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I was eager to do anything to get back on his good side. I raced to Granny’s desk and pulled out a piece of her fancy stationery, and practically bowed as I offered it to him.
“Listen,” he said, cupping his ear and cocking his head toward the buzz. “It’s high-pitched,” Grandpa said. “It’s in distress. Do you see it?”
I followed the sound until I saw the bee gliding in a wobbly circle around the room, looking for a way out, until it rested on the dining room window facing the deck.
“There!” I pointed.
Grandpa crept softly toward it, hiding the jar behind his back. When he was directly behind the bee, he reached up and imprisoned it in one swift motion. With his free hand, he slipped the paper between the window and the mouth of the jar, forming a temporary lid. He stepped away, holding the trap in his hands, and the bee crawled up the glass, tapping the inside of the jar with its antennae.
“Okay, come get the door for me,” he said.
We stepped outside together, and instead of releasing the bee, Grandpa sat on the back step and patted the space next to him, signaling me to sit near.
“Hold out your arm.”
He tilted the jar as if he was going to release the bee onto my forearm. I jerked my hand back.
“It’s going to sting me!” I wailed.
He sighed like he was summoning all his patience, and then turned to me again.
“Bees won’t hurt you if you don’t hurt them.”
Most of my information about bees came from cartoons in which bees always traveled in bloodthirsty swarms terrorizing all manner of people, coyotes, pigs and rabbits. I mentioned this to Grandpa.
“That’s make-believe,” he said. “Honeybees don’t go on the attack. They will only sting to defend their home. They know that if they sting they will die, so they’ll give you plenty of warnings first.”
Grandpa reached for my arm again, but I tucked it behind my back, still uncertain. The bee was now incensed, banging into the walls of its glass prison. Grandpa set the jar down and spoke to me slowly and carefully.
“Bees can talk, but not with words. You need to watch how they behave to understand their language. For example,” he said, lifting a finger to numerate his points. “If you open a hive and hear a soft chewing sound, that means the bees are busy and happy. If you hear a roar, that means they are upset about something.”
I watched the bee get more frantic by the second.
“Two,” he said, holding up a second finger. “Bees will ask you to back away from the hive by head-butting you. It’s a polite warning to step away so they don’t have to sting you.”
I was starting to understand that Grandpa might know bees in a different way than everybody else. He spent every day with them, so he probably could tell what they were thinking. But that didn’t mean that I wanted a bee to crawl on me. I trusted Grandpa wouldn’t do anything to hurt me, but I couldn’t say the same for the trapped bee, who by the looks of things was now totally, royally, pissed. He reached for the jar again and brought it over to me. I shook my head no.
“You mustn’t be afraid around bees,” he said. “They can sense fear, and it will make them scared, too. But if you are calm, they will stay calm.”
“I’m still scared,” I whispered.
“The bee is more frightened of you,” he said. “Can you imagine how scary it is to be this small in a world that is so big?”
He was right, I wouldn’t want to change places with a bee. A little bit of my trepidation melted knowing the bee was also scared. I knew I wouldn’t hurt it, but the bee couldn’t know that for sure. I stretched my arm out again, ever so gently.
“You ready?”
I nodded as I watched the bee fall onto its back inside the jar, its six legs scrabbling to find footing.
“Bees are sensitive, so no sudden movements, and no loud noises, okay? You must always move slowly and quietly around bees to make them feel safe.”
I promised to hold still, an easy pact because I was too terrified to move. I tried to summon calming thoughts, but it was impossible to do on command. Grandpa tapped the jar on the underside of my wrist, and the bee tumbled out. It stood still as I held my breath, then it took a few tentative steps.
“Tickles,” I whispered. This close, I could see that a honeybee’s body was a miracle of miniature interlocking parts, like the insides of a watch. Its antennae, two L-shaped sticks that swiveled in sockets on its forehead between its eyes, searched the air and tapped on my skin, reminding me of a person without sight using a cane to get a mental picture of a place.
“What’s it doing?”
“Checking you out,” Grandpa said. “A bee’s antennae can smell, feel and taste.”
Imagine that. Having a body part that is a nose, fingertip and tongue together. As the bee got used to me, I got used to it. Grandpa was right. This small insect was not my enemy. I carefully lifted my arm until I could see into its eyes, shaped like two glossy black commas on the side of its head. Fear gave way to fascination as I studied how it was put together, so small, so perfect.
Veins crisscrossed its shimmering wings. It was furry, and its abdomen expanded and contracted with each breath. I looked closer at the stripes, and noticed that the orange bands had small hairs and the black ones were slick. The bee’s legs tapered to tiny hooks, and it was now using its front two pair to stroke its antennae. Cleaning or scratching them, I guessed.
“What do you think?” Grandpa asked.
“Can I keep it?”
“’Fraid not. It will die of loneliness if you separate it from its hive.”
I was beginning to understand that bees have emotions, like people, and like people they live in families where they feel safe and loved. They will lose their spirit if they don’t have the security of their hive mates. I was about to ask if we should return this bee to its hive when it parted its mandibles and unfurled a long red tongue.
