The Language of Bees - Laurie R. King [43]
Then I hopped down from the wall and went back to the house. I spent some time with the more scientific manuals on bees, until I was certain that they were all workers, then went to the honey shed to retrieve one of the frames containing queen cells. I wrapped it with care, laid it in my bicycle basket, and set off for Jevington, where Mr Miranker's letter had come from.
A woman tossing grain to her chickens directed me to the beekeeper's house, on the far edge of the village. I spotted the man himself over the wall, gathering windfalls from beneath the apple tree. He looked up, unsurprised to see me.
“Good day, Mrs Holmes.”
“Hello, Mr Miranker.”
“I'm trying to pick up the apples before the wasps find them,” he explained. “I don't like to encourage wasps to spend time in the vicinity of the bees.”
“Quite,” I answered, remembering belatedly, and with some guilt, that Holmes had once told me something of the sort. As if to make up for my own poor husbandry of the bees left to my keeping, I bent to help him clear his apples.
“Was there something I might do for you?” he asked after a while.
“Oh, yes,” I said. I dropped my load of bruised and spoiling fruit in the barrow and fetched the frame from my bicycle. He led me to a sunlit potting bench and moved away the collection of clay pots and gravel. I dusted off the boards and laid out my frame.
“I wonder if you can tell me anything about these queen cells?”
“Apart from the fact that they are empty?”
“Can you tell if they were opened from inside, or from without?” I had brought the magnifying glass, but he did not take it.
He picked up the frame, tilting it back and forth to the sunlight, while I told him my speculations.
“The hive is all by itself on the hillside. The nearest hive is nearly a mile away. Here's what I was wondering.” And I laid out for him the story I had built in my mind.
When a hive swarms, the reigning queen takes with her the better half of the hive, leaving behind the honey, an entire hive's worth of infant workers in their cells, and one or several potential queens. The workers who remain behind nurture the queen cells until the first one hatches, at which point she tries to slaughter her potential rivals. Generally, the hive prevents her from killing all of them until she has returned successfully from her mating flight, ready to take up her long life as the centre of the hive's future.
The hours that she is away is a time of enormous vulnerability for the hive. A hungry bird, a chill wind—and their future fails to return. And if her hive has permitted her to kill all potential rivals, they are doomed.
The summer had seen periods of wet, and wind was always a problem near the sea, but I wondered if the remoteness of the hive had driven the queen to take a longer nuptial flight than normal, before the drones from her own and other hives caught her up.
I was not going to go so far as to suggest that loneliness had killed them, but that was the underlying idea.
Mr Miranker listened to this, radiating doubt as he methodically went over the frame I had brought him.
I asked him, “How do the drones know that the new queen is taking off?”
“There is, literally, a hum of anticipation that builds throughout the hive. And the queen sings, quite loudly. Then, once she is in flight they simply see her—she generally chooses a clear day on which to fly. It is also possible that she ‘speaks’ by sounds inaudible to human ears, or by her motions, or even by emitting an entire language of smells.”
“How far can a drone fly?”
“Bees can fly two or three miles.”
“What would happen if something kept her own drones from reaching her?”
Miranker glanced sideways at me, realising that he was discussing the mechanics of apian sex with a woman young enough to be his granddaughter. He cleared his throat, and replied gamely, “Generally speaking, drones from hives all around respond to the call of a virgin queen. Hundreds, even thousands of them.”
“And if there were no other hives nearby?”
“There are always other hives nearby.”
“As far as I can see, the nearest