by Roald Dahl
‘I’ve just finished giving her the two-o’clock feed and she’s taken the whole lot!’
‘No!’
‘Every drop of it! Oh, Albert, I’m so happy! She’s going to be all right! She’s turned the corner just like you said!’ She came up to him and threw her arms around his neck and hugged him, and he clapped her on the back and laughed and said what a marvellous little mother she was.
‘Will you come in and watch the next one and see if she does it again, Albert?’
He told her he wouldn’t miss it for anything, and she hugged him again, then turned and ran back to the house, skipping over the grass and singing all the way.
Naturally, there was a certain amount of suspense in the air as the time approached for the six-o’clock feed. By five thirty both parents were already seated in the living-room waiting for the moment to arrive. The bottle with the milk formula in it was standing in a saucepan of warm water on the mantelpiece. The baby was asleep in its carry-cot on the sofa.
At twenty minutes to six it woke up and started screaming its head off.
‘There you are!’ Mrs Taylor cried. ‘She’s asking for the bottle. Pick her up quick, Albert, and hand her to me here. Give me the bottle first.’
He gave her the bottle, then placed the baby on the woman’s lap. Cautiously, she touched the baby’s lips with the end of the nipple. The baby seized the nipple between its gums and began to suck ravenously with a rapid powerful action.
‘Oh, Albert, isn’t it wonderful?’ she said, laughing.
‘It’s terrific, Mabel.’
In seven or eight minutes, the entire contents of the bottle had disappeared down the baby’s throat.
‘You clever girl,’ Mrs Taylor said. ‘Four ounces again.’
Albert Taylor was leaning forward in his chair, peering intently into the baby’s face. ‘You know what?’ he said. ‘She even seems as though she’s put on a touch of weight already. What do you think?’
The mother looked down at the child.
‘Don’t she seem bigger and fatter to you, Mabel, than she was yesterday?’
‘Maybe she does, Albert. I’m not sure. Although actually there couldn’t be any real gain in such a short time as this. The important thing is that she’s eating normally.’
‘She’s turned the corner,’ Albert said. ‘I don’t think you need worry about her any more.’
‘I certainly won’t.’
‘You want me to go up and fetch the cradle back into our own bedroom, Mabel?’
‘Yes, please,’ she said.
Albert went upstairs and moved the cradle. The woman followed with the baby, and after changing its nappy, she laid it gently down on its bed. Then she covered it with sheet and blanket.
‘Doesn’t she look lovely, Albert?’ she whispered. ‘Isn’t that the most beautiful baby you’ve ever seen in your entire life?’
‘Leave her be now, Mabel,’ he said. ‘Come on downstairs and cook us a bit of supper. We both deserve it.’
After they had finished eating, the parents settled themselves in armchairs in the living-room, Albert with his magazine and his pipe, Mrs Taylor with her knitting. But this was a very different scene from the one of the night before. Suddenly, all tensions had vanished. Mrs Taylor’s handsome oval face was glowing with pleasure, her cheeks were pink, her eyes were sparkling bright, and her mouth was fixed in a little dreamy smile of pure content. Every now and again she would glance up from her knitting and gaze affectionately at her husband. Occasionally, she would stop the clicking of her needles altogether for a few seconds and sit quite still, looking at the ceiling, listening for a cry or a whimper from upstairs. But all was quiet.
‘Albert,’ she said after a while.
‘Yes, dear?’
‘What was it you were going to tell me last night when you came rushing up to the bedroom? You said you had an idea for the baby.’
Albert Taylor lowered the magazine on to his lap and gave her a long sly look.
‘Did I?’ he said.
‘Yes.’ She waited for him to go on, but he didn’t.
‘What’s the big joke?’ she asked. ‘Why are you grinning like that?’
‘It’s a joke all right,’ he said.
‘Tell it to me, dear.’
‘I’m not sure I ought to,’ he said. ‘You might call me a liar.’
She had seldom seen him looking so pleased with himself as he was now, and she smiled back at him, egging him on.
