Ned Kelly and the City of Bees

by Thomas Keneally

  The next morning the tribe took me with them. But I felt weak and one of the young black women had to carry me. In the night a plump black woman slept beside me to keep me warm. But the cold was stronger than the plump woman. When I remember how cold it was, and how I kept waking and weeping, I feel sad for the little girl I was then. Yes, sad. Because I was only ten years old then, no older than you.

  And it started raining—you know the way it rains in this valley. The tribe did not go on walking the next morning. The plump woman and I snuggled together in a little bark shelter. I didn’t want to eat anything she gave me. I wanted to be warm and sleep without waking up again.

  The plump woman and the other tribes-people were very worried about me now. When the rain stopped and the sun came out, they propped me up against a tree trunk so that I could get warm in the sunlight. But I kept sleeping and woke only one more time. The sun was going down behind the hill and I could see a bee walking up my chest with a drop of golden liquid for me on her tongue. You know how it was, the same thing happened to you in hospital, didn’t it?

  (I nodded. I thought Miss Nancy Clancy’s story was the strangest I’d ever heard.)

  The bee’s name was Cilia (Miss Nancy Clancy continued) and she felt sorry for me. I told her I didn’t want her feeling sorry for me. I didn’t want the sympathy of a bee. But she kept on feeling sorry and I couldn’t do anything to stop her. She said she’d given me the golden drop because I wasn’t going to see my father ever again. It was some sort of charity for losing your relatives. I called her a liar when she said that. But I knew she was telling the truth. She said that I could come and spend summer with her and at the end of the summer she would put me somewhere warm where I could sleep all winter. If she herself should die during the winter, she would leave a message with a young bee so that I would be collected in the spring and brought as a guest to the hive.

  And that’s what’s been happening for a hundred and ten years (said Miss Nancy Clancy) and I must say it’s very pleasant and I’ve met lots of bees.

  I frowned and felt a deep fright as I heard the end of Miss Nancy Clancy’s story.

  “The same thing happened to me as to you,” I said. “A bee crawled up my chest. Does that mean I’m never going to see my mother and father again?”

  “Don’t be silly. It’s an entirely different case.”

  “But I was in the hospital, and Apis crawled up my chest with a drop of golden liquid on her tongue …”

  “It doesn’t mean you’re not going to see your mamma again, babykins. Apis is just sentimental, that’s all. From listening to all those serials. She didn’t say anything about your mother and father, did she?”

  “No.”

  “There you are. That shows you. Now let’s go to sleep.”

  “Where do I sleep?”

  “Across the foot of my bed,” she told me, as if I was a pup.

  “What will I do for sheets and covers?”

  “You won’t have any need of covers. It’s a hot night.”

  And Miss Nancy Clancy was right. All night, whenever I woke, I could hear the flutter of bees’ wings in the hive. Some of the young workers stayed up all night fanning the rest of us, keeping us cool. That sound made me feel cozy and safe, and before long I went into a deep sleep out of which I did not come until morning.

  5

  Ned Kelly Meets the Queen

  It’s morning, said Nancy Clancy, shaking my elbow. “I’ve been up half an hour practicing my rhymes.”

  “Oh,” I said. I sat up, dangling my legs over the end of Miss Nancy Clancy’s bed. I still wasn’t certain where I was, and my head felt put on crooked, as your head often does when you first wake up.

  “Cheer up,” she told me. “You’ll probably see the Queen today.” Then she frowned. She had thought of something that had nothing to do with beehives and early morning. “I wonder why people say cheer up instead of cheer down. Consider this, if you’re not cheerful you’re upset and if you’re upset then you should cheer down. Don’t you think?”

  “If you like,” I sighed. I wasn’t in the mood for arguing. I was missing my mother and father.

  “All right,” Miss Nancy Clancy decided. “From now on we both cheer down.” Before I had any chance to cheer down, two bees appeared at the doorway of the apartment. One carried a bead of royal jelly, the other a drop of water which looked like a jewel in the hive’s dim light. Nancy Clancy ran to collect both the jelly and the water in the cups. She handed both cups to me and I began to eat the jelly and drink the water, but slowly.

