Kiss Kiss (13 page)

      
“It’s magic,” he said. “Pure magic. And last night I suddenly
got the idea that if I was to put some of this into the baby’s
milk . . .”
      
“How
dare
you!”
      
“Now, Mabel, you don’t even know what it is yet.”
      
“I don’t care what it is,” she said. “You can’t go putting
foreign bodies like that into a tiny baby’s milk. You must be
mad.”
      
“It’s perfectly harmless, Mabel, otherwise I wouldn’t have
done it. It comes from bees.”
      
“I might have guessed that.”
      
“And it’s so precious that practically no one can afford to
take it. When they do, it’s only one little drop at a time.”
      
“And how much did you give to our baby, might I ask?”
      
“Ah,” he said, “that’s the whole point. That’s where the
difference lies. I reckon that our baby, just in the last four
feeds, has already swallowed about fifty times as much royal
jelly as anyone else in the world has ever swallowed before.
How about that?”
      
“Albert, stop pulling my leg.”
      
“I swear it,” he said proudly.
      
She sat there staring at him, her brow wrinkled, her mouth
slightly open.
      
“You know what this stuff actually costs, Mabel, if you
want to buy it? There’s a place in America advertising it for
sale at this very moment for something like five hundred
dollars a pound jar!
Five hundred dollars!
That’s more than
gold, you know!”
      
She hadn’t the faintest idea what he was talking about.
      
“I’ll prove it,” he said, and he jumped up and went across to
the large bookcase where he kept all his literature about bees.
On the top shelf, the back numbers of
The American Bee
Journal
were neatly stacked alongside those of
The British
Bee Journal, Beecraft
, and other magazines. He took down
the last issue of
The American Bee Journal
and turned to a
page of small classified advertisements at the back.
      
“Here you are,” he said. “Exactly as I told you. ‘We sell
royal jelly—$480 per lb. jar wholesale.’ ”
      
He handed her the magazine so she could read it herself.
      
“Now do you believe me? This is an actual shop in New
York, Mabel. It says so.”
      
“It doesn’t say you can go stirring it into the milk of a
practically new-born baby,” she said. “I don’t know what’s
come over you, Albert, I really don’t.”
      
“It’s curing her, isn’t it?”
      
“I’m not so sure about that, now.”
      
“Don’t be so damn silly, Mabel. You know it is.”
      
“Then why haven’t other people done it with
their
babies?”
      
“I keep telling you,” he said. “It’s too expensive. Practically
nobody in the world can afford to buy royal jelly just for
eating
except maybe one or two multimillionaires. The people
who buy it are the big companies that make women’s face
creams and things like that. They’re using it as a stunt. They
mix a tiny pinch of it into a big jar of face cream and it’s
selling like hot cakes for absolutely enormous prices. They claim
it takes out the wrinkles.”
      
“And does it?”
      
“Now how on earth would I know that, Mabel? Anyway,”
he said, returning to his chair, “that’s not the point. The point
is this. It’s done so much good to our little baby just in the last
few hours that I think we ought to go right on giving it to
her. Now don’t interrupt, Mabel. Let me finish. I’ve got two
hundred and forty hives out there and if I turn over maybe
a hundred of them to making royal jelly, we ought to be able
to supply her with all she wants.”
      
“Albert Taylor,” the woman said, stretching her eyes wide
and staring at him. “Have you gone out of your mind?”
      
“Just hear me through, will you please?”
      
“I forbid it,” she said, “absolutely. You’re not to give my
baby another drop of that horrid jelly, you understand?”
      
“Now, Mabel . . .”
      
“And quite apart from that, we had a shocking honey crop
last year, and if you go fooling around with those hives now,
there’s no telling what might not happen.”
      
“There’s nothing wrong with my hives, Mabel.”
      
“You know very well we had only half the normal crop last
year.”
      
“Do me a favour, will you?” he said. “Let me explain some
of the marvellous things this stuff does.”
      
“You haven’t even told me what it is yet.”
      
“All right, Mabel. I’ll do that too. Will you listen? Will you
give me a chance to explain it?”
      
