Sherlock Holmes In America (34 page)

Katherine Tingley was a formidable woman in her early fifties, although she stood a mere five feet two in height. She had raven hair, large dark eyes, a determined chin, and the firm voice of a captain of industry. She was not dressed in purple, but wore a perfectly proper Nile-green dress with a double ruffle at the throat. I smiled; my fiancée would have told me the ruffles were a deliberate attempt to soften the air of command, to add a feminine touch to Mrs. Tingley's masculine directness. I wondered whether Holmes, unblessed by feminine confidences, would draw the same conclusion.

“I am delighted to make your acquaintance, Mr. Holmes,” the Theosophist said. “And yours, too, of course, Dr. Watson. I have enjoyed reading your accounts of Mr. Holmes's amazing deductive feats.”

I made the proper murmurs of self-deprecation, but I felt a glow of pride that my writings should be known in the hinterlands.

We did not speak of the problems at Lomaland. Instead, Mrs. Tingley turned to Holmes and said, “I understood from Dr. Watson's accounts of your adventures that you are a man who appreciates music. I should like you to know that at Point Loma music is regarded as much more than an amusement. It is a part of life itself, and it is one of those subtle forces of nature which, rightly applied, calls into activity the divine powers of the soul. Do you not agree, Mr. Holmes?”

Holmes did agree, warmly, and soon he was listening with great attention and respect to the methods of musical education employed at the Raja Yoga Academy. Only after the remains of our light luncheon were cleared away did the talk turn to the reason we had come. Mrs. Tingley said in her firm voice that she was grateful to the Spaldings for inviting Holmes to protect her, but that she had full confidence in Grace Imbler, the head beekeeper. “Indeed, she has promised me a treat tomorrow—fresh honey in the comb. We pasteurize most of our honey, but honeycomb is a special favorite of mine, and she always saves me some before she bottles the rest for the kitchen and the store.”

We stepped away from the lunch table, thanked the Spaldings, and stepped out onto the circular porch. Down the steep, chaparralovergrown canyon, a sliver of beach received silver-capped waves.

“I am eager to show you our community, Mr. Holmes,” Mrs. Tingley said. “I think you will find it to your taste as a man of intellectual pursuits.” Mrs. Tingley walked toward a large square building that from a distance looked like marble, but was wood covered in white stucco. Three smaller domes rose from the towered corners, and the edifice was topped by a huge aquamarine dome some three hundred feet in circumference.

“We call this the Homestead,” she told us. “It is our headquarters. The small round building is our Temple.” The Temple was no less impressive, and boasted two tiers of Greek columns, crowned by a spacious dome of amethyst.

Music sounded in the distance, but strange and discordant. I asked Mrs. Tingley about it and she smiled. “Our practice rooms,” she explained. “Our students practice together, but they do not always play the same pieces. It is part of their discipline, to play their own music without allowing themselves to be distracted by their fellows.”

I glanced at Holmes. A slight frown between his eyes gave evidence that he was disconcerted by the cacophony. What sort of music would the students play if they practiced in such chaos?

Children, young and old, passed us by, the younger ones walking in neat rows, attended by adults I assumed were teachers. They wore uniforms similar to those worn by any schoolchild, and I found myself almost disappointed that they were not in togas or saris or something equally outlandish.

Mrs. Tingley made up for the conventional costumes by referring to the young pupils as “Lotus Buds.” Holmes's thin lips twitched in a near smile.

We learned that the small round buildings with mushroom-cap roofs were Lotus Houses, where the children lived. They did indeed live apart from their parents, who could visit them on weekends. This struck me far more humane than the British tradition of sending children as young as six to boarding schools several hundred miles from home.

We walked west, in the direction of the privately operated tent city. The land was hilly, and large canyons covered in scrub opened the vista to the sea. In the distance, I could see small white boxes and a larger whitewashed building without decorative accents. Next to me, Holmes pointed and said, “The apiary, I presume.”