  “Come on, eat up!” she said. “Though that’s another ridiculous phrase of course. How can you eat up when the food travels down from your mouth to your stomach?” I was feeling better now and so I began to discuss the question with her.

  “You pick it up from the plate or the cup to eat it,” I explained.

  “Well in that case you can pick up but eat down. That’s what we’ll say from now on.”

  “You can say it. I won’t.”

  “All right,” she said, sniffing and turning her face away. “If you want to be as stupid as all other humans, you go ahead eating up. I’ll eat down and I’ll cheer down, and when you’re a hundred and twenty years like me, you’ll see I was right.”

  At this point of the argument Apis poked her head round the edge of the cell.

  “Good morning,” she said in her husky voice.

  “Good morning to you, faithful bee,” Nancy Clancy replied.

  “And what have you got to show to we?”

  “Well, if you both hurry we can see the Queen go by.”

  Nancy Clancy rushed me to the cell door and we looked down. Below us a beautiful bee, much bigger than Apis, much longer than Romeo the drone, was swaying slowly across the wall of honeycomb. Other bees, workers and servants, guards and fanning bees to keep her cool, crowded around her, touching her gently, fanning and fussing. She walked more gracefully than a racehorse or any other animal I had ever seen. Her waist was thinner than the waist on the models in the front window of Murphy’s dress shop, and her wings, which were no bigger than Apis’s wings, were folded over her back.

  “She’s on her way to lay eggs,” Apis explained. “But she might have a moment to meet you.”

  Apis left us, climbed down the wall, dragged two young fanning bees away from the Queen by their hind legs, and rushed into the empty space at the Queen’s side. We could see the Queen and Apis talking, touching each other gently with their feelers. Then Apis turned away and led the Queen up the wall towards us.

  I felt nervous and started combing my hair with my fingers. When Apis was close to us again she whispered, “If you talk in rhymes, Miss Clancy, I promise I’ll sting you.”

  At last the Queen stood at the door, her feelers swaying gracefully and her beautiful molten eyes looking at us. Apis coughed. “Her Majesty decided to come and visit you only because you aren’t good at climbing up and down the honeycomb.”

  “I’m all right at it,” Nancy Clancy muttered. She pointed to me. “But my friend isn’t yet accustomed to it.”

  Apis coughed again. “This, your Majesty, is Miss Nancy Clancy whom you already know, and this is Ned. Ned and Nancy, Queen Selma.”

  “What would you like me to say, you two?” Queen Selma asked in a slightly cracked voice.

  I was surprised to find she could talk just the same as Apis, and my mouth must have hung open for a second. The Queen noticed it, laughed, and began talking fast.

  “Oh yes,” she said, “my good friend Apis has taught me how to talk radio. I can say, Good morning, children, like Mrs Martin in Martin’s Corner. I can say, Hullo, white children! like the little black boy in The Search for the Golden Boomerang, or I can say G’day, kids like Dave in Dad and Dave. Which would you prefer to hear?”

  I was speechless as Selma rattled off the names of radio shows, but Miss Nancy Clancy was able to say, “I think I’d like to hear Good morning, children.”

  “All right
,” said the Queen. “Good morning, children!”

  “Good morning, Your Majesty,” Nancy Clancy sang, bowing as low as she could on the crooked floor.

  “Now,” said Queen Selma, looking at me with large black eyes, “I have to ask this young man some questions, grill him, get him to come clean. Miss Nancy Clancy tells me that when she was young there was a queen called Victoria who never laid any eggs. Is she still alive?”

  “No,” I said. “No, Queen Victoria died a long time ago.”

  “Of course,” Selma sniffed. “No one wants a queen who doesn’t lay eggs.”

  I thought it wouldn’t be polite to tell the beautiful Selma that humans never expected Queen Victoria to lay eggs.

  “Enjoy your stay then,” said Queen Selma. “And, as they say in Rick the Frontier Scout, I’m gonna head down that there canyon. Good morning.”

