Telling the Bees (13 page)

“Goodness, Claire, we couldn’t take your money,” I said, regretting my words as soon as I saw Claire’s jaw begin to set.

“I don’t need your charity.”

“Of course not, Claire,” I said. I stepped out onto the porch, letting the door swing softly closed behind me. “It’s just that my family has always believed that bees should never be bought or sold for money. Bees
may
be acquired through trade, however, and I am sure that providing you with a starter hive and the basic equipment you’ll need would constitute more than fair trade for the all the labor you’ve freely given on our bees’ behalf over the years.”

This last pronouncement seemed to sufficiently mollify Claire.

“There’s a nice clearing, out beyond our almond grove,” she said, the barest hint of a smile beginning to play at the edges of her lips. “This is where I want the hive to go.”

What she didn’t say was that this particular clearing was as far away from her family’s house as physically possible and still be located within the Straussmans’ property lines. Since this was hardly the most convenient placement, I’d naturally assumed it had been chosen to preempt any objections from her parents.

“We’ll bring everything over this evening after dinner,” I said, feeling rather pleased with myself.

“I’ll meet you in the grove at seven,” Claire said.

Though I was the junior partner in our family’s beekeeping enterprise, my father heartily endorsed the independent arrangement I’d just made when he returned home from church later that afternoon.

I had assumed that Claire would bring David Gilbert with her since he had been the inspiration for her sudden decision to acquire her own hive. Yet when my father and I arrived at the clearing at the appointed time, we found Hilda standing silently by Claire’s side instead. I noticed that when she saw that my father had come with me, Claire’s demeanor visibly softened. It was a funny thing. Though Claire was by this time a grown woman who usually projected a hardened air of self-sufficiency, whenever my father was present she tended to remind me of the wonder-struck girl who’d just touched her first swarm.

“Hilda’s offered to help me tend our hive,” Claire said in that way she had of closing off all further discussion with a simple declarative sentence. Hilda smiled rather nervously, but she nodded her assent, more to her sister than either my father or myself. I was about to wonder aloud whether Hilda’s offer had been as voluntary as Claire made it out to be when I caught a sharp look from my father that stayed any further comment. Perhaps such filial deference from a grown man such as myself might seem strange today, but in my day respect for one’s elders did not come with an expiration date. Nor did common courtesy.

My father told Hilda he was glad that she’d decided to join in Claire’s enterprise, and with that we began unfastening the ropes we’d used to secure the hive and equipment to the old wooden pushcart we generally used to haul loads of full supers from our outlying hives to our honey shed. My father explained that he was confident we would be able to acquire a replacement swarm over the coming season and so he’d decided to give Claire one of our established hives rather than a small nucleus brood and queen as I’d assumed he would.

“This is a gentle queenright colony. It should give you a strong start in your move up from assistant to full-fledged beekeeper,” he’d said, and then, turning to Hilda, he graciously added, “Especially now that Claire has you to help.”

“It’ll be fun, you’ll see,” Claire said to Hilda, who nodded back at Claire though her accompanying smile seemed tentative at best.

While Claire was familiar enough with all the hive components and tools my father and I had brought, Hilda was not, and so I took it upon myself to name each piece of equipment and its use as I unloaded it from the cart.

“This is the hive stand,” I said, placing the four-legged wooden support platform on a patch of level ground while my father unfastened the mooring ropes that had held the hive body securely on the cart during its transport. “The stand keeps the hive up and away from predators and preserves the bottom board by keeping it off the damp ground.”

I gathered into my arms an old smoker can, bellows, and a can of smoker fuel and was about to set them all on the ground next to the hive stand when my father handed Claire my old bee veil, the same one my mother had loaned her when she first started working in my family’s apiary.

“You might as well keep this over here now,” my father said. There was a slight hitch in his voice, which surprised me as my father wasn’t normally given to sentimentality toward such utilitarian objects. “I think we have another one we can spare for Hilda. Albert will bring it round tomorrow.”

