by Roald Dahl
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 newborn 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 it 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 two 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 honey-bee 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 on 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 out 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 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!’
‘It’s pretty hard to believe,’ she said, ‘that a food can do all that.’
‘Of course it’s hard to believe. It’s another of the miracles of the hive. In fact it’s the biggest ruddy miracle of them all. It’s such a hell of a big miracle that it’s baffled the greatest men of science for hundreds of years. Wait a moment. Stay there. Don’t move.’
Again he jumped up and went over to the bookcase and started rummaging among the books and magazines.
‘I’m going to find you a few of the reports. Here we are. Here’s one of them. Listen to this.’ He started reading aloud from a copy of the American Bee Journal:
‘ “Living in Toronto at the head of a fine research laboratory given to him by the people of Canada in recognition of his truly great contribution to humanity in the discovery of insulin, Dr Frederick A. Banting became curious about royal jelly. He requested his staff to do a basic fractional analysis …” ’
He paused.
‘Well, there’s no need to read it all, but here’s what happened. Dr Banting and his people took some royal jelly from queen cells that contained two-day-old larvae, and then they started analysing it. And what d’you think they found?
‘They found,’ he said, ‘that royal jelly contained phenols, sterols, glycerils, dextrose, and – now here it comes – and eighty to eighty-five per cent unidentified acids!’
He stood beside the bookcase with the magazine in his hand, smiling a funny little furtive smile of triumph, and his wife watched him, bewildered.
He was not a tall man; he had a thick plump pulpy-looking body that was built close to the ground on abbreviated legs. The legs were slightly bowed. The head was huge and round, covered with bristly short-cut hair, and the greater part of the face – now that he had given up shaving altogether – was hidden by a brownish yellow fuzz about an inch long. In one way and another, he was rather grotesque to look at, there was no denying that.
‘Eighty to eighty-five per cent,’ he said, ‘unidentified acids. Isn’t that fantastic?’ He turned back to the bookshelf and began hunting through the other magazines.
‘What does it mean, unidentified acids?’
‘That’s the whole point! No one knows! Not even Banting could find out. You’ve heard of Banting?’
‘No.’
‘He just happens to be about the most famous living doctor in the world today, that’s all.’
Looking at him now as he buzzed around in front of the bookcase with his bristly head and his hairy face and his plump pulpy body, she couldn’t help thinking that somehow, in some curious way, there was a touch of the bee about this man. She had often seen women grow to look like the horses that they rode, and she had noticed that people who bred birds or bull terriers or pomeranians frequently resembled in some small but startling manner the creature of their choice. But up until now it had never occurred to her that her husband might look like a bee. It shocked her a bit.
‘And did Banting ever try to eat it,’ she asked, ‘this royal jelly?’
‘Of course he didn’t eat it, Mabel. He didn’t have enough for that. It’s too precious.’
‘You know something?’ she said, staring at him but smiling a little all the same. ‘You’re getting to look just a teeny bit like a bee yourself, did you know that?’
He turned and looked at her.
‘I suppose it’s the beard mostly,’ she said. ‘I do wish you’d stop wearing it. Even the colour is sort of bee-ish, don’t you think?’
‘What the hell are you talking about, Mabel?’
‘Albert,’ she said. ‘Your language.’
‘Do you want to hear any more of this or don’t you?’
‘Yes, dear, I’m sorry. I was only joking. Do go on.’
He turned away again and pulled another magazine out of the bookcase and began leafing through the pages. ‘Now just listen to this, Mabel. “In 1939, Heyl experimented with twenty-one-day-old rats, injecting them with royal jelly in varying amounts. As a result, he found a precocious follicular development of the ovaries directly in proportion to the quantity of royal jelly injected.” ’
‘There!’ she cried. ‘I knew it!’
‘Knew what?’
‘I knew something terrible would happen.’
