the book closed over my finger.
“Do you know where we might take some refreshment?” she asked with a touch of desperation.
I looked to see where I was, then pointed towards the distant rise. “You see that tower there? Keep going past it and you'll come to an hotel. I'm sure they'll have ices and tea.”
The entire group thanked me and marched away, their boots thudding on the bare path like so many cattle hooves. I shook my head and resumed my solitary way.
The massacre of the males is a yearly occurrence in the hive-“Delivering over to executioners pale the lazy yawning drone.” When the days close in and the last nectar ceases, the workers cast their gaze upon the drones, whom they have willingly fed and cosseted all the year long, but who are now only a burden on the food reserves, a threat to the future of the hive. So the females rise against the useless males and exterminate them every one, viciously ripping their former charges to pieces and driving any survivors out into the cold.
The female is generally the more practical member of any species.
What might we say of the intelligence of bees? On the one hand, it beggars the imagination that an entire species would permit itself to be enslaved, penned up, pushed about, and systematically pillaged for the hard-fought product of a year's labours.
Yet is this so remarkably different from the majority of human workers? Are they not enslaved to the coal face or the office desk, told where to go and what to do by forces outside their control? Do not the government and those who control prices in the market-place systematically rob human workers of all but a thin measure of the year's earnings?
I laughed aloud at this last paragraph, only to be startled by yet another voice, this one nearly on top of me.
“Good day, madam.”
I jolted to a stop and looked at the man who had addressed me, a dapper figure with pure white hair underneath the straw boater he was lifting in greeting.
“Hullo,” I answered.
“I wonder if you might know the shortest path to the Tiger Inn, in East Dean? I am supposed-”
“There,” I said, pointing repressively. This fashion for countryside rambles looked to have severe drawbacks, particularly at this time of year.
When the white-haired gentleman had left, I checked my position again and found that I had just about run out of cliff-side path: Below me lay Eastbourne with its frothy pier-top pleasure palace and sea-front hotels. Its long curve of shingle beach was thick with holiday-makers and umbrellas, the waves dark with splashing bodies large and small.
Less than five miles up the coast from that frivolous piece of architecture, on a sunny September morning 858 years before, half a thousand ships had come to shore, carrying a king, a flag, and enough men and horses to seize England's future.
I glanced around me warily, and abandoned the public footpaths for the pastures of sheep and gorse, reading in solitary contentment until a shadow fell upon the page: My feet had brought me home. I let myself through the gate, to stand beneath trees heavy with summer fruit; the air was thick with fragrance, and with the throb of activity from the hives. Lulu's bicycle still leant on the wall near by the kitchen door, so I cleared away some rotting apples and settled down with my back against a tree.
Beekeeping would appear to be a hobby for the tin-pot god, the man who seeks to keep an entire race under his control. In point of fact, a mere human has little control over bees: He shelters them, he takes their honey, he drives away pests, but in the end, he merely hopes for the best.
A bee has no loyalty to the keeper, only to the hive; no commitment to the place, only to the community. A queen has no conversation for her human counterpart, and she or any other bee will attack the human protector if he makes a gesture that can be read as threat.
Despite millennia of close history, in the end, the best a beekeeper can hope for is that he be ignored by his bees.
In the hive, there can be but one ruler. The queen (Virgil, here, got it wrong, and imagined a bee king) is permitted a sole outing in her long life, one brief foray into the blue heights. She chooses a day of singular warmth and clarity, and sings her anticipation, stirring the hive into a state of excitement before she finally launches herself into the sky, pulling the males after her like the tail of a comet. Only the fastest can catch the queen, with her long wings and great strength, which ensures the vigour of their future progeny.
Then she returns to her hive where, if the beekeeper has his way, she spends the remainder of her days, never to fly, never to use her wings, never to see the sky again.
When one watches that queen, dutifully planting her eggs in the cells prepared for them, surrounded at every moment by attentive workers, fed and cleaned and urged to ever greater production, one can only wonder: Does she remember? Does some part of that mind live forever in the soaring blue, inhabiting freedom in the way a prisoner will imagine a rich meal with such detail his mouth waters? Or does the endless song of the hive fill her mind, compensating for the drudgery of her lot?
Perhaps that freedom is why the queen is the hive's one true warrior, jealously guarding her position against her unborn rivals until the regal powers wane, her production falters.
But a queen does not die of old age. If she does not fall in royal battle, or of the cold, her daughters will eventually turn against her. They gather, hundreds of them, to surround her in a living mass, smothering her and crushing her. And when they have finished, they discard her lifeless body and begin the business of raising up another queen.
The queen is dead, long live the queen.
That is the way of the hive.
My attention was caught here by motion at the top of the book: a bee, come to explore the possibilities of the printed page. Or more likely, taking advantage of a temporary resting place, for her leg sacs bulged with pollen, a load that the most doughty of aeronauts might reconsider. She walked along the blue binding, as heedless of me as I was of the sky overhead; reaching the spine, she gathered herself and flashed off in the direction of the white Langstroth box thirty feet away, in the shade of Mrs Hudson's beloved Cox's Orange Pippin.
I pocketed the book and followed the bee.
Holmes had situated the hive to be warmed by the morning sun but shaded by the apple tree during the afternoon. I knelt nearby, avoiding a wasp that was working at a fallen apple, and watched the bees come and go.
The Langstroth hive was a wooden structure roughly twenty inches on a side. On the outside it was a stack of plain, whitewashed boxes, but within lay a technological marvel of precise measurements and moving parts, all of them aimed at providing the bees with such perfect surroundings, they would stay put and work. One hive could produce hundreds of pounds of honey, under the right conditions, from bees that would be just as pleased with a hollow tree.
At the bottom front of the box was a long entrance slit with a porch on which the workers landed. Or, as on this hot day, stood facing the outer world while whirring their wings enthusiastically-this was the draught that Holmes had written about, air pushed through the hive to exit, hotter and damper than it had entered, through vents at the upper back. The sound this made struck the neophyte as a warning of high danger, as if the hive was about to erupt in fury and search for a human target for its wrath.
I knew Holmes' bees well enough, however, to hear that this was merely the roar of a hard-working hive, putting away its wealth, one minuscule drop at a time-until the beekeeper ripped off the top of their universe and pillaged the community's resources for his own savage needs.
One queen; a handful of males who spent their lives in toil-free luxury awaiting a call to shoot skyward in a mating flight; and thousand upon thousand of hard-labouring females, who moved up the ranks from nursery attendants to nectar-gatherers before their brief lives were spent. An organic machine, entirely designed to provide for the next generation.
Which when one thinks about it, is pretty much what all creatures are designed for.
And now, yet again, my thoughts had circled around to Damian Adler and his young daughter. In irritation, I rose and brushed off my knees: At last, Lulu's bicycle had gone.
I used my key on the French doors from the terrace-as Lulu had noted, it was idiosyncratic for rural dwellers to lock a house with such care, but Holmes and I never knew when London would follow us home. In the kitchen,
