Telling the Bees

by Peggy Hesketh

  I knocked again at their back door, and then I jiggled the doorknob; that was how I discovered the door was unlatched. Opening it slowly, I hesitated on the threshold for a moment, but only for a moment, as I was unable to dismiss the foreboding that urged me past my more cautious self.

  I called out their names as I stepped into the service porch just off their kitchen. Still, there was no response, and so I called again, louder, as I proceeded into the kitchen proper.

  An iridescent yellow and gold-trimmed china tea service that I keenly recalled having once been served from when I was a boy sat oddly abandoned upon their chrome-edged dinette, leaving the eerie impression that the two women had been enjoying a cup of tea together one minute and had disappeared into a rapture of thin air the next.

  A skin had formed on the milky liquid that floated atop the tea. I picked up one of the half-filled china cups. It felt cold, though the liquid in the matching creamer felt warm, which I am sure was more a matter of my own expectations as to what should feel warm or cold than it was an actual temperature differentiation.

  Then I noticed the smell. I was not so much struck at that time by the unpleasantness of the sour odor I perceived as I was by its ability to overpower the memory of disinfectant and camphor that had been the dominant aroma in my neighbors’ home for as long as I could recall.

  Standing in my neighbors’ kitchen, I remembered a conversation with my father.

  I was six years old. I asked him why we hated the Straussmans. My father was a man of few words. He said that hate was a very strong word. He explained simply that there were two kinds of people in the world: those who love bees and those who fear them, and that these two types seldom found common ground. The flowering hedgerow my father planted between our property and our next-door neighbors’ was the concrete extension of his philosophy: Out of sight, to him, was out of mind. For the first dozen years of our coexistence, this seemed to accommodate both our families’ fairly reclusive natures.

  Then one April morning in 1932 we were rousted from our breakfast table by the sound of a sharp rapping on our front door. When I was sent to answer it, I found our neighbors’ two daughters standing uncomfortably on our porch.

  The smaller, and the bolder, of the two girls was more than a year older than myself, though she stood a good six inches shorter. Her roan hair was parted in the middle and plaited into two neat braids that hung just below her shoulders. Her sky blue eyes were wide set and frank in their expression. From her pale complexion I surmised that she did not spend nearly as much time out of doors as I did.

  “My name is Clarinda Jane Straussman,” she said, which of course I knew, having watched her from our back porch since I’d grown tall enough to see over the hedgerow from that vantage. She cleared her throat rather ceremoniously and nodded to my parents. “But you may call me Claire.”

  The tone of her voice, even then, was more commanding than permissive. She said she needed to speak to my father, and so I bade her and her sister to follow me into the dining room, where I presented them to my family.

  “How do you do,” my mother replied, a bit more formally than I would have expected until I noticed she wore the same indulgent smile she displayed when sampling one of my sister’s more problematic culinary experiments.

  “I’m very well, thank you,” Claire replied curtly. She turned to the taller, silent girl beside her, whose name should have seemed familiar but did not. With a sweeping gesture that bespoke as much theatricality as maturity she said: “This is my sister, Hilda.”

  Whereas Claire’s features were delicate and finely molded as a porcelain doll’s, Hilda’s face, and indeed her entire body down to the tips of her limbs, appeared to have been shaped from modeling clay by a child’s clumsy fingers. Hilda’s short-cropped hair, which sprouted like tufts of dried corn silk from her head, was more lifeless than straight. Even today, I can only guess at the color of her eyes as she so seldom looked directly at anyone.

  Hilda curtsied rather stiffly, to my father’s seeming bemusement. My mother, who stood by my father’s side, gave him a reproving glance.

  “How nice to meet you both, at last,” she said. “Of course you must already know Albert and Eloise from school.”

