The Keeper of the Bees, page 17
“If the Queen gets home everybody is so tickled when she comes through the door that they kiss her and they comb her hair and they polish her wings and they fix her all up fine. You wouldn’t think there was a thing but love and goodness in their hearts.
“Then what do you think the workers do? You couldn’t ever guess, not in days and days, so I’ll have to tell you. All the white nymphs that they have been feeding royal jelly and that the nurses have been taking care of so fine, get stung. Can you beat it? You know how when any man cheats in business and loves another man up and makes him think he is his friend, and then turns around and takes all his money and maybe kills him, why-people say the good man ‘got stung.’ Well, right there in the beehive what happens is ’cause the reason why they say that. All the white nymphs that have been loved up so good and fed the royal jelly, the minute the young Queen gets home all safe and sound, why the white nymphs that would be Queens if they got a chance, they all get stung to death, and maybe there’s forty or fifty thousand of them—that’s how sure the bees want to feel about having a Queen. They are so dead that the workers carry them out and put them all together with the dead ones.
“The next thing they do is for all the workers to get together and every big, bluffy drone that has been lazing round the hive and getting waited on by-five or six worker bees and everybody has stood everything from him, why, every one of them gets stung, too. When it happens in the observation hive, you can sit with the glasses on ’em and see their faces, and they look so surprised and scared you can’t help feeling sorry for them. They don’t know what they’ve done, and they don’t know why what’s happening to them happens, and they can’t understand why workers that waited on them, just a whole army of workers, mad as Alice’s March Hare and the Hatter out of Wonderland, come roaring at ’em singing a war song and whooping battle cries. The old Mr. Drones get their wings pulled off and they get their eyes stung out and they get punctured everywhere, and every last one of them gets killed good and dead, and pushed out of the hive.
“There’s not anybody left but the young Queen and the Maids of Honor and the workers and the nurses that are going to stay with her. If there’s any danger, all of them make a shield and cover up the young Queen. If it is a hard winter, they get close around her to keep her warm; and if there isn’t enough food, they all go hungry and feed her. No matter what happens to them, every one of them, as long as they are alive, takes care of the Queen, because it is the eggs she lays that make the new brood and keep the bees alive in the world. So something tells every bee, ‘No matter If you die yourself, take care of your Queen so that bees will not vanish off the face of the world like everything did that time of the flood.’ The thing that tells them, that’s God again”
The little Scout looked Jamie straight in the eye “You begin to see now, don’t you, why the Bee Master said the hair on a bee was God?”
“Yes,” said Jamie, “I begin to see. It is the most wonderful thing I’ve ever heard about in all the world! Go on and tell me more. Tell me every least little thing you know.”
“There isn’t much more to tell,” said the little Scout. “There’s more figures I could tell about—how the old drone males have got just oodles more eyes and more smell hollows than the workers. The old drone males have got thirty-seven thousand eight hundred smell hollows and that is so they will be dead sure to find the Queen, and that’s God again. And the old drone males have got thirteen thousand eyes on each side of their heads. That’s so they can see better than anybody else and be certain to find the Queen, ’cause they’ve got to find the Queen, and they’ve got to get married, and the Queen has to lay her eggs to keep the world having bees, and to make the nice, sweet honey for everybody, and to keep the hundred thousand flowers alive.
“When the Bee Master gets the old Queen and her family in a new hive, he sets it up in a nice place. The scouts come back to where they left the Queen and they hunt until they find the new hive. They know their family and they go in, and then everybody goes to work. The workers build the cells, and the old Queen lays all the eggs and tells the workers what she wants to come out of each egg. They go straight ahead just like they did in the hive they came from. The workers clean up everything and the old Queen fills the cells again with eggs that she wants to be Queens and drones and workers and nurses, and maybe scouts, and they go on making more honey and hatching out more bees, until the hive gets so full that the old Queen says they will have to bring out a young Queen and turn the hive over to her, while they go out and start another family.
“The Queen keeps giving orders all the time about what she wants done. She may rule for five or six years. She lays eggs all the time. You couldn’t believe how” many eggs—maybe as many as two million. She has only got seven or eight thousand eyes, ’cause she’s a stay-at-home-lady. Right-on-the-Job is her first and last name, both all two of them. But she hasn’t any wax pockets, and no brushes, and no pollen baskets. She doesn’t like light, and she doesn’t know how Madonna lily nectar tastes, ’cause all her food is digested for her before she eats it—If I could work that scheme on hot dogs, you wouldn’t think they were so bad, would your”
Jamie laughed. “Go on,” he said.