‘I’d just like to see your face when you hear it, Mabel, that’s all.’
‘Albert, what is all this?’
He paused, refusing to be hurried.
‘You do think the baby’s better, don’t you?’ he asked.
‘Of course I do.’
‘You agree with me that all of a sudden she’s feeding marvellously and looking one-hundred-per-cent different?’
‘I do, Albert, yes.’
‘That’s good,’ he said, the grin widening. ‘You see, it’s me that did it.’
‘Did what?’
‘I cured the baby.’
‘Yes, dear, I’m sure you did.’ Mrs Taylor went right on with her knitting.
‘You don’t believe me, do you?’
‘Of course I believe you, Albert. I give you all the credit, every bit of it.’
‘Then how did I do it?’
‘Well,’ she said, pausing a moment to think. ‘I suppose it’s simply that you’re a brilliant feed-mixer. Ever since you started mixing the feeds she’s got better and better.’
‘You mean there’s some sort of an art in mixing the feeds?’
‘Apparently there is.’ She was knitting away and smiling quietly to herself, thinking how funny men were.
‘I’ll tell you a secret,’ he said. ‘You’re absolutely right. Although, mind you, it isn’t so much how you mix it that counts. It’s what you put in. You realize that, don’t you, Mabel?’
Mrs Taylor stopped knitting and looked up sharply at her husband. ‘Albert,’ she said, ‘don’t tell me you’ve been putting things into that child’s milk?’
He sat there grinning.
‘Well, have you or haven’t you?’
‘It’s possible,’ he said.
‘I don’t believe it.’
He had a strange fierce way of grinning that showed his teeth.
‘Albert,’ she said. ‘Stop playing with me like this.’
‘Yes, dear, all right.’
‘You haven’t really put anything into her milk, have you? Answer me properly, Albert. This could be serious with such a tiny baby.’
‘The answer is yes, Mabel.’
‘Albert Taylor! How could you?’
‘Now don’t get excited,’ he said. ‘I’ll tell you all about it if you really want me to, but for heaven’s sake keep your hair on.’
‘It was beer!’ she cried. ‘I just know it was beer!’
‘Don’t be daft, Mabel, please.’
‘Then what was it?’
Albert laid his pipe down carefully on the table beside him and leaned back in his chair. ‘Tell me,’ he said, ‘did you ever by any chance happen to hear me mentioning something called royal jelly?’
‘I did not.’
‘It’s magic,’ he said. ‘Pure magic. And last night I suddenly got the idea that if I was to put some of this into the baby’s milk…’
‘How dare you!’
‘Now, Mabel, you don’t even know what it is yet.’
‘I don’t care what it is,’ she said. ‘You can’t go putting foreign bodies like that into a tiny baby’s milk. You must be mad.’
‘It’s perfectly harmless, Mabel, otherwise I wouldn’t have done it. It comes from bees.’
‘I might have guessed that.’
‘And it’s so precious that practically no one can afford to take it. When they do, it’s only one little drop at a time.’
‘And how much did you give to our baby, might I ask?’
‘Ah,’ he sa
id, ‘that’s the whole point. That’s where the difference lies. I reckon that our baby, just in the last four feeds, has already swallowed about fifty times as much royal jelly as anyone else in the world has ever swallowed before. How about that?’
‘Albert, stop pulling my leg.’
‘I swear it,’ he said proudly.
She sat there staring at him, her brow wrinkled, her mouth slightly open.
‘You know what this stuff actually costs, Mabel, if you want to buy it? There’s a place in America advertising it for sale at this very moment for something like five hundred dollars a pound jar! Five hundred dollars! That’s more than gold, you know!’
She hadn’t the faintest idea what he was talking about.
‘I’ll prove it,’ he said, and he jumped up and went across to the large bookcase where he kept all his literature about bees. On the top shelf, the back numbers of the American Bee Journal were neatly stacked alongside those of the British Bee Journal, Beecraft, and other magazines. He took down the last issue of the American Bee Journal and turned to a page of small classified advertisements at the back.