  Strictly speaking, we did not. Both the Straussman sisters were at least several grades ahead of me, and in all the years we had attended the same grammar school we had scarcely spoken to one another, and only in incidental passing. I was only ten years old. I did not understand the reason behind my sister’s practiced indifference toward Claire and Hilda any more than I understood the festering power of the insult my mother had been nursing against our neighbors since her initial gift of huckleberry jam had been received indifferently. All I knew is what my father had told me: They weren’t bee people. As my father’s son, I had been content up until that moment to more or less leave well enough alone.

  “Mr. Honig,” Claire said, fashioning an expression of impatience at having her clearly rehearsed speech interrupted, “my mother has sent me to ask if you would be so kind as to come with me now to our house. She says there are bees living in our parlor wall and she would like you to remove them at once.”

  To my young mind, our neighbors’ assumptions were manifest: Bees were troublesome creatures to be avoided, the swarm of bees that had taken up residence in their parlor wall must have come from one of our secluded hives and therefore they were our responsibility to remove.

  I found such wrongheaded assumptions particularly irksome as the swarming season was nigh upon us and for that very reason my father and I had been particularly watchful that week for signs of restlessness from our hives and we had not yet seen the slightest indication that even one new queen was ready to hatch from any of them. I was prepared to point out to the Straussman sisters that even the most overcrowded hive does not produce a swarm until a new queen is born either to lead the excess bees or, in the case of a weaker regent, to push the old queen and her loyal escort out to search for a suitable new hive.

  Perhaps sensing my agitation, my father gently suggested it was much more likely that a wild swarm, freshly emerged from a nearby hollow log or abandoned shed, had chanced upon a tiny crack or some other such entry into the space between the inner and outer walls of the Straussmans’ house, which was, unfortunately, where this particular colony had chosen to establish a new hive.

  I say “unfortunately” because there is no easy way to remove bees from a wall once they have decided to take up residency inside such awkward quarters. Removal usually requires great skill on the part of the beekeeper, and even more patience on the part of the homeowner, unless of course the homeowner doesn’t mind having his wall torn apart and the unwitting home invaders summarily murdered for no good reason other than human convenience.

  My father chose not to belabor this point to our young neighbors. Instead, he motioned for me to follow him out to our honey shed where we kept a store of prepared hives ready to receive wild swarms.

  I should explain that while beginning beekeepers generally get started by purchasing established hives from a reputable supplier, experienced beekeepers whenever possible prefer to add to their stock by acquiring wild swarms each spring; wild swarms are usually quite robust and free of disease, and they are always without cost. For this reason my father was careful to keep a goodly supply of empty hives ready for new colonies to occupy come the first of April, which is when the Valencia oranges that used to surround our property began to bloom. This way we were ready to act at a moment’s notice when the groves reached full blossom and the bees began to swarm.

  My father explained as much to Mrs. Straussman when he came to her door with his hiving equipment in hand and me and the Straussman sisters in tow. I was expecting to help my father set up the catcher hive, but Mrs. Straussman had other designs.

  A remarkably large woman with gray hair and matching gray eyes the color of winter clouds, Mrs. Straussman came out onto her front porch and leaned heavily on a polished
wooden cane as my father told her that it would likely take up to a month to lure the entire colony out of her wall and into the catcher hive. With her permission, he said, he would place the catcher hive just outside the crack in the wall the bees were using as an entryway. The catcher hive was already equipped with two fully drawn brood combs filled with honey and pollen, as well as young brood and larvae and eggs and nurse bees to tend to them all.

  My father then showed Mrs. Straussman the ingenious cone he had fashioned from a twelve-by-sixteen-inch piece of window screen that he planned to nail to the opening of the telltale crevice where the brick facing of the chimney met the roof. The wide end of the cone would cover the opening in the wall, he explained. The other end, just about a half inch in diameter, would be wide enough for the bees to exit when they left the hive in search of nectar and pollen.