“Thank you, Mr. Honig,” Claire said. She smiled at Hilda.

“Well,” I said, “you use this smoker here to keep your bees gentle during hive inspections and honey harvesting.”

I explained to Hilda how smoke kindled the bees’ natural instinct to gorge themselves on honey in preparation for fleeing a burning hive. And once so subdued, a beekeeper may move and manipulate his or her bees without undue fear of defensive stings.

“What about this?” Hilda said, pointing a doughy finger at the flat metal device lying on the cart next to the hive body.

“It’s called a hive tool,” Claire said.

“Yes,” I confirmed after a moment’s pause. I honestly couldn’t remember the last time Hilda had spoken directly to me. Her voice was raspier than I’d remembered, as if her words had to claw their way out into the open air.

“The curved end is for scraping the foundation frames,” Claire explained as she picked the tool up and turned it around for Hilda to see. “You use this flat side here to pry the hive open.”

“And then you take this brush,” I said, picking up the bee brush to demonstrate how it was used to gently whisk bees from the hive’s foundation frames when my father called for me to give him a hand in removing the staples from the hive components, which we had secured in preparation for the move. As we slid off the C-shaped staples, I told Hilda that the bottom part of the hive was called the brood chamber and that it contained developing eggs, larvae, young nurse bees and attendants, and a queen bee.

“These lower supers are where the worker bees store the honey the colony needs to survive. We harvest only the excess honey that they store in these shallow top supers.”

“Are there bees in the hive now?” Hilda inquired, a hint of alarm creeping into her odd scratchy voice.

“Of course,” I replied. I hoped to allay her fears by explaining that we had waited until the colony was bedded down for the night before moving the hive.

“Don’t worry, Hilda,” Claire added, “you can tell they’re asleep. Listen.”

Nodding to my father, Claire explained to her sister that the low, steady hum we could all clearly hear coming from the hive signified the bees inside were safely at rest. Nevertheless, Hilda took a few steps back when my father and I gripped the body of the hive and heaved it off the cart and onto its stand in one quick move. Then, after we had situated the hive squarely onto its platform, my father took a weathered hammer from the cart and abruptly began to give the brood chamber a series of sharp raps all around.

“Don’t make them mad!” Hilda exclaimed as she quickly skittered a dozen yards back as the distinctive whine of rapidly beating wings began to emanate from within the awakening hive.

“Keep your voice down and they won’t bother you,” my father said in a slow, even tone, further reassuring Hilda by explaining that bees seldom leave their hive after sundown. “We’re just letting them know that a change in their circumstances has occurred.”

The moon was just tipping the tops of the almond trees by the time the din inside the hive finally subsided, and in the meantime my father and I tried to allay any lingering doubts and questions the two sisters might yet harbor.

“All quiet again,” my father said at last. He then instructed Claire and Hilda to gather a few handfuls of dried grass and make a barrier of it all around the entrance to the hive. “When your field bees come out of the hive in the morning, this will remind them that a change has indeed been made.”

Claire had been around my father long enough to know that when he spoke, he had something important to say, and so she appeared prepared to do whatever he told her to do in order to ensure the well-being of her newly acquired charges. Hilda, on the other hand, remained skeptical, judging from the halfhearted way she had begun to pluck at a few blades of grass near her feet.

I decided to appeal to what I assumed was an inherently more rational nature than that of Claire’s. I explained to Hilda that bees use the sun’s position to orient themselves in their foraging flights to and from the hive. Without some radical reminders that their hive location has changed in relation to the sun’s position, bees often revert to their familiar orientation point and return to the former site of their hive.

“The grass at the entrance disrupts their normal routine and this prompts many of them to fly round in circles to get their bearings. This reorients them and seems to help them remember where to return after they’ve collected their fill of nectar and pollen,” I said, adding that in the morning we would also place a shoe box on the old hive stand so that if any stragglers mistakenly return to their former home, they could be brought back to their new hive that evening. “We’ll cut a hole into one end of the box so that they will have shelter in the meantime.”

