The Honey Bus Page 8

  “My cousin Singy’s place,” Grandpa said, yanking his thumb at the cabin.

  “Singy?”

  “Yeah, everybody calls her that because as a girl she sang a lot.”

  “Are we going there?” I wanted to pet one of those lambs.

  “Not today.”

  We continued on the narrow, winding road and soon the eucalyptus grove gave way to a cathedral of redwood trees. Palo Colorado Creek rippled along one side of the roadway, and sunlight filtered through the forest, making polka dots on tiny hillside cabins propped up on stilts over the creek. Staircases with too many steps to count zigzagged from the homes to the road. After a mile, Grandpa turned up a steep incline, driving through a tangle of greenery, the ivy-choked coyote brush and manzanita branches scraping our roof while the asphalt below became a dirt road the color of chalk rock. When we reached the plateau, we were in a meadow and we could see the sea again.

  Grandpa stopped before a cattle gate that was secured by a locked chain. He reached into the glove compartment to pull out an enormous key ring just like the sort janitors carry. By the looks of it, everyone who had property in Big Sur had given him a key. He slid the keys around the ring, muttering to himself until he landed on the right one. He got out and popped the lock, unwrapped the chain and swung open the gate so we could pass through.

  Grandpa shifted into four-wheel drive as we descended into Garrapata Canyon on an elevated wisp of a road with a severe drop-off on my side. It was barely wide enough for all four tires as the truck groaned around the tight switchbacks, bouncing over pits and boulders left by winter rains. Grandpa honked as he cranked the wheel around the turns just in case someone was coming the other way, and a few of the curves were so sharp that he had to do a three-point turn, backing up and turning, backing up and turning, before he could get the truck all the way around. One false move and we were toast. None of this seemed to bother Grandpa, who continued chatting away as rocks fell away from under his tires and skittered down the slope, but I couldn’t bear to watch. I kept my eyes on the horizon, looking in the distance for the patch of ocean peeking through the V formed by the two canyon walls.

  When we reached the bottom of the grade, pine needles cushioned us as we drove around fallen trees. Grandpa revved the engine and we drove right through Garrapata Creek, the water coming halfway up the tires. We got a tire stuck between two granite river rocks for a second, and the truck rocked back and forth as Grandpa tried to get momentum to propel us out of the divot. He seemed to be enjoying our predicament, wriggling his eyebrows at me as he punched the gas. Third time was a charm, and the truck bucked and splashed and got to the other side. We drove through more redwoods, and because the earth was wetter here, there were ferns and snarls of orange monkey flower encircling the trees.

  Finally, we emerged from the tree grove into a small wildflower meadow, and Grandpa cut the engine. At one edge of the clearing was a city of vertical white beehives, each with a small cloud of black dots waggling before it. We stepped out of the cab to the sound of scrub jays complaining about our intrusion. The air smelled as clean as mouthwash—a minty mixture of bay leaves and sage and lemony horsemint. Grandpa opened his door, and Rita’s long body shot out from underneath his seat, eager to hunt in the thicket.

  “Get along, little doggie!” he sang after her. “Oh wait a minute,” he said, watching her gather speed on six-inch legs, “I already have a long little doggie.”

  Grandpa laughed so hard his false teeth jiggled loose. He’d lost his real teeth, he said, when they rotted and fell out in his twenties, despite regular brushing. Now he put his fake ones in a glass of water on the nightstand where they grinned at him as he slept.

  He rifled through the stuff in the truck bed and tugged out two plastic hats with full brims. They looked like white pith helmets, with vents on the crown. He put mine on first, then slipped a yellow mesh veil over it so my head was covered all the way around, then cinched the netting in place with two long cords that he crossed over my chest, circled around my waist and then tied in the back. The hat was adult-sized and kept slipping over my eyes, but it was all he had.

  He put his veil on, then lifted a burlap sack from the truck, fished inside for a dry cow patty, broke it apart and shoved the pieces into the can of the bee smoker. He lit the dung with a match, closed the lid and squeezed the bellows a few times to stoke the flame until white smoke coursed from the spout. As we approached the first hive, I saw a row of honeybees lined up at the slit at the base of the hive where the entrance was, beating their wings.

  “Air-conditioning,” Grandpa said.

  Bees, he explained, always keep their hives about ninety-five degrees inside, no matter what the weather. In winter, you can put your hand on the outside of a hive and feel the heat radiating from within as they cluster together and shiver their wing muscles to generate warmth. In summer, bees gather on the landing board near the entrance and circulate air with their wings to cool the hive down. No matter where a hive is, whether in snow or triple-digit heat, it’s always within a few degrees of ninety-five. How bees could regulate temperature so precisely without a thermometer was one of their biggest mysteries.

  Grandpa handed me a metal tool, just like the one he always carried in his back pocket, with one flat end for scraping wax and a hook on the opposite end for lifting wooden honeycomb frames out of the hive.

