Telling the Bees Read online

  “Albert. Albert Honig,” I said, extricating my hand from his hearty grip. “I live next door.”

  “That’s H—O—N . . .” the detective said, setting his pen to pad and looking up at me expectantly. There was a weariness to his eyes that seemed to absorb rather than reflect the light around him.

  “H—O—N—I—G,” I said, and the detective dutifully recorded this, followed by my address and telephone number. I remember thinking how absurd it was that the two of us were obliged to dally over such mundane information while my deceased neighbors lay bound and gagged not five feet in front of me. The uncomfortable closeness in the air that I had first noticed upon entering the house had become almost unbearable. Just then the front door creaked open.

  “Can you excuse me just a moment?” Detective Grayson said, turning his attention to another team of police investigators who had just arrived.

  “Of course,” I said.

  Detective Grayson nodded and motioned for me to stay where I was. I realized that my hands had begun to shake and I slipped them into my trouser pockets and leaned against the doorframe that separated the hall from the parlor from where I could observe the detective directing one officer to take photographs of the parlor and the kitchen. He then instructed another officer to begin sprinkling the countertops, doorframes, windowsills, and furniture with a fine black dust, after which he turned his team’s attention to the Bee Ladies’ teacups, teapot, and milk pitcher, which the officers dusted as well, after siphoning samples into individual glass tubes that were then stoppered and labeled before depositing the emptied tea service into plastic bags, as still more officers busied themselves outside, wrapping yellow tape around the tiny cottage and fending off the crowd that had begun to gather in small bunches to whisper and point.

  So many people, I remember thinking. More people than the Bee Ladies had welcomed into their home in a thousand months of Sundays. What a shame they could not enjoy the company.

  It had been more than a decade since I last had come calling on my neighbors, and nearly as long since I had thought of them as what they once were: my dearest friends. I am sure I was the last person, besides the two women themselves, to call them by their proper Christian names. And regretfully, over time, even I had taken to referring to them by the nickname the neighborhood children had given them after they began selling jars of honey and beeswax candles from a little stand on their front porch.

  Of course I had never called them the Bee Ladies to their faces. But in my head, it seemed somehow easier to think of them as something other than what they once were to me, if only to dull the ache of our estrangement.

  My melancholic reverie was eventually interrupted by Detective Grayson’s return.

  “Sorry to keep you waiting,” he said, retrieving his notebook from his pocket. “So . . .”

  It was just a single word. But he said it softly, as if for all the times he’d had to ask the next question, it was never an easy one: “I understand you found the bodies?”

  I closed my eyes, wishing to erase the image from my mind. Reading the gesture as acquiescence, the detective clasped my shoulder as he strode past me into the parlor, where he circled the bodies like a wary beast.

  “So,” he said again, this time just a bit more firmly, “what can you tell me about all this?”

  All this.

  I suppose I could have told the detective that long after our stubborn silence had grown into a mighty rift, I had taken to observing Claire and Hilda silently tending their hives from the distance of our two yards. I could have explained that my dear mother, bless her soul, used to say there was no moving me off plumb once I’d dug my heels in, which was true enough, though in my own defense, the same could just as easily have been said about either of the Straussman sisters and that I truly believed that they had found some measure of contentment within the binary solitude of their later years, just as I had taken solace in the companionship of my books and my bees.

  The detective, who had bent to examine the body of the larger of the two women, turned his head back to me.

  “Her name was Hilda. Hilda Straussman,” I said. The name tasted like rust on my tongue.

  The detective wrote her name down as he sidled past Hilda and knelt rather laboriously next to the woman lying frozen at Hilda’s side.

  “This would be Claire. Claire Straussman,” I said. “They were sisters.”

  I started to walk toward the detective in the parlor, but he held up his hand, which was broad and surprisingly well manicured.

  “Please, Mr. Honig. This is a crime scene.”

  “Of course,” I said, chastened.

  “I take it this is the younger sister?” Detective Grayson inquired from across the room. I nodded.

  Curled into her unnatural repose, Claire seemed so small and withered. That she had taken to wearing her once luxurious curls pulled back into a single silvery braid wrapped around the back of her head in a thick bun reminded me once again of how old we’d both grown. A few strands had sprung loose from the braid and lay in errant wisps across her cheek. Alive, Claire would have suffered not even a single hair out of place, and it seemed to me the detective’s thick hand hovered momentarily above her cheek as if to brush the hair from Claire’s face as he bent closer to examine her body. Or perhaps I just wished it so.

  “Neither one of them ever marry?” the detective wondered aloud. I shook my head no, and his eyes filled with the special pity reserved for elderly spinsters. I thought of my own lifelong bachelorhood and how even after my father’s death I had seldom felt the lack of companionship, except perhaps at mealtime when I was forced to cook as well as clean up the detritus of pots and pans and plates I invariably made of even my most meager culinary efforts.

  “Any family at all?”

  “None to speak of.”

  We were interrupted, just then, by a string of curses erupting from the back of the house, and I turned to watch two coroner’s attendants roll a pair of steel gurneys down the long hallway from the kitchen to the parlor.