“Well, the Queen just keeps right on laying eggs all day, maybe all night, for all I know. Anyway, she lays ’em, I tell you, boy, she lays ’em! And every time she lays an egg she says what she wants it to be, and her nurses go right to work to feed the royal jelly to the white nymphs, and bee bread to make more drones, and to make the workers and the nurses, and the scouts, maybe, like I said before. And some of the workers arc builders and some are masons and some are dancers. It’s the dancers’ job when the hive gets very hot inside, to dance and wave their wings until they start a breeze to cool the cells. And sometimes they dance the queerest dance for the white nymphs.
“That’s part of what I know about bees. I couldn’t tell all I know about them ’cause I can’t think of it all at once. There’s too much of it to tell right hot off the bat. But you can watch ’em in the observation hive and pretty quick you can see which cells have got the big, soft, white nymphs in them, and which ones have got the big fat, and which ones have the little workers, and the nurses, and the scouts, maybe. After what I’ve told you, you can see the old drones crawling around over the cells eating honey where they please, and being as dirty and mussy as ever they want to. Then you can see the workers go and clean up after them. You can see the cells where the eggs are being taken care of. You can see the cells that are being filled with honey. You can see the cells that have gold and red and purple pollen in for wax. Next time I come, I’m going to ask you about the figures that I told you, like the Bee Master asked me. You have to be ready and not make any mistakes, because If I can remember, a big man like you ought to remember!”
The little Scout stood up, pushed down the tail of the green shirt that seemed habitually to work up, tightened the belt buckle at the waist, and drew a deep breath.
“I don’t know as I’ve told you so very well. In there in the library you can find the books like I showed you that tell what people used to think. The books that are the bunk. Then you’ll find the books like Lubbock and Swammerdam, which have the wonderful pictures, that will tell you what really happens. Then there are the books like Fabre and Maeterlinck that the Bee Master says are three things at one time. First they are the truth, and next they are poetry, and third they are the evidence of a Master Mind that plans every least little tiny thing. He says the only name for that Master Mind is God. He doesn’t see any use in trying to dodge God and side-step Him and call Him ‘the Spirit of the Hive’ and lnstinct and Nature and things like that. He says a great scientist, one of the best, almost went crazy trying to do that very thing. His name was Charles Darwin, and the Bee Master says C. D. would have been a heap better off if he’d been willing to put God in where He belongs. He says when God does anything ‘with such care, and puts so much thought in it, and deals out such splendid justice’ as there is in a beehive, that a wise man will just take off his hat and lift his eyes to the sky and very politely he will say, ‘Just God.’”
Then in a lightning-like change, the little Scout kicked a high-standing pebble with fine precision against a mark several yards away, plumped down on the seat beside Jamie, and inquired casually, unconcernedly: “What do you say?”
Under the spell of the magic of the story he had heard, Jamie ran his fingers through his hair. Then he cupped his right hand over his knee, and put his left arm around the little Scout and drew the child up to him closely. He dropped his lips against the tow hair, worked down through its bleached exterior, down through the dark strands underneath, and close to the small ear he brought his lips and whispered very reverently: “I say, ‘Just God!’”
11. The Aroma of a Spirit and a Flower
A few days later Margaret Cameron came to Jamie with a pair of jackets that she had fashioned from unbleached muslin. A broad band fitted neatly around his chest and fastened with flat buttons. A pair of straps, easy when sitting, sufficiently close fitting to keep the bandages in place when moving around, crossed the shoulders. When his wound was dressed and he slipped on one of these contrivances and buttoned it, he felt like a man who had just been redeemed. The bandage was so much lighter in weight, so much easier to wear than what he had carried for two years. Above all, it served his purpose and did not constantly remind him by its weight and the ceaseless chafing across his shoulders and under his arms of the fact that it was there.
For a week he and Margaret worked together, “fixing their fences,” they called it. They planned the best time of day to do the sprinkling. To the extent of the knowledge of either of them, they watched over the bees. As slowly and easily as possible Jamie went about everything that week. He kept religiously to the diet that they were working out, and every morning at ten o’clock he put on the Master’s bathing suit, and armed with an old blanket to cover his feet and towels for his head and arms, went down and boldly marched into the Pacific Ocean. After the first few ventures, he discarded fear and walked in until the waves broke over him, and before a week had passed he discovered that by lying on his right side, stroking with his right hand and using his feet, he could trail his left arm and swim a few strokes. This fact so delighted him that merely the feeling of exhilaration helped the circulation of his blood. When he was thoroughly chilled from the tingle of the cold salt water, then, in a spot he had selected beginning in a mound of gold primroses and sloping down to the sands of the beach facing directly to the southwest, he stretched his long frame on the hot sand, disposed of the blanket and towels to his comfort, and fell sound asleep. When he awoke he would be thoroughly warm from the heat of the sands beneath him and his body would have dried while coated with the salt water.