  She waved her feelers especially gracefully, turned and swayed away, and all the fanners and escort bees fell in at her side, marching sideways, keeping her company.

  6

  Selma Lays a Queen Egg

  Watching the queen go, Apis seemed thoughtful. If a bee can do such a thing as frown, I would have said she was frowning. Then she shook herself and turned towards me.

  “It’s time you learnt to get around the hive on your own,” she told me. I thought of the great wall of cells and apartments in which Nancy Clancy and I sat. I thought of all the other walls of beeswax that made up the hive. Did she really expect me to climb up and down them? Did royal jelly turn you into a hive climber?

  “Quite right,” Nancy Clancy said. “You can’t get round on Apis’s back all day. She has enough to do.”

  “Keep your elbows loose,” Apis advised me, wriggling her own front elbows. “Ready, Miss Clancy?”

  Miss Clancy said,

  “Lead on, brave bee

  I’ll climb each wall

  Never will Nancy Clancy fall.”

  “Sometimes I wish you would fall,” Apis remarked and stepped back from the door to let us climb out backwards. There was something about the way I backed out the door that made her chuckle.

  We seemed to be on a newly built part of the hive and all the apartments stood wide open. So I had to climb all spread out, like a crab. I kept feeling for places to put my feet and hands. In fact my hands sweated from the fear I was suffering. Helpfully, Apis called, “A little to the right with your left foot. That’s right. A little to the left with your right foot.”

  When you look at a honeycomb it seems so smooth, but I found that all over it there were tiny cracks where my hands and feet fitted. Within five minutes I began to feel more comfortable, climbing down that dim wall.

  “This way,” Apis called. “But watch out for the crowds. They don’t look where they’re going.”

  Soon we were amongst crowds of bees. I lost all sense of danger now and looked around me. Some bees were working on new cells. They seemed to take sheets of wax from the cracks in their armor, knead them into the shape they wanted with their front legs and feelers, cut them neatly with their mouths and put them in place to make a part of a wall. They were quick and they were neat and all their angles were right.

  “The wax!” I called to Apis. “The wax comes from the bodies of the bees?” I had never known that before.

  “Where did you think?” asked Nancy Clancy in her haughty way. “The wax factory?”

  “Look,” Apis called. “Below us. Queen Selma is laying.” I looked down, feeling a little giddy at first. All I could see was a great mass of bees. It would be a little time before I’d find out all the secrets of the hive, how the honey and pollen were stored, how the young were made.

  Queen Selma—I found out—surrounded by all her fanners and escorts, would lay many eggs a day in the early summer. Some of the eggs would grow into workers and others into drones like Romeo, the lovesick male bee we had met the day before.

  Soon each egg in its own cell would hatch and a little grub-like creature would lie there. Nursemaids fed it royal jelly for a few days and, when it began to change into a small insect, gave it plenty of pollen and honey and walled up the entrance to its cell. It wasn’t a thick wall they made to lock the babies in. It had holes in it to let the air through. The little insect would eat up all its supplies till it was a full-grown young bee. Then it would chew its way out of its cell. If it was a worker, it started work within a few days, and if a drone, it lay around and was fed as the drones always were.

  At the bottom of the wall where Apis and Nancy Clancy and I were climbing that morning were some strange cells that hung downwards and were shaped like ice-cream cones. I could tell that Selma’s escorts were trying to force her to lay eggs in them, and that she didn’t want to and tried to walk away from them. The escort bees however pushed her towards them, crowding her, making her back until the rear half of her body was inside one of the cone cells. When she had laid an egg in that cell, they forced her on to the next.

  “Why?” I asked Apis.

  “Well,” said Apis. She didn’t seem to want to tell me. “The eggs she’s laying there, in those cells … they’ll be raised as queens. Fed on a pure diet of royal jelly and brought up to rule. Selma doesn’t want to lay queen cells, no queen does.”

  “Why?” I persisted.

  “Because Selma’s frightened she might have to go away from the hive and leave it for some young and beautiful queen to take over.”

  I still hadn’t finished asking questions. “But are they making her lay queen eggs?”