‘Here you are,’ he said. ‘Exactly as I told you. “We sell royal jelly – $480 per lb. jar wholesale.” ’
He handed her the magazine so she could read it herself.
‘Now do you believe me? This is an actual shop in New York, Mabel. It says so.’
‘It doesn’t say you can go stirring it into the milk of a practically new-born baby,’ she said. ‘I don’t know what’s come over you, Albert, I really don’t.’
‘It’s curing her, isn’t it?’
‘I’m not so sure about that, now.’
‘Don’t be so damn silly, Mabel. You know it is.’
‘Then why haven’t other people done it with their babies?’
‘I keep telling you,’ he said. ‘It’s too expensive. Practically nobody in the world can afford to buy royal jelly just for eating except maybe one or two multimillionaires. The people who buy it are the big companies that make women’s face creams and things like that. They’re using it as a stunt. They mix a tiny pinch of it into a big jar of face cream and it’s selling like hot cakes for absolutely enormous prices. They claim it takes out the wrinkles.’
‘And does it?’
‘Now how on earth would I know that, Mabel? Anyway,’ he said, returning to his chair, ‘that’s not the point. The point is this. It’s done so much good to our little baby just in the last few hours that I think we ought to go right on giving it to her. Now don’t interrupt, Mabel. Let me finish. I’ve got two hundred and forty hives out there and if I turn over maybe a hundred of them to making royal jelly, we ought to be able to supply her with all she wants.’
‘Albert Taylor,’ the woman said, stretching her eyes wide and staring at him. ‘Have you gone out of your mind?’
‘Just hear me through, will you please?’
‘I forbid it,’ she said, ‘absolutely. You’re not to give my baby another drop of that horrid jelly, you understand?’
‘Now, Mabel…’
‘And quite apart from that, we had a shocking honey crop last year, and if you go fooling around with those hives now, there’s no telling what might not happen.’
‘There’s nothing wrong with my hives, Mabel.’
‘You know very well we had only half the normal crop last year.’
‘Do me a favour, will you?’ he said. ‘Let me explain some of the marvellous things this stuff does.’
‘You haven’t even told me what it is yet.’
‘All right, Mabel. I’ll do that too. Will you listen? Will you give me a chance to explain it?’
She sighed and picked up her knitting once more. ‘I suppose you might as well get if off your chest, Albert. Go on and tell me.’
He paused, a bit uncertain now how to begin. It wasn’t going to be easy to explain something like this to a person with no detailed knowledge of apiculture at all.
‘You know, don’t you,’ he said, ‘that each colony has only one queen?’
‘Yes.’
‘And that this queen lays all the eggs?’
‘Yes, dear. That much I know.’
‘All right. Now the queen can actually lay different kinds of eggs. You didn’t know that, but she can. It’s what we call one of the miracles of the hive. She can lay eggs that produce drones, and she can lay eggs that produce workers. Now if that isn’t a miracle, Mabel, I don’t know what is.’
‘Yes, Albert, all right.’
‘The drones are the males. We don’t have to worry about them. The workers are all females. So is the queen, of course. But the workers are unsexed females, if you see what I mean. Their organs are completely undeveloped, whereas the queen is tremendously sexy. She can actually lay her own weight in eggs in a single day.’
He hesitated, marshalling his thoughts.
‘Now what happens is this. The queen crawls around on the comb and lays her eggs in what we call cells. You know all those hundreds of little holes you see in a honeycomb? Well, a brood comb is just about the same except the cells don’t have honey in them, they have eggs. She lays one egg to each cell, and in three days each of these eggs hatches out into a tiny grub. We call it a larva.
‘Now, as soon as this larva appears, the nurse bees – they’re young workers – all crowd round and start feeding it like mad. And you know what they feed it on?’
‘Royal jelly,’ Mabel answered patiently.
‘Right!’ he cried. ‘That’s exactly what they do feed it on. They get this stuff out of a gland in their heads and they start pumping it into the cell to feed the larva. And what happens then?’
He paused dramatically, blinking at her with his small watery-grey eyes. Then he turned slowly in his chair and reached for the magazine that he had been reading the night before.