  “Reentering the hive will be another matter entirely for our tiny friends,” my father said with a knowing wink. He explained how, after crawling around the wall of the house in search of the screened opening, the disoriented worker bees would eventually give up and turn to the primed catcher hive, which would stand invitingly unimpeded beneath the cone. In this way, the great bulk of the hive’s inhabitants would gradually transfer themselves to our new hive to combine with the starter brood.

  “The new hive is queenless at present,” my father said. “But the workers will soon rear a new queen from the brood cells to preside over the bees in the catcher hive and, God willing, the new queen’s scent should over time lure the rest of the old colony out from inside your wall.”

  Mrs. Straussman appeared uninterested in the intricacies of my father’s inventive procedure.

  “I can hear those bees buzzing inside the wall, right there next to our chimney,” she said to my father, pointing peevishly around the side of the porch with her cane. Beckoning to me with her free hand, she said: “Come have a cup of tea with me while your father gets rid of them.”

  Like the rest of the neighborhood children, I was more than a little cowed by Mrs. Straussman, who passed many an afternoon hunkered down on the large rattan chair on her front porch, only to rise ponderously and shout invectives at any child who strayed onto her front lawn. I tried to politely decline her invitation, explaining that I did not much care for tea, and that my father would certainly be in need of my assistance, but the woman would have none of my excuses.

  “We wouldn’t like to see a nice-looking young man like you get all stung up by those nasty bees,” she said, beckoning to me with her cane as she turned to go back into the house. When I protested that honeybees were not in the least bit nasty, and that they were, in fact, my dearest friends, my father cut me short with a stern glance. A gentleman to the core, he would brook no disrespect by me toward my elders. And so I was hooked.

  Following Mrs. Straussman reluctantly indoors, I was assaulted for the first time by the sharp camphor tang of mothballs as I passed the hall closet. I took a shallow breath and held it in as I trailed her monstrous wake through the hallway. The Straussman sisters followed close upon my heels.

  The kitchen was a spotless white room at the back of the house. It was furnished with a pale pine table and four unadorned chairs, an icebox, and a small stove. Glass-faced white wooden cabinets encircled the upper half of the room, and white tile covered the countertops beneath. Not a plate, a dish towel, or even a single bread crumb had been left lying about the Straussmans’ perfectly ordered kitchen. Nor were there any lingering odors of bacon or toast or even boiled oatmeal. Certainly nothing of the sweet aroma of my mother’s homemade scones and honey. I smelled instead the acrid blending of pine tar and lye soap.

  As Mrs. Straussman eased herself into the chair nearest the door, I climbed into the chair across from hers and observed what I could only conclude was a particular Straussman family ritual. Hilda began it by lighting the stove’s back right burner with a long kitchen match and setting a hammered-aluminum teakettle to boil while Claire withdrew two fine yellow-and-gold china cups and saucers from a cabinet shelf and set them on the table next to two silver teaspoons. Claire next set out a matching gilded china teapot and creamer between us, scooped several teaspoons of loose tea into the pot, and fetched fresh cream from the icebox, which she poured into the smaller pitcher beside it. When the water came to a boil, Hilda filled the porcelain teapot with the steaming water from the aluminum pot and waited several more minutes before pouring the steeped tea through a metal strainer into her mother’s cup halfway to the brim, and then she did the same into mine.

  I had never taken to drinking tea, nor had I been trusted to sip from fine china at home, so I could only follow my hostess’s lead as she reached for the china creamer and topped off my cup and then her own.

  “It cuts the bitterness,” she said, swirling the sweet cream with her silver spoon and urging me with her eyes to do the same. “Take care not to clink the side of the cup with your spoon.”

  “Why?”

  “It’s rude, boy,” Mrs. Straussman said, setting her spoon gently onto the saucer behind her cup with its handle aligned with the cup’s handle. “It’s bad luck, besides.”

  Hilda and Claire were not invited to join us at the table but rather hovered about ever ready to refill our cups with more steaming tea.