“You’ll see,” Claire said to Hilda, taking the grass from her sister’s hands and adding it to the pile she’d already arranged on the landing board of the hive.

“One more thing,” my father said, turning back to Claire, who was whispering something I could not hear to Hilda. “First thing tomorrow morning, be sure to tell your bees that you are their new mistress.”

My father assured them both that this was a very simple ritual but that it must be observed when a change in ownership takes place.

“Otherwise your bees may never settle into their new home,” I chimed in. “This could severely disrupt your hive’s honeyflow or, worse, the colony might decide to swarm or your queen could stop laying altogether.”

Claire placed a hand on her sister’s shoulder as if to silence any objections, spoken or otherwise.

“Albert can come back over in the morning to show you what you must do,” my father said. “Tonight, though, you’re going to want to find a safe, dry place to store your equipment.”

“I know, Mr. Honig, a place for everything and everything in its place,” Claire said with a wry smile as she began gathering up the beekeeping gear we’d brought. “We have a little shed behind the house where we keep our gardening tools and baskets. We can store all this there.”

And then, to my father’s surprise, Claire took his right hand in hers and shook it heartily. “Thank you, Mr. Honig.”

“You’re welcome, Claire,” my father said, withdrawing his hand and slipping it quickly into his pocket as he gripped one of the cart handles with his left hand and instructed me to grab the other.

“You too, Albert,” Claire called out to me as she and Hilda, their arms laden with gear, headed back through the grove toward their house.

“Mr. Honig?” There was an urgency to Detective Grayson’s tone. “Are you all right?”

“I’m fine,” I assured him as I unclenched my hand from the arm of my chair. The detective nodded and picked up his notebook.

“I kinda lost you there for a minute,” he said. He began flipping back and forth through the pages until he found the one he was looking for. “We were talking about David Gilbert’s fondness for eucalyptus honey.”

“Of course,” I said. I took another bite of my toast and washed it down with a sip of tea. “Claire told me once that when the boy first tasted our eucalyptus honey, his eyes lit up like they were full of fireflies. That’s how she put it: Full of fireflies. That’s when she decided, right on the spot—Claire was always such an impetuous girl—to make sure that David Gilbert had all the honey he could ever eat in a month of Sundays. I remember thinking that there are no fireflies in California. I meant to ask her where she’d come up with such an exotic image, but Claire was already running on about how she could watch David Gilbert like that forever.”

The detective looked up from his notebook but said nothing. He nodded silently for me to continue.

“You know, she used to sing to her bees,” I said.

He raised his eyebrows slightly, and so I recounted how every morning, regular as clockwork, Claire used to stop at every hive and sing an old Scottish tune her grandmother taught her when she was a little girl.

“What was the name of it?” I mused aloud. Detective Grayson shrugged.

“You know the one,” I urged. “It started:
‘By yon bonnie banks and by yon bonnie braes, / Where the sun shines bright on Loch Lomond.’
Yes, that was it. ‘Loch Lomond.’ Her father’s people were German, but her mother’s family was of Scottish descent. Claire said she learned the song when her family visited her grandparents in Saint Louis one summer when she was just a little girl. She had such a lovely voice when she was younger—Claire, I mean. Clear and delicate as crystal. I’m sorry you never had the chance to know her as I did.”

“And how would that have been, Mr. Honig?”

“How would what have been?” I asked.

“How did you know Miss Straussman?”

“As a friend, Detective. A very dear friend.”

“And what about David Gilbert?” the detective pressed. “What was he to you?”

“Nothing at all,” I said sadly. More sadly, in truth, than I would have imagined possible.

Still, I suppose in light of the detective’s apparent line of questioning what came next was inevitable.

“Okay, what was he to her, then?” the detective said, looking up from his notebook to stare straight into my eyes. “David Gilbert to Claire, I mean. Her Detroit relations seem to think he was a nephew or orphan cousin from somewhere down South. They weren’t real clear about it. The one thing they were sure of was that David Gilbert grew up here in the Straussman house.”

I nodded my assent.