The Language of Bees (16 page)

When I was finished, I climbed onto the wall and gazed at the slopes running down to the Channel. The water was blue today beneath the summer’s sun; I counted twenty-three vessels, from light sail-boat to heavy steamer, in the patch immediately before me.

Not so this piece of hillside. Even in August, this was away from the shoes of long-distance ramblers and day-tourists alike. The nearest house was almost a mile away, the grassland was broken by nothing larger than gorse bushes.

A small and tentative idea, born of the loneliness of the place and three days of my own solitude, crept into the side of my mind. I looked speculatively down at the packet of bees.

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 bees to that hive are those in our orchard, more than a mile away.”

Miranker stared at me. “Are you suggesting that the queen’s flight went, er, unconsummated?”

“Is that possible?”

“It is more likely that she did not return at all. That is why the hive produces a number of queen cells, in anticipation of failure.”

“But if she was too bloodthirsty for them? If they didn’t stop her from killing her rivals?”

“Then it might well be too late for them to raise up another from the eggs left by the previous queen.” But just as I was thinking that I had succeeded in solving Holmes’ mystery, he said, “However. These cells have been opened from within.”

“What, all of them?”

“The five I see here. How many were there in all?”

“Twenty-one. They all looked pretty much—”

“Twenty-one?
All like this?”

“As far as I could see.”

“I should say that all of these hatched.”

“You mean, this hive has made twenty-one queens? Every one of them hatched, and fighting for primacy?” Absolute chaos, if that was the case.

“More likely, hatched and flying off into the blue. In some hives, the difference between a cell intended for swarming and one intended for supersedure—replacing the queen—is clear. Here, I would not be so certain.”

“So, one after another, the queen cells hatched and led a swarm?”

“Yes. However, you see this frame here? The brood?”

“Unhatched bees?”

“And eggs?”

When he pointed them out to me, I could see them. “What does that mean?”

“It means the queen was active until quite recently. Certainly there was a queen in residence when I last checked the hive, three weeks ago.”

“So all this happened in the last three weeks? Twenty-one swarms?”

“No, the swarms took place beforehand. And that is the peculiar thing. Your hive had an active queen, and yet continued to hatch virgin queens, time and again. And not only did she not kill them, she did not lead any of the swarms. Just kept laying while the hive swarmed around her.”

“Did the workers keep her from killing them?” A hive madness, indeed.

“In their decreasing numbers? I should be surprised if they could.”

“Then what happened?”

“It would appear as if your queen simply ignored the imperative to murder, and went about her business while the hive swarmed itself to death around her.”

The hive died because the reigning queen and all twenty-one of her royal daughters were too soft-hearted for murder, and the hive could not summon sufficient numbers to maintain the brood.

This struck me as highly significant, although of what, precisely, I could not immediately think. Mr Miranker, however, had moved past the reasons.

“In any case, as I suggested to your husband, filling the hive with a new colony should be done soon. He could add a second hive-box, in the event that solitude has compounded the problem.” He sounded dubious about my theory.

Mr Miranker was clearly more concerned with solution than theory. Holmes, I thought, would prefer to dig into the cause—but then I recalled his initial proposition of doing away with the entire hive. Perhaps even he would not permit philosophy to get in the way of agronomy.

In any event, replenishing the hive was a task I was happy to leave
to the professionals, since moving several thousand live bees around the countryside was not a challenge I cared to meet. Mr Miranker promised me that he would be on the watch for stray swarms that might appreciate a new home, and I said I would have Holmes arrange for a second hive-box at first opportunity.

I bicycled the four miles home from Jevington, well pleased with my solution to The Case of the Mad Hive.

Later, I carried the album of Damian’s work onto the terrace to re-examine it by light of day.

Were the macabre overtones of his later paintings figments of my imagination? Was my own solitude working to cloud my perception?

One after another, I turned the pages, chewing my thumbnail in thought.

No, I decided: I was not reading a nonexistent message. Damian Adler’s paintings were truly mad—although whether they were the deliberately cultivated madness of Surrealism, or an internal madness rising of his own, I could not say.

Studying them in the warm afternoon sunshine, however, I realised something else: Holmes would have asked the same questions.

He would not have been satisfied with a mere catalogue of his son’s artwork. He would have gone back to the source and investigated its roots, its influences, and its effects.

And if Holmes had mounted an investigation, then somewhere he would have a case file. It might be an actual file-box, or an envelope stuffed with notes, or a document case tied and sealed with ribbons, but to his eyes, it would constitute records of a case.

Unlike the album, I could not find anything resembling a case file.

I searched for hours: in the laboratory, in the pantry, out in the honey shed, under the carpets. I tapped stones until my knuckles ached, pulled apart all the beds, looked inside every art book on the shelves.

Near midnight, I eased my sore back and decided reluctantly that he had left it in a bolt-hole, or with Mycroft.

I curled up in bed and closed my eyes, trying not to picture the lively features of Irene Adler as drawn by her son. Irene Adler, who had managed to get the best of Holmes in an early, and important, case. Irene Adler, whom he had sought out in France some years later, and, all unknowing, left with child. Irene Adler, whose musical life meshed with that of Holmes, an area of my partner’s life in which I could not share, since my tin ear and my dislike—

I sat bolt upright.

Music.

I trotted downstairs to the shelf in the sitting room where Holmes kept his gramophone records. Because I had no ear for music, it was a shelf I rarely went near, and anyone else, knowing Holmes’ passion for these fragile objects, kept well clear of it, as well.

Two-thirds of the way along the shelf was an inch-thick cloth-covered box of Irene Adler’s operatic recordings. Inside, nestled between the second and third disk, was a manila envelope containing perhaps thirty pages.

The first was a copy of Damian Adler’s birth record. The second a Photostat copy of his enlistment in the Army. The third was an arrest form, dated 27 April 1918. The fourth recorded his admission to the mental asylum in Nantes, on 6 May 1918.

He’d killed a fellow officer, ten days before.

The Guide (1):
A Guide is rarely a person whom society
will invite to its garden parties. The boy’s Guide appeared
as a coarse bully with compelling eyes and the
overweening pride of a man who has conquered
mountains: It mattered not, for the Guide possessed
both knowledge and wisdom
.
Testimony, II:1

H
OLMES HERE.”

“Mycroft, have you heard anything from Damian?”

“Sherlock, good evening. Where are you?”

“Have you heard from Damian?”

“Not since Saturday. Have you lost him?”

“We came up to Town together on Tuesday, but he left the hotel early this morning, and had not returned when I came in tonight. I wondered perhaps if he had telephoned to you.”