She sighed and picked up her knitting once more. “I suppose
you might as well get it off your chest, Albert. Go on and
tell me.”
      
He paused, a bit uncertain now how to begin. It wasn’t
going to be easy to explain something like this to a person
with no detailed knowledge of apiculture at all.
      
“You know, don’t you,” he said, “that each colony has only
one queen?”
      
“Yes.”
      
“And that this queen lays all the eggs?”
      
“Yes, dear. That much I know.”
      
“All right. Now the queen can actually lay two different
kinds of eggs. You didn’t know that, but she can. It’s what we
call one of the miracles of the hive. She can lay eggs that
produce drones, and she can lay eggs that produce workers. Now
if that isn’t a miracle, Mabel, I don’t know what is.”
      
“Yes, Albert, all right.”
      
“The drones are the males. We don’t have to worry about
them. The workers are all females. So is the queen, of course.
But the workers are unsexed females, if you see what I mean.
Their organs are completely undeveloped, whereas the queen
is tremendously sexy. She can actually lay her own weight in
eggs in a single day.”
      
He hesitated, marshalling his thoughts.
      
“Now what happens is this. The queen crawls around on
the comb and lays her eggs in what we call cells. You know
all those hundreds of little holes you see in a honeycomb?
Well, a brood comb is just about the same except the cells
don’t have honey in them, they have eggs. She lays one egg
to each cell, and in three days each of these eggs hatches out
into a tiny grub. We call it a larva.
      
“Now, as soon as this larva appears, the nurse bees—they’re
young workers—all crowd round and start feeding it like mad.
And you know what they feed it on?”
      
“Royal jelly,” Mabel answered patiently.
      
“Right!” he cried. “That’s exactly what they do feed it on.
They get this stuff out of a gland in their heads and they start
pumping it into the cell to feed the larva. And what happens
then?”
      
He paused dramatically, blinking at her with his small
watery-grey eyes. Then he turned slowly in his chair and
reached for the magazine that he had been reading the night
before.
      
“You want to know what happens then?” he asked, wetting
his lips.
      
“I can hardly wait.”
      
“ ‘Royal jelly,’ ” he read aloud, “ ‘must be a
substance of tremendous nourishing power, for on this diet alone, the
honey-bee larva increases in weight
fifteen hundred times
in
five days!’ ”
      
“How much?”
      
“
Fifteen hundred times
, Mabel. And you know what that
means if you put it in terms of a human being? It means,” he
said, lowering his voice, leaning forward, fixing her with those
small pale eyes, “it means that in five days a baby weighing
seven and a half pounds to start off with would increase in
weight to
five tons
!”
      
For the second time, Mrs Taylor stopped knitting.
      
“Now you mustn’t take that too literally, Mabel.”
      
“Who says I mustn’t?”
      
“It’s just a scientific way of putting it, that’s all.”
      
“Very well, Albert. Go on.”
      
“But that’s only half the story,” he said. “There’s more to
come. The really amazing thing about royal jelly, I haven’t
told you yet. I’m going to show you now how it can transform
a plain dull-looking little worker bee with practically no
sex organs at all into a great big beautiful fertile queen.”
      
“Are you saying our baby is dull-looking and plain?” she
asked sharply.
      
“Now don’t go putting words into my mouth, Mabel, please.
Just listen to this. Did you know that the queen bee and the
worker bee, although they are completely different when they
grow up, are both hatched out of exactly the same kind of
egg?”
      
“I don’t believe that,” she said.
      
“It’s true as I’m sitting here, Mabel, honest it is. Any time
the bees want a queen to hatch out of the egg instead of a
worker, they can do it.”
      
“How?”
      
“Ah,” he said, shaking a thick forefinger in her direction.
“That’s just what I’m coming to. That’s the secret of the whole
thing. Now—what do
you
think it is, Mabel, that makes this
miracle happen?”
      
“Royal jelly,” she answered. “You already told me.”
      
“Royal jelly it is!” he cried, clapping his hands and bouncing
up on his seat. His big round face was glowing with excitement
now, and two vivid patches of scarlet had appeared high
up on each cheek.
      