  “The bees glue the lid down,” he said, showing me how to wedge the hive tool into the crack to pry the inner cover off. Bees, he explained, don’t like cold drafts in their homes, so they make glue out of tree sap called propolis, and use it to seal any cracks in the hive. I mimicked his movements, and we each slid our tool under opposite sides of the inner cover. We popped it off, revealing a row of ten wooden slats underneath, each a removable rectangular frame of wax honeycomb resting on a groove cut into the box. The bees responded to the intrusion of sunlight with one quick, loud hum—a collective shout to warn the rest that something was happening to their home.

  I peered closer, and noticed the bees were aligning themselves in rows in the empty spaces between the frames and peeking out to see what was going on. They wriggled their antennae, exploring the airspace where their honey pantry had been seconds before. The hive had a comforting smell of hot pancakes with butter and syrup. Grandpa reached in with bare hands and lifted out the first frame of honeycomb, which was blanketed on both sides by bees. They were a moving carpet, each an individual thread that together made one thing. Some went this way, others that way, bumping and crawling over one another but never causing injury or irritation.

  Grandpa shook the frame over the hive to dislodge about half the bees, so I could see the honeycomb underneath. It was a masterpiece of mathematical symmetry. The interlocking hexagonal tubes were aligned in straight rows, every cell sharing one wall with six of its neighbors for economy of space and wax. To fight the laws of gravity, Grandpa explained, each honeycomb cell was slightly tilted upward a few degrees to keep the honey from spilling out. It was as if the bees knew that of the three shapes that can stack without creating wasted space—squares, equilateral triangles and hexagons—the hexagon uses the least amount of material for the largest storage room, thus saving on labor and supplies.

  I reached with my fingertips to feel the geometry. The stacked configuration made the wax sturdy enough to hold several pounds of honey in one sheet of honeycomb, but the wax itself was pliable and crushed under my fingertip. Some of the cavities held gleaming honey, others small plugs of bright yellow and orange and reds where the bees had stored pollen grains. Grandpa turned the frame from side to side to examine it, bringing it so close to his face that his veil nearly brushed the bees.

  “See the queen?” I asked.

  Grandpa put the frame down on its side and propped it against another hive. The bees stayed on it, continuing to make their rounds on the honeycomb as if they didn’t even realize that they had be
en ejected from their own home.

  “Nah, this one is full of food, no place for her to lay an egg. She’ll be in the middle somewhere, where it’s warmer.”

  Some of the bees were now overflowing down the sides of the hive like a spreading stain. Instinctively, I took a step back.

  “Okay, smoke ’em,” Grandpa said.

  I pointed the snout of the smoker over the remaining nine frames in the hive and squeezed the folding bellows once. One white cloud puffed out.

  “Keep doing it. More. Lots more,” Grandpa said.

  I sent a storm of smoke clouds over the frames. The fumes had a wet cigar smell that tricked the bees into thinking their hive was on fire, sending them down into the hive to gobble honey before they fled their burning home. With full stomachs, Grandpa said, it made it harder for them to bend their bodies into stinging position.

  When I had smoked most of the bees off the top bars of the hive, he lifted a second frame out. Grandpa worked barehanded because he said he’d been stung so much it didn’t bother him anymore. He swore all that venom prevented his joints from stiffening up with arthritis like Granny’s.

  He inspected two more frames, returned them to the box and lifted out another. Then he bent down on one knee and held the frame out to me so I could see.

  “Look here, where I’m pointing.”

  I let out a small gasp. The queen was so obviously the queen. She was elegantly tapered, twice the size of all the other bees, and with longer legs that looked like they belonged on a spider. Her abdomen was so heavy with eggs that it dragged behind her as she walked.

  Like bodyguards parting a crowd for a pop star, an entourage of attendant bees formed a protective circle around her and cleared a path as she moved. She rushed across the honeycomb like she was late for something. Her royalty was apparent in the way the other bees grew visibly excited when she came near, rushing up to caress her with their antennae, some even wrapping their forearms around her head in what looked like an embrace. Curiously, none of the bees turned its back on her. As she moved about, each new group of bees she approached rearranged themselves to face inward, even backing up before her to keep their eyes and antennae focused on her every move. The only word for their behavior was worship.

  “Why do they touch her like that?”

  “They are gathering her special scent and passing it to the rest of the bees,” Grandpa said. “That’s how they know which hive is theirs. Every queen has her own smell. Her daughters never forget it.”

  It’s true mothers have an aroma. Mine smelled like Charlie perfume and Vantage cigarettes, mixed with the faint musk of other people’s clothes from the church thrift shop. It was a unique scent that I recognized instantly whenever I climbed into bed. I thought of Mom at that moment, passing the hours in bed. I wished she could see this queen, how an insect was so perfectly designed to be a mother, how the queen was the heartbeat of a whole stunning society operating right under our noses. There were so many fascinating things happening outside Mom’s four walls, but she was missing out on all of it. Her days came and went without little miracles like this to lift her spirit.

  The queen padded along the honeycomb with the impatience of the very pregnant. She seemed to be weary of all the attention, refusing to slow down for every bee that wanted to touch her as she single-mindedly searched for something. Every few steps, she ducked her head into one of the honeycomb cells, then retreated. She checked chamber after chamber, hunting.

  I asked Grandpa what she was looking for.