‘Nonsense. There’s nothing wrong with that. Now here’s another, Mabel. “Still and Burdett found that a male rat which hitherto had been unable to breed, upon receiving a minute daily dose of royal jelly, became a father many times over.” ’
‘Albert,’ she cried, ‘this stuff is much too strong to give to a baby! I don’t like it at all.’
‘Nonsense, Mabel.’
‘Then why do they only try it out on rats, tell me that? Why don’t some of these famous scientists take it themselves? They’re too clever, that’s why. Do you think Dr Banting is going to risk finishing up with precious ovaries? Not him.’
‘But they have given it to people, Mabel. Here’s a whole article about it. Listen.’ He turned the page and again began reading from the magazine. ‘ “In Mexico, in 1953, a group of enlightened physicians began prescribing minute doses of royal jelly for such things as cerebral neuritis, arthritis, diabetes, autointoxication from tobacco, impotence in men, asthma, croup and gout … There are stacks of signed testimonials … A celebrated stockbroker in Mexico City contracted a particularly stubborn case of psoriasis. He became physically unattractive. His clients began to forsake him. His business began to suffer. In desperation he turned to royal jelly – one drop with every meal – and presto! – he was cured in a fortnight. A waiter in the Café Jena, also in Mexico City, reported that his father, after taking minute doses of this wonder substance in capsule form, sired a healthy boy child at the age of ninety. A bullfight promoter in Acapulco, finding himself landed with a rather lethargic-looking bull, injected it with one gram of royal jelly (an excessive dose) just before it entered the arena. Thereupon, the beast became so swift and savage that it promptly dispatched two picadors, three horses and a matador, and finally … ” ’
‘Listen!’ Mrs Taylor said, interrupting him. ‘I think the baby’s crying.’
Albert glanced up from his reading. Sure enough, a lusty yelling noise was coming from the bedroom above.
‘She must be
hungry,’ he said.
His wife looked at the clock. ‘Good gracious me!’ she cried, jumping up. ‘It’s past her time again already! You mix the feed, Albert, quickly, while I bring her down! But hurry! I don’t want to keep her waiting.’
In half a minute, Mrs Taylor was back, carrying the screaming infant in her arms. She was flustered now, still quite unaccustomed to the ghastly non-stop racket that a healthy baby makes when it wants its food. ‘Do be quick, Albert!’ she called, settling herself in the armchair and arranging the child on her lap. ‘Please hurry!’
Albert entered from the kitchen and handed her the bottle of warm milk. ‘It’s just right,’ he said. ‘You don’t have to test it.’
She hitched the baby’s head a little higher in the crook of her arm, then pushed the rubber teat straight into the wide-open yelling mouth. The baby grabbed the teat and began to suck. The yelling stopped. Mrs Taylor relaxed.
‘Oh, Albert, isn’t she lovely?’
‘She’s terrific, Mabel – thanks to royal jelly.’
‘Now, dear, I don’t want to hear another word about that nasty stuff. It frightens me to death.’
‘You’re making a big mistake,’ he said.
‘We’ll see about that.’
The baby went on sucking the bottle.
‘I do believe she’s going to finish the whole lot again, Albert.’
‘I’m sure she is,’ he said.
And a few minutes later, the milk was all gone.
‘Oh, what a good girl you are!’ Mrs Taylor cried, as very gently she started to withdraw the nipple. The baby sensed what she was doing and sucked harder, trying to hold on. The woman gave a quick little tug, and plop, out it came.
‘Waa! Waa! Waa! Waa! Waa!’ the baby yelled.
‘Nasty old wind,’ Mrs Taylor said, hoisting the child on to her shoulder and patting its back.
It belched twice in quick succession.
‘There you are, my darling, you’ll be all right now.’
For a few seconds, the yelling stopped. Then it started again.
‘Keep belching her,’ Albert said. ‘She’s drunk it too quick.’
His wife lifted the baby back on to her shoulder. She rubbed its spine. She changed it from one shoulder to the other. She lay it on its stomach on her lap. She sat it up on her knee. But it didn’t belch again, and the yelling became louder and more insistent every minute.