“Here’s how it works. I’ll put it very simply for you. The
bees want a new queen. So they build an extra-large cell, a
queen cell we call it, and they get the old queen to lay one of
her eggs in there. The other one thousand nine hundred and
ninety-nine eggs she lays in ordinary worker cells. Now. As
soon as these eggs hatch into larvae, the nurse bees rally round
and start pumping in the royal jelly. All of them get it,
workers as well as queen. But here’s the vital thing, Mabel, so
listen carefully. Here’s where the difference comes. The
worker larvae only receive this special marvellous food for
the
first three
days of their larval life. After that they have a
complete change of diet. What really happens is they get
weaned, except that it’s not like an ordinary weaning because
it’s so sudden. After the third day they’re put straight away
on to more or less routine bees’ food—a mixture of honey and
pollen—and then about two weeks later they emerge from the
cells as workers.
      
“But not so the larva in the queen cell! This one gets royal
jelly
all the way through its larval life
. The nurse bees simply
pour it into the cell, so much so in fact that the little larva is
literally floating in it. And that’s what makes it into a queen!”
      
“You can’t prove it,” she said.
      
“Don’t talk so damn silly, Mabel, please. Thousands of
people have proved it time and time again, famous scientists
in every country in the world. All you have to do is take a
larva out of a worker cell and put it in a queen cell—that’s
what we call grafting—and just so long as the nurse bees keep
it well supplied with royal jelly, then presto!—it’ll grow up
into a queen! And what makes it more marvellous still is the
absolutely enormous difference between a queen and a worker
when they grow up. The abdomen is a different shape. The
sting is different. The legs are different. The . . .”
      
“In what way are the legs different?” she asked, testing him.
      
“The legs? Well, the workers have little pollen baskets on
their legs for carrying the pollen. The queen has none. Now
here’s another thing. The queen has fully developed sex
organs. The workers don’t. And most amazing of all, Mabel,
the queen lives for an average of four to six years. The worker
hardly lives that many months. And all this difference simply
because one of them got royal jelly and the other didn’t!”
      
“It’s pretty hard to believe,”she said, “that a food can
do all that.”
      
“Of course it’s hard to believe. It’s another of the miracles
of the hive. In fact it’s the biggest ruddy miracle of them all.
It’s such a hell of a big miracle that it’s baffled the greatest
men of science for hundreds of years. Wait a moment. Stay
there. Don’t move.”
      
Again he jumped up and went over to the bookcase and
started rummaging among the books and magazines.
      
“I’m going to find you a few of the reports. Here we are.
Here’s one of them. Listen to this.” He started reading aloud
from a copy of the
American Bee Journal
:
      
“ ‘Living in Toronto at the head of a fine research laboratory
given to him by the people of Canada in recognition of his
truly great contribution to humanity in the discovery of
insulin, Dr Frederick A. Banting became curious about royal
jelly. He requested his staff to do a basic fractional
analysis . . .’ ”
      
He paused.
      
“Well, there’s no need to read it all, but here’s what
happened. Dr Banting and his people took some royal jelly
from queen cells that contained two-day-old larvae, and then
they started analysing it. And what d’you think they found?
      
“They found,” he said, “that royal jelly contained phenols,
sterols, glycerils, dextrose,
and
—now here it comes—and
eighty to eighty-five per cent
unidentified
acids!”
      
He stood beside the bookcase with the magazine in his hand,
smiling a funny little furtive smile of triumph, and his wife
watched him, bewildered.
      
He was not a tall man; he had a thick plump pulpy-looking
body that was built close to the ground on abbreviated legs.
The legs were slightly bowed. The head was huge and round,
covered with bristly short-cut hair, and the greater part of
the face—now that he had given up shaving altogether—was
hidden by a brownish yellow fuzz about an inch long. In one
way and another, he was rather grotesque to look at, there was
no denying that.
      
“Eighty to eighty-five per cent,” he said, “unidentified acids.
Isn’t that fantastic?” He turned back to the bookshelf and
began hunting through the other magazines.
      
“What does it mean, unidentified acids?”
      
“That’s the whole point! No one knows! Not even Banting
could find out. You’ve heard of Banting?”