The Language of Bees (10 page)

“That’s fine, Lulu.”

“Are you nearly finished in here, because I could help if you—”

Lulu was an implacable force of nature; as Mrs Hudson had once remarked, if a person waited for Lulu to finish a sentence, the spiders would make webs on her hat. I abandoned the field of battle, and retreated downstairs to start in on the mail.

By noon I had written an answer to a letter from my old Oxford friend Veronica, admiring the photograph she had sent me of her infant son, and responded to a list of questions from my San Francisco lawyers concerning my property there. Another letter from an Oxford colleague was pinned to a paper he was due to present on the Filioque Clause, for which he wanted my comments. I dutifully waded into his detailed exegesis of this Fourth Century addendum to the Nicene Creed, but found the technical minutiae of the Latin trying and eventually bogged down in his attempted unravelling of the convoluted phraseology of Cyril of Alexandria. I let the manuscript fall shut, scribbled him a note suggesting that he have it looked over by someone whose expertise lay in the Greek rather than the Hebrew Testament, and stood up: I needed air, and exercise.

But first, I hunted down a book I’d thought of on Holmes’ shelves, then followed thumps and rustles to their source in the upstairs hallway. Lulu looked up as my presence at the head of the stairs caught her eye.

“I’m going for a walk,” I told her. “Don’t bother to set out any luncheon, I shouldn’t think either of them will be back. And when you’ve finished here, why don’t you take off the rest of the day?”

“Are you certain, ma’am? Because I really don’t mind—”

“I’ll see you tomorrow, Lulu.”

“Thank you, ma’am, and I’ll make sure to lock up when I go, like you and Mr Holmes—”

I laced on a pair of lightweight boots I had not worn for the best part of a year, took a detour through the kitchen to raid the pantry for cheese, bread, and drink, and left the house.

I turned south and west, following the old paths and crossing the new roads towards where the Cuckmere valley opened to the sea. The tide was sufficiently out to make the small river loop lazily around the wash; three children were building a castle in the patch of sand that collected on the opposite bank. Even from this distance I could see the pink of their exposed shoulders, and I thought—the back of my neck well remembered—how sore they would be tonight, crying at the touch of bed-clothes on their inflamed skin.

Which image returned me to my thoughts before sleep the night before: the photograph, and the child. Her name was Estelle, Damian had told us, after the bright stars on the night she was born. An odd little girl, troubled by everyday things another child would not even notice—she would exhaust herself with tears over the sight of a feral cat in the rain, or a scratch on the leather of her mother’s new shoes. But clever, reading already, chattering happily in three languages. She and her father were closer than might normally be the case, both because she was in and out of his studio all day, and because of Yolanda’s periodic absences.

He wanted us to understand, Yolanda was not an irresponsible mother. The child was well looked after, and Yolanda never went away without ensuring Estelle’s care. It was simply that she believed a child did best when the parents were satisfied with their lives, when their sense of excitement and exploration was allowed full expression. Self-sacrifice twisted a mother and damaged the child, Yolanda believed.

Or so Damian said.

Personally, I thought he seemed too willing to forgive his wife both her present whims and her past influences. Without meeting the woman, of course, I could not know, but the bare bones of the story could easily paint a far less romantic picture, beginning with the blunt fact that a young woman whose friends were prostitutes was not apt to be an innocent herself. And, running my mind back over Damian’s tale, it occurred to me that he had taken great care to say
nothing of what she had been doing between leaving the missionary school at eleven and being kicked onto the streets at sixteen.

Without a doubt, he had been besotted with her—even his gesture in the snapshot testified to that—but this was a man whose life’s goal was to embrace light and dark, rationality and madness, obscenity and beauty.

One had to wonder if the affection was as powerfully mutual. One might as easily posit another scenario: Desperate young woman meets wide-eyed foreigner with considerable talent and an air of breeding; young woman flirts with the young foreigner and engages his sympathy along with his passion: Young woman encourages the man’s art, nudges him into financial solvency, and finds herself pregnant by him. Marriage follows, and a British passport, and soon she is in London, free to live as she pleases, far from the brutal streets of Shanghai.

Without meeting her, I could not know. But I wished Holmes had stuck around long enough for us to talk it over. I wanted to ask how he felt about having his son marry a former prostitute.

I left the path at the old lighthouse, to sit overlooking the Channel, and took from my pockets the cheese roll, the bottle of lemonade, and the slim blue book I had found in the library between a monograph on systems of zip fastening and an enormous tome on poisonous plants of the Brazilian rain-forest.

I ran my fingertips across the gold letters on the front cover:
Practical Handbook of Bee Culture
, the title read, and underneath:
With some Observations upon the Segregation of the Queen
.

I had read Holmes’ book—which he, only half in jest, referred to as his
magnum opus
—years before, but I remembered little of it, and then mostly that, for a self-proclaimed handbook, there seemed little instruction, and nothing to explain why its author had retired from the life of a consulting detective at the age of forty-two in order to raise bees on the Sussex Downs. Now, nine years and a lifetime after I’d first encountered it, I opened it anew and commenced to read my husband’s reflections on the bee. He opened, I saw, with a piece of Shakespeare, as I remembered,
Henry V:

The honey-bees
,
creatures that by a rule in nature teach
the act of order to a peopled kingdom…

Chief among the everyday miracles within the hive is that of how the first bee discovered the means by which watery nectar, vulnerable to spoilage, might be made to keep the hive not only through the winter, but through a score of winters. Can one conceive of an accidental discovery, a happenstance that arranged for the hive sisters to be arrayed
en masse
at the mouth of their hive, fanning their wings so vigorously and for so long that the nectar they had gathered evaporated in the draught, growing thick and imperishable? And yet if not an accident, we are left with two equally unsatisfactory explanations: a Creator’s design, or a hive intelligence.