  “What the Sam Hill?” Detective Grayson fairly barked at the young men.

  “Gosh durned bees!” the taller of the two attendants exclaimed, pointing to a small cluster of bees in the hallway, except that he didn’t say gosh durned, and I felt my cheeks redden at the sound of the Lord’s name being taken in vain. Though I no longer attend church as regularly as I did when my dear mother walked this earth, I do believe there is a common decency that should be observed in the avoidance of vulgar epithets.

  “There’s a flaming swarm back there in the hallway,” the first one added, more or less.

  Observing my discomfort at what they really said, the good detective intervened.

  “Watch your language, son,” he said sharply.

  “Bees are upset by coarse language,” I agreed, and as if to prove my point one of the bees broke away from the cluster to hover skittishly above the nearer of the two attendants. When he tried to swat it away, it drove its stinger defensively into the back of his hand.

  “Don’t pull it out,” I said. I kept my voice low and calm as the young man yelped and flailed about in circles. “Use a knife blade or your fingernail to scrape the stinger off.”

  Both the attendants and the detective looked at me as if I had grown an extra head.

  “Plucking it out only releases more venom into the wound,” I tried to explain as the young man continued to worry the offending barb with his forefinger. “Some Mrs. Stewart’s Liquid Bluing rubbed on the sting helps to relieve the pain. I’m fairly certain the Straussmans have some on hand—in the pantry, just to the right of the kitchen. Or if not, swabbing on some Clorox helps, or even table salt. I’m also told meat tenderizer contains an enzyme that neutralizes the irritant in the sting, but I have yet to try this remedy myself.”

  “Jiminy, there’s more of the little flamers on the window over there,” the shorter of the two attendants shouted before shrugging apologetically in my direction.
“And there, on the mantle!”

  “Keep your voice down, and try not to move suddenly,” I instructed. “Bees will not sting unless they are frightened or offended. Loud noise and sudden motion both frighten and offend them.”

  A large drone flew out from the fireplace and lit on Claire Straussman’s skirt just then.

  “You seem to know a thing or two about bees,” the detective said to me. “What do you make of this?”

  By this, I assumed he meant the growing number of bees gathering in the Straussmans’ parlor, as he did not appear to be well enough schooled in apian habits to find the appearance of a solitary drone outside the hive odd, in and of itself.

  “The bees seem to be coming into the house through the chimney,” I said as another pair of field bees entered the parlor in just this manner.

  “I can see that,” the detective replied, a terseness creeping into his voice that surprised me. “What I’m asking is, why?”

  “In my experience,” I replied, “I have found that bees are generally forthright, intelligent creatures. It’s not in their nature to offer false testament any more than it would be natural for a worker and a drone to mate or a queen to leave the hive to gather pollen. While I might not readily understand their actions or intentions in certain situations, that has always been my shortcoming, not theirs.”

  Detective Grayson had meanwhile begun to reflexively click his ballpoint pen open and shut in what I could only read as irritation. I wondered what about my measured response had so offended him. As if reading my mind, he repeated his question.

  “This time,” he added, “in twenty-five words or less.”

  I told him then as succinctly as I could that I did not know the precise reason for the bees’ entry into the Straussmans’ house, per se, but it seemed to me the natural rhythm of their precisely ordered world clearly had been disturbed.

  Four

  DWINDLING: The dying off of old bees in the spring, sometimes called spring dwindling or the disappearing disease.

  Though I found myself surprisingly agitated at the thought of abandoning my former friends, I reluctantly allowed myself at this time to be ushered onto the Straussmans’ front porch where Detective Grayson solicited additional information from me about the nature of my relationship with the Straussman sisters. I told him that I’d known them all my life, that my parents had moved to this area from Oregon more than seventy years before, and that we—the Straussman sisters, my sister and myself—had all grown up together.

  I do not recall the exact progression of our discourse, but I believe it moved at some point from the friendship Claire and I once shared to Aristotle’s observations on the general nature of bees and how he was able, through this particular manner of philosophic extrapolation, to glean some further insight into the nature of man.

  I, of course, hold no such lofty philosophic conceits. But I did tell the detective that through years of careful observation I have been able to discern quite clearly when my bees are hungry or when they are cold. Through a nuanced pattern of motion and sound, my bees signal just as plainly to me when there’s an abundance of honey to be harvested from the hive or when they are set to swarm. Indeed, my bees tell me when a new queen has been born, and though I’ve gotten more than a few painful stings over the years, I’ve learned to judge by the tone and pitch of their buzz whether they’re glad to see me or if they are on the other hand offended by the smell of a new pair of woolen gloves I am wearing or off-put by the color of my jacket.

  “I remember in particular the fuss I stirred up among my hives the time I wore a purple velvet jacket.”

  I explained to Detective Grayson that I would never have chosen this color or fabric on my own, but one of my honey customers, a young woman with something of an ethereal nature, had presented me with this particular jacket as a thank-you present for helping her to start a bee colony of her own.

