Invisible Beasts (3 page)

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C
an nonhumans be artists? I suppose “art” is a human concept, yet anyone who has heard a mockingbird singing under a spring moon has heard an animal out-riff Bird; it's hard to believe they do it without some aesthetic sense. Like ours, the works of nonhumans have individuality. I've seen many competent webs made by arrow-shaped micrathena spiders, but only one that was perfectly round, with strands spun as evenly as the grooves in an LP, and not by accident—for it was remade many times—but by the mastery of a single spider. The Feral Parfumier Bees show how animals can make a thing of beauty following a procedure well known to human artists
.

Feral Parfumier Bees

O
N A COLD SPRING NIGHT
in the Pleistocene, in the midst of forests rubbing like bear pelts against the flinty stars, a bolt of lightning locked onto heaven and earth and staggered in its violent light that froze an entire horizon of shadows. Minutes later, a banner of fire unfurled, smoked, and sank under rainy gusts. In its place lay the ruins of a pitch pine, still hissing, alive with crawling sparks. Some chunks of pine had exploded off the burning boughs, showering hot ash, and smacked into the undergrowth like arboreal meteorites. One had rolled into the mouth of a dire-wolf den whose occupants were out hunting. Bumping downward, smutched with wolf hairs, jiggling from residual steam in its pitch that jetted it first one way, then the other, it sped over claw-marked dirt and fell ten feet,
whoosh
, down a crack leading from the wolves' den into the true pores of the earth. It landed in a pocket of rock as a pinball lands in its hole, and there, with mass subsiding and heat sighing away, it rested for twenty-five millennia.

At first, the thread of steamy incense unraveling at the back of the den caused anxious sniffing from the mother of four dire puppies, who all grew up safely but never experienced, in hundreds of miles of travels, a fragrance anything like their home den's. Eventually, the den lost the incense smell and, forever, the scent of dire wolves. Gray wolves, red wolves, and timber wolves took their place for a span of time equal to the lives of empires; then coyotes, foxes, groundhogs, and skunks (thanks to the spread of a human empire) overran the burrows of the wolves. By this time the innumerable pines that had bristled in the cold spring lightning were mostly flattened into rivers of asphalt. But the ancient, charred chunk—a great artwork waiting for its audience—stayed intact through the eons, slowly hardening. I should say a word about it.

It was unique. Before being coated in molten pitch, it had clung to a pine branch onto which it exuded a shiny ooze meant to repel weaver ants, though there were no weaver ants anywhere around. It didn't know that. It clung to its spot: a rough sphere that from a short distance gave the impression of fruitlike translucence, varying with the sunbeams from rosy-peach to yellow amber. Up closer—from the perspective of a giant ground sloth—it got strange. The sloth had no concept of “beehive,” much less “hexagon,” though a golden ball composed of Tiffany-like translucent grids gave him as much pause as could be sustained by a hungry, incurious guy with claws like personal forklifts. One thing the sloth knew: it smelled
good
.
The next thing he knew, he was galloping about on his massive knuckles, making the sound (whatever it was) of
Eremotherium
harassed by wasps. He felt wasps, he heard wasps, wasps stung his ears, drilled up his snout, stabbed at his bony little eyes—but he didn't see any wasps. He left in a hurry anyway. And a defensive swarm of invisible honeybees returned to crawl over their comb in four-bee-thick cosiness, though they had no business to be (or bee) in North America. But they didn't know that.

These bees were naive newcomers. Their comb, scarcely secreted into place, came there by sheer accident. Natural selection can magnify an accident into a new variation on the theme of life, or let it dwindle into extinction. For all our bees' sloth-banishing activity, they had little defense against dangers like bears—those Pleistocene bears tall enough to have ambled into your house and scratched their chins on top of your Christmas tree. And they had no defense against a North American winter. They were running out of time.

Invisible, or Parfumier, Bees are natives of Asia, where they likely sprang from the oldest lineage of honeybees, the red-bellied dwarf honeybee,
Micrapis florea
. Though noble in their antiquity,
Micrapis
have never been the brightest bees on the planet—they never learned to waggle-dance, for example. Our invisible
Micrapis
, marooned on a cold, alien continent, never considered sheltering in a cave or hollow tree. Dim aristocrats that they were, they built on a pitch-pine limb the same
fragile pavilion that suited their queen in the home latitudes of cinnamon, vetiver, and pepper. They danced their same, waggle-less, straitlaced beeline, pointing to nectar sources of which they knew absolutely nothing. Out and back they flew, and one can only imagine the discomfort of this genteel sisterhood on finding their honeys and jellies altered beyond repair. Everyone performed her duty: the foragers danced, the cleaners swept and garnished, the porters ported, the nurses nursed, and the queen's attendants licked her constantly and sped her commands to the colony. Yet nothing smelled right. Their beautiful comb, that sweet home epitomizing the best of vigorous feminine care, reeked of poor levulose levels and unpleasant ratios of copper to manganese. Social insects all agree that life bows to a well-executed plan, so the Parfumiers, confronted with seeping evil, continued to do what they did best, with emphasis. They ranged farther; gathered more data; memorized new landmarks. They pioneered! Veteran foragers—bees of experience, whose antennae alerted to the slightest trace of sugar, who could sniff the very hour at which a flower had unfolded—these exquisitely discriminating Parfumiers got their tongues trapped in heavy-duty, spring-loaded sepals meant for the oversize jabs of hummingbirds. They hauled the icy-tasting pollens of the temperate zone. They scaled saber-toothed roses, mandibular violets, grasses that could saw through a glacier's toes. They were as brave as brides.