‘You want to know what happens then?’ he asked, wetting his lips.
‘I can hardly wait.’
‘ “Royal jelly,” ’ he read aloud, ‘ “must be a substance of tremendous nourishing power, for on this diet alone, the honeybee larva increases in weight fifteen hundred times in five days!” ’
‘How much?’
‘Fifteen hundred times, Mabel. And you know what that means if you put it in terms of a human being? It means,’ he said, lowering his voice, leaning forward, fixing her with those small pale eyes, ‘it means that in five days a baby weighing seven and a half pounds to start off with would increase in weight to five tons!’
For the second time, Mrs Taylor stopped knitting.
‘Now you mustn’t take that too literally, Mabel.’
‘Who says I mustn’t?’
‘It’s just a scientific way of putting it, that’s all.’
‘Very well, Albert. Go on.’
‘But that’s only half the story,’ he said. ‘There’s more to come. The really amazing thing about royal jelly, I haven’t told you yet. I’m going to show you now how it can transform a plain dull-looking little worker bee with practically no sex organs at all into a great big beautiful fertile queen.’
‘Are you saying our baby is dull-looking and plain?’ she asked sharply.
‘Now don’t go putting words into my mouth, Mabel, please. Just listen to this. Did you know that the queen bee and the worker bee, although they are completely different when they grow up, are both hatched out of exactly the same kind of egg?’
‘I don’t believe that,’ she said.
‘It’s true as I’m sitting here, Mabel, honest it is. Any time the bees want a queen to hatch out of the egg instead of a worker, they can do it.’
‘How?’
‘Ah,’ he said, shaking a thick forefinger in her direction. ‘That’s just what I’m coming to. That’s the secret of the whole thing. Now – what do you think it is, Mabel, that makes this miracle happen?’
‘Royal jelly,’ she answered. ‘You already told me.’
‘Royal jelly it is!’ he cried, clapping his hands and bouncing up o
n his seat. His big round face was glowing with excitement now, and two vivid patches of scarlet had appeared high up on each cheek.
‘Here’s how it works. I’ll put it very simply for you. The bees want a new queen. So they build an extra-large cell, a queen cell we call it, and they get the old queen to lay one of her eggs in there. The other one thousand nine hundred and ninety-nine eggs she lays in ordinary worker cells. Now. As soon as these eggs hatch into larvae, the nurse bees rally round and start pumping in the royal jelly. All of them get it, workers as well as queen. But here’s the vital thing, Mabel, so listen carefully. Here’s where the difference comes. The worker larvae only receive this special marvellous food for the first three days of their larval life. After that they have a complete change of diet. What really happens is they get weaned, except that it’s not like an ordinary weaning because it’s so sudden. After the third day they’re put straight away on to more or less routine bees’ food – a mixture of honey and pollen – and then about two weeks later they emerge from the cells as workers.
‘But not so the larva in the queen cell! This one gets royal jelly all the way through its larval life. The nurse bees simply pour it into the cell, so much so in fact that the little larva is literally floating in it. And that’s what makes it into a queen!’
‘You can’t prove it,’ she said.
‘Don’t talk so damn silly, Mabel, please. Thousands of people have proved it time and time again, famous scientists in every country in the world. All you have to do is to take a larva out of a worker cell and put it in a queen cell – that’s what we call grafting – and just so long as the nurse bees keep it well supplied with royal jelly, then presto! – it’ll grow up into a queen! And what makes it more marvellous still is the absolutely enormous difference between a queen and a worker when they grow up. The abdomen is a different shape. The sting is different. The legs are different. The…’
‘In what way are the legs different?’ she asked, testing him.
‘The legs? Well, the workers have little pollen baskets on their legs for carrying the pollen. The queen has none. Now here’s another thing. The queen has fully developed sex organs. The workers don’t. And most amazing of all, Mabel, the queen lives for an average of four to six years. The worker hardly lives that many months. And all this difference simply because one of them got royal jelly and the other didn’t!’