  “You look like someone who could have worn this in a past life,” she’d said. Beaming like a courtesan, she’d reached up to help me into the jacket, and, not wanting to hurt her feelings, I had thanked her heartily and waved good-bye, with her watching all the way as I headed out to my number one hive. This is how I discovered that my bees did not like purple, I told the good detective. “Before I could take the offending jacket off, I received three, perhaps four, bee stings.”

  “What’s your point, Mr. Honig?” Detective Grayson said, flipping his notebook closed and slipping it and his pen back into his jacket pocket.

  My point was that bees are extraordinary creatures.

  “Did you know that the ancient Egyptians revered honeybees, believing that they were born from the tears of the sun god, Ra?”

  “I can’t say that I did,” Detective Grayson replied, glancing back toward the front door where the attendants stood poised to wheel out the first of the two steel gurneys bearing the Straussman sisters’ remains.

  Before I had the chance to elaborate on the mythic significance of bees to Egyptian civilization, the detective thanked me rather perfunctorily for what assistance I had been able to provide and called one of his junior officers over to show me to my home just as the Straussmans’ front door swung open and the shorter of the two coroner assistants nosed the first gurney out onto the Straussmans’ front porch. I assumed it was Claire who was zipped into the black body bag as the straps on the gurney were notched tight with plenty to spare.

  Before taking my leave, I asked the detective if I might ask a favor of him. He raised his eyebrows, which, like his hair, were in need of a good trim.

  “Would it be possible for you to see to it that they are transported in a single vehicle?” I queried, gesturing to the pair of coroner’s vans parked in the driveway. I explained to the detective that in all their years on earth, Hilda and Claire had only rarely found cause to spend time apart.

  Detective Grayson took a deep breath and squeezed the raised tendons at the back of his neck.

  “As the Lord has seen fit to take them from this life together,” I persisted, “it seems so very wrong to send them off to their heavenly repose in separate vehicles.”

  The detective’s eyes flicked from me to the second gurney that had just begun to nose out the door and back to me again. He shook his big bear head slowly and let out a protracted sigh.

  “I’ll see what I can do.”

  I had no choice but to trust his good intentions, and so I let myself be led back across the expanse of the Straussmans’ front yard to my own porch, where I bid the young officer a polite farewell at my doorstep. I considered for a moment whether I should check on my hives before going inside. Though the sun was still less than midway through its journey across the sky, darkness had already fallen on all I could see, and, in truth, my legs suddenly felt as though weighted with lead. There was a growing constriction in my chest that seemed to ratchet ever tighter with each breath I took. I decided my bees would have to take care of themselves for an afternoon.

  Entering my darkened house, I sat for a while in my parlor before slowly climbing the stairs to my bedroom, which by then was bathed in late-afternoon shadows. I switched on the reading light over my mother’s old padded rocker. I had moved this chair from my parents’ room into mine after my father’s death.

  Sleep was out of the question, but, for once, I found no solace in my books. After a time, I switched off the lamp, opened the curtains of my window, and lay down on my bed. I watched the color of the sky shift from gray to mottled black to gray again.

  Five

  QUEEN MANDIBULAR PROTEIN: A pheromone produced by the queen bee that attracts drones for mating, inhibits the production of replacement queens, unites the colony, and stabilizes its temperament by drawing attendants to the queen and stimulating the development of nurse and forager bees to raise its brood and gather honey and pollen to feed it. Without it, robber bees seem to be drawn to the hive.

  The next morning, I arose even earlier than was my custom. Finding food as unappealing as sleep, I d
ecided to forgo my usual breakfast routine in favor of a small nibble of dry toast and a teaspoon of jasmine honey. Yet even this slight fare seemed to catch in my throat, and I quickly sought what comfort I could out of doors in the quietude of my own thoughts, where I passed most of the morning tending to my hives, which had been sorely neglected in the distractions of the previous day.

  It was close to noon, and I was doing what I could to fend off a small brown ant infestation in my number three hive when I heard my name being shouted from across my backyard. I looked up to see the detective I had met at the Straussman sisters’ home the previous day standing at the foot of my back porch.

  “Mr. Honig?” he called again to me, this time louder, but with a slight tremor that I naturally ascribed to an apprehension common to those finding themselves in close proximity to so large a number of bees for the first time. I set down my smoker can and the empty container of motor oil I had just finished pouring into the tin pans suspended on the legs of my hive stand. I approached the house, as it was clear by the grip of the detective’s hand on the porch railing that he would venture no closer of his own accord. As my mother often said, it is easier to bring Muhammad to the mountain than the mountain to Muhammad.

  “Please, call me Albert,” I said, extending my hand. I had hoped to put him at ease by dispensing of such formalities as surnames, though, in truth, it was not solely his comfort I sought. For most of my days it had been my father to whom friends and neighbors had referred to as Mr. Honig, while I was known simply as “young Albert.” Even though I myself was in my eighth decade, I confess that I was at that moment still loath to accept my natural inheritance.