexagons out of alignment. This seemed to me a rather high number, for each queen cell represented either a potential swarm, or a deadly battle between the reigning queen and the virgin upstart. Generally speaking, the queen ripped any royal larvae from their cells and murdered them. Holmes, or Mr Miranker, might be able to tell whether the infinitesimal marks in the wax of these cells had been made from without or within the cell, but I couldn't.
These frames, I put aside for Holmes.
Extracting the honey took me most of the day, and left me sweat-soaked and incredibly sticky, all my muscles burning, my skin, nostrils, and mouth permeated with the cloy of honey. All the while, bees plucked their way up and down the screens Holmes had installed on the shed's windows, teased by the aroma of riches ripe for plunder.
I finished about four o'clock: jars capped, machinery clean, frames set aside for the next use. There was one partial jar. I picked it up, stuck one grubby finger into the amber contents, and put the resulting glossy burden into my mouth.
The honey from mad bees tastes much like that of others.
I left the jar on the kitchen table and went upstairs to put on my bathing costume. I got out the bicycle, checked that the tyres were still inflated, and pedalled down the lane to the shore, where I found—as I'd hoped—that the day's holiday-makers were beginning to