  Apis kept quiet for half a minute, looking at me, still wondering if she should tell me. “Well,” she said at last, “a queen has a sort of sweetness all over her body, and when we touch the queen we taste the sweetness, and when we pass nectar or honey to each other, the sweetness is passed on. But when the hive gets crowded or the queen gets older, there isn’t enough queen sweetness to go around. And Selma’s getting old and Selma”—by now Apis was whispering—“Selma doesn’t have enough sweetness. And so she’s been forced to lay eggs in those cells, the queen cells. Do you understand that?”

  I nodded.

  “Then keep it a secret,” she warned me. “In about seventeen days one of those new queens will be ready to be born. And then everything will be turned upside down.”

  I got so brave on that wall that after a time I was able to look over my shoulder and see what was happening on the wall opposite ours. I noticed that already workers were flying into the hive from the outside world carrying pollen in the baskets on their back legs and nectar in their mouths. When they landed, young bees rushed up to them, unpacked the pollen from the baskets, and rushed to store it in one or another of the cells. Other young bees took the nectar from them and stretched it out on their long tongues and packed it in one cell and then in another, helping it to dry and become honey. But the royal jelly which Selma and the babies were fed was never stored in cells. The bees carried it in their bodies and when they needed it for feeding the Queen or the young, there it would suddenly be, a golden drop on the end of their tongues.

  I watched the young workers walling up any cells that were full of honey, molding and cutting the wax, molding and cutting quickly. Apis in turn watched me. “Oh yes,” she said, “they work hard.”

  I wondered why Apis didn’t have to work as hard as they did. Because she taught the Queen to speak as they do on the radio? Or because she had visitors? Nancy Clancy and me.

  “Don’t look now,” shouted Nancy Clancy,

  “But right below

  Is Razzle-

  Dazzle Basil.”

  “The idiot!” said Apis.

  In a space inside the front door, a group of drones was meeting in a bunch. They were husky fellows and I noticed their large eyes that took up almost all their head. One of them stood apart from the others and seemed to be making a speech. When he saw us he began to speak in English, as if to impress us.

  “And, gentlemen, I would like to draw your attention to our two young visitors
from the outside world. I would like in their presence to ask, are our so-called sisters, the so-called workers, going to throw us out of the hive again this autumn? Are they going to do it in front of the eyes of two strangers from the outside world, two such persons as those climbing on the comb there? Are they really going to shock those young eyes by hurling us, sad, solitary, sopping and starving, out into a forest full of enemies? When we try to return, are they going to hurl us once more away from the door and tell us there is no room or food for us? Does the race of humans treat each other like that? Do they behave like that in Martin’s Corner or Rick the Frontier Scout? I say that we belong here as much as the workers, as much even as the Queen!”

  This idea appealed to the drones. They waved their feelers at Basil, applauding him.

  “My cry,” said Basil, “is Power to the Drones!”

  This really made them crazy. Some of them fell over with excitement.

  “Do you really throw them out when the rains come in the autumn?” I asked Apis.

  She tossed her head. “Basil’s an idiot,” she said again. Then, “Do you want to come out with me?”

  Nancy Clancy answered for both of us. “Certainly we want to go out, bee, to gather nectar, the basis of hon-ey.”

  Straight away, Apis let go of the wall and hovered near Nancy and me, flapping her wings up and down but floating, not moving forward. “Jump on!” she yelled. “And once again, Miss Clancy, no hair pulling!”

  7

  Giving Romeo the Hive-Smell

  We flew out into the clear day, past the guards and the fanners at the door. Circling, we saw the river and flew over the cow paddocks. I kept thinking that the cows would be so surprised to see me, Ned, a fourth grader, flying overhead in a valley in which few planes were ever seen. But they kept their heads down, eating grass in the strange bunch-lipped way cows have.

  We arrived amongst a stand of spotted gum trees. They were in blossom, and thousands of bees were working all around us. In the fork of one of the trees, Apis set us down. From this place, we could see a barge in the river carrying timber, and a man fishing from a row-boat. Then Apis went to work with the other bees.