  “Is this real gold?” I recall asking Mrs. Straussman as I raised the teacup to my lips. Surprised by my own boldness, I stared into the cup’s brilliantly gilded rim.

  “Twenty-two carat,” she replied. “That’s why we only take it out for special company, young man.”

  I took a certain pride in being deemed “special” by the imperious Mrs. Straussman—more special, if truth be told, than her own two daughters, who seemed to have been relegated to our personal serving staff. As the youngest in my family, I’d never experienced such polite deference before.

  Staring once again into those teacups and the dark liquid reservoired within, I found it painful to reconcile the reflection of the gaunt, bespectacled old man I’d become with the innocent boy who’d sipped from that startlingly iridescent tea set for the first time sixty years before.

  I don’t know how long I would have stood gazing at that abandoned chinaware, dawdling like a schoolboy in my recollections, had not the baleful hum of bees that first drew me to my neighbors’ house finally penetrated my reveries. I realized then that the hum seemed to be coming from the front end of the house.

  Once again, I called out to my neighbors as I moved cautiously past the kitchen table and on into the narrow dark hallway leading to the parlor. Oddly, the odor of sour milk grew stronger as I moved forward. With rising dread I made my way to the front room, where to my everlasting sorrow I found the Bee Ladies at last.

  Lying like rolled rugs on the polished hardwood floor, they stared into each other’s faces with blank, unseeing eyes. There was no blood or marks of injury on the women that I could detect from where I stood at the entrance to their parlor.

  Nothing appeared to be out of place in the room, nothing at all except of course for the Bee Ladies, who lay face-to-face on their sides with strips of silver duct tape binding their wrists and ankles. It appeared that red bandannas had been stuffed inside both their mouths and fastened in place with more silver tape. My distress continued to mount as I noticed the disquieting gray-green tint to both women’s complexions.

  It was at least a minute or more before I saw the first bee flitting about the fireplace opening, and perhaps another half minute after that before I spotted three more bees crawling about the framed photographs that were set in a tidy row on the wooden mantelpiece above the hearth.

  Three

  HIVE MORALE: When the morale of the honeybee colony is high, its bees are predictable. They make honey, they pollinate flowers, they propagate. When the morale of the hive is adversely affected, the colony reacts in unexpected ways.

  The first emergency vehicle arrived no more than ten minutes after I called 911 from the black wall phone set into a tiny vestibu
le just off the Straussmans’ service porch. The coroner followed shortly after several marked and unmarked police cars began rumbling up the Straussmans’ graveled driveway.

  I noticed somewhat abstractly that everything seemed to be moving slower than normal, yet the lines of the hallway and the grain of the wooden floor seemed preternaturally sharp. I watched with detached curiosity as an official investigator approached me where I stood leaning weakly against the wall. Clad in a square brown suit that seemed cut from an earlier era, he was shorter than me by at least an inch or two but much broader across his shoulders and chest. He nodded to an underling and flipped open his leather billfold containing his badge and photo identification, which he flashed quickly at me. From the easy flick of his wrist, it occurred to me that this was the sort of thing he had been doing for years and that he was loath to acknowledge just how many as his thick sandy hair was now peppered with more gray than what showed in his photograph. Judging from the jowling on his face and the snug fit of his shirt around his middle, he had added another twenty pounds as well since the photo had been taken. I noticed that his leather shoes, like his suit, had clearly been chosen more for utility than style, though they were meticulously enough maintained that I assumed the detective had some military experience in his background. His stylish gray-and-tan diagonally striped tie was the only contradiction of his frank, utilitarian style. Its colors seemed to play nicely off his hazel eyes, which suggested to me that it had been chosen by a more sophisticated sartorial eye than his.

  “Detective Grayson,” he said. Offering me a printed identification card that he urged me to keep, he slipped his badge back into his jacket pocket and extracted a narrow spiral notebook and pen with his left hand while grabbing my right hand with his, all in an impressively efficient syncopated motion. “And your name is . . . ?”