Then he went through the quaint gate and slowly climbed the winding stairway that led to the back door. During these climbs he discovered that he was developing a familiarity with every flower that grew on either side of the path. Those that he did not know, Margaret Cameron did, from her years of work that she and the Bee Master had put upon their gardens together. He found himself studying the flowers, watching which bees went most frequently to which flowers, and when he discovered that the Black Germans were paying more frequent visits to the nasturtiums than to any other flower, Jamie sneered.
He remembered from botanical days Nasturtium officinale. That was cress, but nasturtiums were of the same family. The boys in the classes had always called nasturtiums the “official nose twister” and wasn’t it like anything doing business under the title of Black German to select for an especial favorite an “official nose twister”? This and other whimsies began to occupy his mind.
When he reached the house, he went straight to the bathroom for a shower, applied fresh dressings, and clothed himself, and by that time Margaret had brought his lunch. After he had eaten he wandered about the grounds for the twenty minutes prescribed and then deliberately lay down on the Master’s bed and to the music of the rhythmic breaking of the waves he slept another hour. From that hour he came to a brimming glass of cold orange juice. As regularly he took the tomato juice in the morning, and instead of either tea or coffee, he drank milk with his meals. When he had finished his nap, he did as much work in the garden as he could do without tiring himself. Then he went to the bookshelves, but in his new resolve to fight to be of some good in the world, he passed by the tempting volumes of romance and Ancient Natural History. He laughed at them and talked to them and repeated in their faces rich phrases from their unique pages.
“The bees pluck their young from the air and place them in cells, do they? The honey falls from the heavens, does it? The best bees are small, round and variegated, are they?”
So Jamie had his joke with the ancient naturalists and then he advanced on the moderns and sat down with book of rules for men who would be the keepers of bees
Back in the depths of his mind, Jamie decided that when the Bee Master returned he would be so weakened that it might be a year at least before he would be able to go on with his work, and during that time he would stay on the job, if the Master wanted him, and he would learn every-thing there was to know about bees. The more he thought of it, the more it appealed to him that, since there was not the chance for forestry in California that there was in the East, he would do better and extract fully as much enjoyment out of life working with bees as he would with trees.
It was after ten days of religious following of this schedule that Jamie awoke one morning, and instead of arising immediately, lay still to take stock of himself. He stretched his right leg as far down in the bed as it would go and wiggled his toes. Fine! There was not a hint of soreness. He tried the left leg with the same results. Then he tried the right arm and then the left and then he stretched his whole body and threw his weight on the back of his head and his heels and drew up his shoulders and eased them down, and the result of the exercise so delighted him that he tried it over again. He decided that it might not be a bad thing to work out a form of exercise and put himself through it every morning on awakening.
So for himself, and merely of his own volition, he began a practice which a very great doctor of health recommends for all men and women who would be physically strong. It was considerably a matter of stretching and squirming the first morning, but during the days that followed there developed a sort of rhythmic exercise that stretched and twisted every muscle in his body. After it he lay resting half an hour or so and went to the work of the day with a feeling in his body and an uplift in his heart and brain that a few short weeks before he had never expected again to experience. He was beginning to realize that the heat and the nerve strain were in some way being eliminated from his system. He was beginning to experience a calm satisfaction in the pit of his stomach as If there were cooling streams running through his veins instead of torturing poisoned blood. The result of this feeling was that he could accomplish very much more in a day among the bees and with the flowers than he had been doing.
At that he realized that the time was coming speedily when he must have help. When it came to examining the hives and ascertaining for sure that each hive had a healthful and happy queen, that no disease had crept in, he would need help. There was the question becoming imminent of removing the honey, and it seemed that there might be too many queens. So the next time he went to the hospital for a visit with the Bee Master, he asked where he could secure help when the day came that he would need it, and the Bee Master gave him the address of John Carey, another keeper of bees with whom he had occasionally exchanged work in times of honey collecting and swarming.
As Jamie sat beside the Bee Master’s bed and watched him, it seemed to him that each day that passed marked a distinct point in the ravages of the disease that was devastating the lean frame before him. Each time he went, he could see that the Bee Master had not quite his old strength of voice, that he was slightly weaker in the clasp of his hands.
When he had finished copying the address and listened to the instructions that the Master gave him, Jamie sat looking at the fine old face on the pillow, the skin like parchment, the silken hair, and it seemed to him that daily a great peace and a quietness were growing on the brow and in the eyes, and he thought of what the little Scout had said about the beautiful kind of death that came softly in the night, and he wondered if any night now that experience might not befall the Bee Master.
It was while these thoughts were dominant in Jamie’s mind that the same thought must have been passing in the brain of the Bee Master. His voice was very low and quiet and his eyes seemed unusually tired as he said: “Jamie MacFarlane, suppose you begin away back at the beginning and tell me all about the mother who bore you and your father and what kind of home you were reared in.”