Yet despite exceptional industry, the honey of the
stranded Parfumiers smelled more and more odd. It nourished them, roughly, but somewhere in its aromatic heart lurked an indigestible dissonance, where the chemistries of received wisdom wrestled with the nectars of circumstance. And their time was running out, though they didn't know that.

They knew the supreme truth of bees: honey is collaboration. The taste of honey is the taste of sisterhood. Everybody involved in making honey has to agree about such technical matters as the quality standard, when to stop regurgitating the refined product, how long to fan off the excess water, and so on, with many other decisions we're not aware of as we pour the stuff all over our granola. Unlike us, bees have a sound mass mind, so good at collective decisions that they don't even need to be conscious of them. It is also a mind capable of abstract thought. Bees know the concepts of
sameness
and
difference
, and the Parfumiers, in their rude spring of exile, had brought home a string of unknown ingredients, one after another, trying to make their honey the
same
as it used to be. Their approximations tasted like approximations, but each was slightly
different
from the one before. Then something extraordinary happened, simply because it had to. A point came when the Parfumiers' honey wasn't a failed version of the same one they used to make, but a whole new thing. I couldn't say if the Parfumiers' mass mind consciously read out a royal proclamation to the effect of “Our honey is not the same—then let it be
different.” But anyone, even a social insect, who tries to realize a plan through successive approximations is eventually bound to realize not the plan itself, but the sum of the differences between plan and reality. That is the procedure of artists, and the invisible bees, working with unknown materials, had produced a great artwork of the olfactory senses. No one could have identified its resemblances to a flower, or even a potpourri of several flowers. Nothing in nature had smelled like it before. Imagine, however, some unlucky person who would die without ever having encountered a flower, a person whose footfalls regularly met cement, whose raised eyes bumped off a dead layer of clouds, whose hopes consisted of daily crusts, and whose fears were so familiar they couldn't be bothered to wear faces. Smelling the Parfumiers' honey, that sad soul would know precisely what a flower was and what it meant—the heart of change that makes hope possible. Our bees had become like the invisible sisterhood of the Muses: their honey was pure poetry.

B
EWARE GREATNESS
! Like all art of the highest order, the Parfumiers' unmasked, gently but implacably, our human imperfection. It happened this way:

Twenty-five millennia after a pitch-coated honeycomb fell into a hole under a dire-wolf den, I was enjoying a bright spring morning. I was buttering toast. Patches of sunlight danced on the kitchen counter,
where a smudge of raspberry jam drew a bee through the open window—she flew past my ear, grazing it with her hot hum. My other ear pressed to the cell phone, I listened to my sister Evie. Most people's voices saw up and down when they're excited, but Evie's voice separates into identically-sized syllables all simmering at the same high, maximally efficient pitch, like water heated in a warm pan until convection bubbles, those exactly hexagonal bubbles, cover the surface and simmer according to the same laws of physics that command hexagonal cells in a beehive. I think it's nice for a biologist's voice to exhibit one of nature's fundamental patterns. My sister was telling me about a honeycomb, miraculously preserved from the Pleistocene, complete with the bodies of an unknown, primitive species of
Micrapis
.

“‘My crap is'?”

“
Apis
, bee,
micro
, small, Sophie! Anyway, my graduate student has been running this mummified honeycomb through batteries of tests,” Evie continued, her tone implying that I was intellectually limp though still good enough for her news. She and her student had built models of the dead bees through digital simulation, and, finally, had synthesized a replica of the ancient honey, based on melissopalynological and paleobiochemical analysis. Typically, Evie pronounced these terms without lessening the rate and pitch of her speech. She invited me to visit her lab.

“It's super-incredible. Wait till you smell it.”

“Smell what?”

“You won't believe your nose.”

P
OSTERS OF BRIGHTLY DYED
microorganisms, like creepy crawly clerestory windows, decorated the door to Evie's lab. My baby sister was perched on her swivel chair, at her sprawling bench. Her bangs flipped joyfully at the ends of her sentences. Before I got to see her digitally simulated bee, she insisted that I take a sniff of the reconstructed Pleistocene honey.

“This isn't a prank? It's not some kind of drug?”

“I would never give an already crazy person a drug. Come on,” she coaxed, handing me a sealed Pyrex retort, its interior coated in small brown beads.

I put my nostril, as instructed, to a tube hanging from the retort, pressed a tiny plastic catch, inhaled, and let out a long whistle. I pressed the catch again, and again, eyes closed, drawing the fragrance into my memory as hard as I could. “That's enough,” Evie warned. “We have to limit its exposure. Sorry—I know it's tempting.”

“Don't you think . . . it smells a bit like . . . Joy?” I asked.

“Smells like freakin' paradise.”

I explained that Joy is a perfume, and Evie shrugged.