  “A good spot to lay an egg,” he whispered. “Gotta be clean and well built. Can’t have an egg already in there.”

  The queen squeezed her body inside the honeycomb to inspect, and all that remained visible was her butt sticking out. She was picky about her nursery, but finally she found a space to her liking and backed her abdomen into it. As the queen crouched there for a second, her attendant bees came in close as if to tell her a secret. The queen then did a little push-up with her legs and exited as her admirers backed up to give her room. I peered at the hexagon cell where she’d just been and spied a white pin inside, like a miniature grain of rice, standing on end perfectly centered on the back wall. Two of her attendants dipped their heads into the cell to verify her work. I had never seen anything born before and realized I’d just seen my first miracle.

  “Is she going to do it again?” I whispered.

  “About a thousand times a day,” he whispered back.

  Grandpa stood back up and gingerly slid the frame with the queen back into the hive, being extra careful not to squish her. He stacked the hive back together and closed it, then moved to the next one. He wedged his hive tool under the lid of the second hive and broke the sticky propolis seal, then twisted the top box off and set it on the ground, his cheeks puffing with effort.

  What struck me most about the queen was how many children she had. That seemed like an impossible number for one mother to handle.

  “Hey, Grandpa?”

  “Hmmmm?”

  “How can one queen take care of that many bees?”

  He slid his tool into his back pocket, and pushed his mesh veil above his eyes and perched it on his forehead, so he had a clearer view of me.

  “All the bees take care of each other. A hive is like a factory. All the bees have different jobs so they share the work.”

  I gave him a sideways look and crossed my arms skeptically. Grandpa put the smoker on the lowered tailgate of his truck, away from the dry weeds. He squatted in front of a hive and waved me to come closer. He pointed at a handful of bees that were standing in a cluster at the entrance with their backsides facing outward, all ferociously beating their wings.

  “Their job is to air-condition the hive,” he said. Then he pointed at another bee on the landing board.

  “Now watch what this one does.”

  The bee marched left, then right, then left again, as if it couldn’t make up its mind where it wanted to go. Just then a second bee landed nearby, and the pacing bee scurried over, crouched defensively and blocked it from entering the hive. The first bee circled the new arrival, tapping it with its antennae, then stepped aside and let it continue inside.

  “Guard bee,” Grandpa said. “Making sure no strange bees enter the hive.”

  I was stunned. Until now, besides the queen and the stocky male drones, all bees looked identical to me. What had seemed like aimless crawling of thousands of bees now snapped into tight organization, once I understood that the way to see bees was to watch their behavior. I pointed at the bees landing at the entrance.

  “What kind are those?”

  “Field bees. They bring nectar and pollen. House bees that stay inside the hive will take it from them and store it.”

  “Can I see?”

  He reached into the hive and lifted out a honeycomb frame blanketed with bees. I pointed at a bee that had its head buried in one of the cells, and asked if that bee was storing honey. He brought the frame closer to his face and blew on the bee gently, and it backed out of the cell so he could see what was inside.

  “Nope. That was a nurse bee feeding a baby.” He lowered the frame and pointed. Inside the cell was a small white grub.

  The more Grandpa taught me, the more excited I became. I wanted to understand everything that the bees were doing, to be able to read them the way he could. Because when I let myself get lost in a beehive, my mind could stop spinning. I was able to slow down and relax with the task of simply paying attention. Serenity came as I shifted my worried mind to the bees and their behaviors. I felt a comforting assurance that there was hidden life all around me, and that made my own problems seem smaller somehow.

  I learned that some bees are wax makers, others are builders that construct the honeycomb, and there are even undertaker bees that remove the dead, flying out of the hive with bee corpses in their clutches and dropping them f
ar from the hive. Grandpa explained that a bee will have many different jobs during its life, but every bee’s first job is janitor, cleaning the debris out of the honeycomb and polishing the cells so they can be reused for storing honey or laying eggs. A bee promotes upward through the various in-house jobs, nursing the babies and curing nectar into honey, until reaching its final job foraging for food outside the hive. Now it made sense why the queen could lay so many eggs a day. She had a massive day care system in place. Her only job was to drop eggs in cells.

  “The queen can’t even feed herself,” Grandpa said. “Those bees you saw in a circle around the queen? That’s her royal court. They bring her water drops when she is thirsty, food when she is hungry. They keep her warm at night, and they even clean up her poop!”

  “What happens if the queen dies?”

  “The bees will make a new one.”

  You can’t just make your own mom. No animal had ever done that on one of our nature programs. I wasn’t buying it.

  “That’s impossible,” I said.

  “Not for bees,” Grandpa said. As soon as the bees sense that their queen is failing or missing, he said, they select a handful of eggs and start feeding them royal jelly—a milky superfood the nurse bees produce from glands in their head. It’s full of vitamins, and a steady diet of it will make a regular worker bee larva start to develop into a large queen. The bees build protective wax chambers for the incubating queens that look like unshelled peanuts dangling from the honeycomb. Wait a couple weeks, and the tip of her birthing chamber turns papery and thin. She chews her way out and, Presto! New mom.

  “Bees are very smart, but most people don’t see it,” he said.