Suddenly a tiny brown object flashed towards where I sat and began to snap and growl furiously at my boot-laces. I quelled the impulse to kick the beast over the cliff, and received the apologies of its owner with little sympathy.

“If that dog gets in among the sheep,” I told the girl, “don’t be surprised if it feels the end of a shepherd’s crook.”

Her boy-friend began to object, then noticed that I was actually a female and toned down his remarks somewhat.

I rose, and continued with my literary stroll.

The language of bees is one of the great mysteries left us in this age, the means by which this genus communicate. For speak they do, to tell their hive-mates of food, to warn of invasion, to exchange the password of identity, to reassure that all is well. Speech among humans is a complex interaction between tongue and teeth, lungs and larynx, driven by mind and a thousand generations of tradition.

But what if we humans had developed along another line than that of primate? What if, instead of manipulative digits and opposing thumbs, we were given only arms, teeth, and wings? If in place of fist and weapon we were given a defence that required us to lay down our own lives? If we lacked the lungs and trachea that gave rise to speech, how would we preserve the intelligence of our own community?

Humans convey meaning in a multitude of ways: the lift of a shoulder, the sideways slip of a gaze, the tensing of small muscles, or the quantity of air passing through the vocal cords. How much more must this be so in a complex hive-mind that lacks the brute communication of words?

One finds common sense and intelligence in the newest of hives and the rawest of virgin queens, a discernment that goes far past mere dumb survival. No beekeeper doubts that the creatures in his charge have their own language, as immediate and real as that which might be found in a village composed entirely of brothers and sisters. However, whether bees communicate by odour, by subtle emanations, by faint song, or by infinitesimal gestures we have yet to discover.

A loud voice greeted me from a few feet away, and I looked up, startled, to see a group of at least twenty young women determinedly equipped for mountain-climbing—all had hiking poles, all sweated under sturdy trousers and heavy Alpine boots. Their leader, a stout bespectacled woman of forty, had hailed me. I paused politely with the book closed over my finger.

“Do you know where we might take some refreshment?” she asked with a touch of desperation.

I looked to see where I was, then pointed towards the distant rise. “You see that tower there? Keep going past it and you’ll come to an hotel. I’m sure they’ll have ices and tea.”

The entire group thanked me and marched away, their boots thudding on the bare path like so many cattle hooves. I shook my head and resumed my solitary way.

The massacre of the males is a yearly occurrence in the hive—“Delivering over to executioners pale the lazy yawning drone.” When the days close in and the last nectar ceases, the workers cast their gaze upon the drones, whom they have willingly fed and cosseted all the year long, but who are now only a burden on the food reserves, a threat to the future of the hive. So the females rise against the useless males and exterminate them every one, viciously ripping their former charges to pieces and driving any survivors out into the cold.

The female is generally the more practical member of any species.

What might we say of the intelligence of bees? On the one hand, it beggars the imagination that an entire species would permit itself to be enslaved, penned up, pushed about, and systematically pillaged for the hard-fought product of a year’s labours.

Yet is this so remarkably different from the majority of human workers? Are they not enslaved to the coal face or the office desk, told where to go and what to do by forces outside their control? Do not the government and those who control prices in the market-place systematically rob human workers of all but a thin measure of the year’s earnings?

I laughed aloud at this last paragraph, only to be startled by yet another voice, this one nearly on top of me.

“Good day, madam.”

I jolted to a stop and looked at the man who had addressed me, a dapper figure with pure white hair underneath the straw boater he was lifting in greeting.

“Hullo,” I answered.

“I wonder if you might know the shortest path to the Tiger Inn, in East Dean? I am supposed—”

“There,” I said, pointing repressively. This fashion for countryside rambles looked to have severe drawbacks, particularly at this time of year.

When the white-haired gentleman had left, I checked my position again and found that I had just about run out of cliff-side path: Below me lay Eastbourne with its frothy pier-top pleasure palace and sea-front hotels. Its long curve of shingle beach was thick with holiday-makers and umbrellas, the waves dark with splashing bodies large and small.

Less than five miles up the coast from that frivolous piece of architecture, on a sunny September morning 858 years before, half a thousand ships had come to shore, carrying a king, a flag, and enough men and horses to seize England’s future.

I glanced around me warily, and abandoned the public footpaths for the pastures of sheep and gorse, reading in solitary contentment until a shadow fell upon the page: My feet had brought me home. I let myself through the gate, to stand beneath trees heavy with summer fruit; the air was thick with fragrance, and with the throb of activity from the hives. Lulu’s bicycle still leant on the wall near by the kitchen door, so I cleared away some rotting apples and settled down with my back against a tree.

Beekeeping would appear to be a hobby for the tin-pot god, the man who seeks to keep an entire race under his control. In point of fact, a mere human has little control over bees: He shelters them, he takes their honey, he drives away pests, but in the end, he merely hopes for the best.

A bee has no loyalty to the keeper, only to the hive; no commitment to the place, only to the community. A queen has no conversation for her human counterpart, and she or any other bee will attack the human protector if he makes a gesture that can be read as threat.

Despite millennia of close history, in the end, the best a beekeeper can hope for is that he be ignored by his bees.

In the hive, there can be but one ruler. The queen (Virgil, here, got it wrong, and imagined a bee king) is permitted a sole outing in her long life, one brief foray into the blue heights. She chooses a day of singular warmth and clarity, and sings her anticipation, stirring the hive into a state of excitement before she finally launches herself into the sky, pulling the males after her like the tail of a comet. Only the fastest can catch the queen, with her long wings and great strength, which ensures the vigour of their future progeny.