I was surprised and then realized I'd been visualizing the beehives of my youth, the moundlike skeps made of hay that dotted the English countryside.

“Nothing we do here is done purely for the sake of commerce,” Mrs. Tingley said as we continued strolling along the bluff. “Our bee farm is not merely a source of honey, but also of inspiration. The bees have much to teach humanity about the virtues of cooperation and hard work.”

She stopped walking and said, “This is where I live. I have some correspondence I must attend to. I will leave you to meet Mrs. Imbler on your own. Follow the path just past the theatre.”

My eyebrows must have gone up, for Mrs. Tingley said, with more than a touch of pride, “We have just built the first Greek theatre in the New World, Dr. Watson.”

Not only a theatre, but a Greek theatre! I saw wooden benches cut into the hillside, focused on a small flat patch of ground that served as a stage. I could not but marvel at the sight of an open-air theatre in the ancient Greek mode sitting on land once occupied by red Indians.

Holmes and I bade farewell to Mrs. Tingley, who went into her house, a much more modest affair than the Spalding mansion, and we made our way down the hill toward the neat rows of white boxes to meet the lady who might or might not be plotting Mrs. Tingley's demise.

As we drew closer, we smelled an overpowering sweetness in the air. Holmes remarked, “This must be the honey house” and strode forward to knock on the door.

Mrs. Imbler, a stout lady whose face and arms were brown from the intense sun, opened the door a fraction and peered out at us. She seemed distracted and not particularly pleased to have visitors, but she invited us inside after Holmes mentioned the magic name of Tingley. With forced good grace, Mrs. Imbler showed us how she used a heated knife to cut through the beeswax, and extract the honey, which drained into a can below the table. Heat would be applied to separate honey from melted wax and keep the honey from granulating. It was clear she'd given this tour before, but equally clear that she wanted to cut it short and send us on our way.

“I'm about to open the hives and check on my queen larvae,” she said. “Queen work is the most exacting part of bee culture.” Her tone said she would much rather perform these duties in solitude.

“I'm told beekeeping is farming for the literary soul,” Holmes remarked. “Indeed, I recall reading about honeybees in Virgil's Fourth Georgic at school.”

A thin-lipped smile graced Mrs. Imbler's weathered face. “In the first place, Mr. Holmes, no one really ‘keeps' bees. Bees deign to live in our hives and allow us to steal some of their honey, but they are far from domesticated. In the second place, your Virgil was quite wrong when he wrote of ‘kings' and ‘warriors' in the hive. The queen rules the colony, and all the workers are female.”

Mrs. Imbler seemed to come to a decision about our presence. She reached for one of the veiled beekeepers hats, which hung from wooden pegs on the wall nearest the door. She put it on and offered two others to Holmes and me. We put the hats on and secured the netting at chest-height with a strap. Mrs. Imbler took the extra precaution of putting on heavy gloves that reached to her elbow. She picked up an odd-looking metal canister with a bellows at one end and a conelike protrusion over the top. Smoke emerged from the cone. In her other hand, she held a long rectangular piece of metal.

“Come along,” she said briskly and opened the door.

We stepped from the dimness of the honey house into the sun. Through the veil, the sharp-edged landscape took on a gauzy, painterly tone. It was as if a gentle fog had descended over Point Loma. I decided I liked the muted landscape better than the harsh one revealed by the California sun. Mrs. Imbler led the way toward the neat rows of whitepainted boxes that lay nestled at the bottom of the canyon, about fifty feet from the water's edge. As we approached the hives, the sound of buzzing filled my ears. It was an otherworldly sound, and I found myself unable to conjure up a comparison. It was as loud as a foghorn on the Thames, as menacing as a tiger's roar, as angry as a raging mob. The hairs on the back of my head stood up, and I felt a fear so primitive that it shocked me.

I stopped. “Are you certain it is safe for us to proceed?” I had no wish to appear a coward, but neither did I fancy being stung by the thousands of little warriors that circumnavigated the hives.

“It is never safe,” the beekeeper replied, and I sensed a smile I could not see through the thick veil. “The bees will die in defense of their hive and their queen. They see us as the enemy, and because we are bent on having their honey, they are right. We tend them, and then we rob them. That is the cruel reality of bee culture.”

Holmes stepped closer to the buzzing hive and seemed to take a great interest in the worker bees flying to and fro. Several of them seemed to be engaged in what would be called a scuffle, had the participants been human. They zoomed and darted, thrust and parried, like guards repelling an assault. I said as much, and Mrs. Imbler remarked, “You are quite right, Doctor. These bees will repel any intruders who come from other hives to steal the honey.”

“How can they tell these bees are intruders?” I wondered. “There must be thousands of bees in each hive.”

“There are nearly fifty thousand at the height of the season,” the beekeeper said. “And the bees know their own through scent, although they have no olfactory organs such as we would recognize.”

The hives were tall rectangular boxes with three sections. The bees made their way in and out through a slit at the bottom. Mrs. Imbler explained that the top box was where the honey was stored, the middle box was where the bees kept the pollen they fed their larvae, and the bottom box was where the queen lived and laid her eggs.

“There is but one queen to a hive,” she said, “and she is the only fertile female. There are a few drones, kept for mating with the queen, but they are driven from the hive at the end of mating season when they are no longer needed.”

“It is a cruel society,” Holmes murmured.

“Nature itself is cruel, Mr. Holmes,” the beekeeper replied. “It is survival of the fittest.”

Mrs. Imbler stepped toward one of the boxes, and I saw what the canister was for. She applied pressure to the bellows, and smoke emerged from the conical top of the device. Smoke encircled the hive, and the bees all flew inside.

“The bees believe their hive is on fire,” the beekeeper said. “They are going inside to save their most precious asset: the honey. They will drink their fill and then come outside again, only they will be too heavy with honey to fight us.”

I glanced at Holmes. I could not see his expression underneath the veil, but I knew he must have been thinking of the late Irene Adler, whom he had smoked out of her home, and who had also taken her most precious possession with her.

Mrs. Imbler walked behind the hive and motioned us to follow her. “Never stand in the way of the bees,” she advised. “Always open the hive from behind.” She set down the smoker and lifted the metal tool. She wedged it under the top of the hive and levered the top off. Bees streamed out the bottom of the box, but there were many more left inside, squirming and jostling one another. Mrs. Imbler lifted the top box and set it on the ground. Golden honey glistened in the sun, dripping from hundreds of six-sided combs.

Beside me, Holmes stood poised in what I began to realize was quivering excitement. “It is a city,” he murmured. “A city as complex as London, with a hierarchy of work and government and productivity. Tell me,” he said, eagerness in his tone, “how do the bees communicate? How do they know what to do, where to go?”

“You have put your finger on the great mystery, Mr. Holmes,” Mrs. Imbler replied. “No one knows how bees do what they do. All we know is that they are able to communicate quite complex messages to one another, and that somehow the queen is the center of that communication network. She gives orders that are followed as far as five miles away—but exactly how she conveys her wishes is not scientifically established as yet.”

As she spoke, Mrs. Imbler lifted the second box off the stack and set it on the ground. More bees tumbled over one another in writhing profusion inside the wax cells of the honeycomb. Several flew in my direction, and I lifted my arms to swat them away, and then blushed as I remembered the veil's protection.

She directed our attention to the third, lowest box. “Here is the birthing chamber,” she explained. Holmes leaned in to look closer. I did not care to crowd him, so I stood back a few steps.

“Those little grains of rice,” he asked, “are those the larvae?”

“Yes,” the beekeeper said. “They will become workers or drones. They will make their way into the cells of the comb when it is time for their metamorphosis.”

“Which is the queen?” I asked.

To my surprise, it was Holmes who answered. He pointed to a space deep within the box and said, “There. She is longer than the others and she has three black stripes on her back.”