“It’s going to bite me!” I shrieked.
“Shhhh, hold still,” Grandpa whispered. The bee tasted my arm tentatively, realized that I was not a flower and recoiled its tongue. The bee put its hind end in the air and fanned its wings so rapidly that I could feel a vibration on my skin. Then it lifted off and was gone.
Grandpa stood, reached for my hand and pulled me to my feet.
“Meredith, never kill something unless you are going to eat it.”
I gave him my word.
That night when I got under the sheets, Mom was already snoring. I cleared my throat hoping that would wake her, and when that didn’t work, I jiggled the bed, just a little bit.
“Hmmmm?”
“Hey, Mom.”
She grunted and turned toward me with eyes closed. “What?”
“Did you know bees die after they sting?”
“Shhhh. You’ll wake your brother.”
I lowered my voice and whispered.
“Their guts come out with the stinger.”
“That’s nice.”
Mom rolled me away from her, then tucked her knees under mine and drew me to her stomach. I was about to brag about picking up a bee with my bare hands, but I felt her legs twitch and realized that she had fallen back asleep.
I lay there, my mind swimming with new questions about bees. Grandpa had just cracked open a portal to a secret microcosmos in our backyard, and now that I knew bees lived in families, I wanted to know everything about them. Which bees are the parents? How many bees in one family? How do they remember which hive they live in? What does it look like inside a beehive? Do they sleep at night? How do they make honey in there?
Grandpa had proven to me that I could get close to a honeybee without getting stung. I was coming around to the opinion that fearsome animals and insects rarely live up to the reputations foisted on them by circuses and monster movies. Grandpa was teaching Matthew and me that all creatures were sacred, with their own inner emotional lives. As part of our education, after dinner each night we climbed into the recliner with Grandpa to watch his favorite nature shows. I’d been astonished to watch male lions play with their cubs, aquarium octopuses reach from the water to embrace their human handlers, or elephants dig stairs leading out of a deep mudhole so a drowning baby could clamber to safety. So it made me wonder, what if bees were compassionate like that, and what if I could teach myself how to see it? As a girl needing to know that love existed naturally all around her, it was thrilling to realize that I didn’t have to wait for Wild Kingdom or Jacques Cousteau to be reassured. The mysteries of the animal kingdom were within my reach, anytime I wanted. That night when I went to bed, the confines of our small room expanded ever so slightly. I had found one good thing—a reason how California might make me happy.
I awoke to the percolator bubbling on top of the stove, so I knew my grandparents were up. I tiptoed down the hall and pushed open their bedroom door. Granny was reading aloud to Grandpa from the Monterey Herald while he looked at the photos in a beekeeping magazine called Gleanings in Bee Culture. On weekends, they liked to ease into the day. I climbed onto their small four-poster bed, wedged myself in between them and asked Grandpa if he could show me his beehives.
“Whoa, Nelly,” Grandpa said, putting down his magazine. “I haven’t had my think-juice yet.”
“Excellent point,” Granny said. “Sounds like the coffee’s done, Franklin.”
Grandpa dutifully threw back the covers and slid his feet into slippers, and I heard his joints crack as he pushed himself upright. I sighed dramatically, but nobody acknowledged it. I was in for a long wait. On Saturdays and Sundays they savored several cups of coffee in bed, as Granny curated the newspaper front to back, reading aloud particularly important paragraphs to Grandpa, enhanced by her commentary. Grandpa would often get weary at a certain point, but he never complained. Instead, he would distract her by gripping sections of the paper with his strong toes and dropping the pages on her lap. Granny thought it was repulsive; Grandpa thought it was a riot.
I wandered outside and spotted Matthew lifting his chubby leg and stomping on something near the vegetable garden. When I got closer, I could see that he was killing snails. He smiled when he saw me approach, and lifted his shoe to display the slimy puddle he’d made on the ground. He was helping Grandpa, who’d shown him how to hunt the marauders who ate his crops. Snails and gophers were the only exceptions to Grandpa’s no-kill rule.
“Gross,” I said, slightly unnerved by how much my brother was enjoying himself.
He held a snail between a thumb and forefinger and dropped it on the ground.
“You do it,” he commanded.
I reached for his hand instead. “Come on, I have another job for you.”
His eyes widened, and he bounced alongside me as I walked him toward the honey bus. There was about a foot and a half of clearance under the chassis. If we crawled underneath, we could hopefully find a rusted-out hole or some type of entry and maybe climb through to get inside the bus. I’d already tried pushing all the windows, and had inserted all manner of sticks and screwdrivers and butter knives inside the opening where the back door handle used to be, hoping to pop the lock. This was my last idea. I figured I’d need Matthew if we found an opening too small for me.
I slid under first on my back, as it was more Matthew’s nature to see if something was safe before trying it. He watched my legs disappear and waited for my report. A tangle of weeds blocked my view of the undercarriage, so I used a snow angel technique to knock them down. I pressed here and there on the bus floor with my foot to test for weak spots. The metal was rusty, but solid. I kicked at the exhaust pipe, and it rattled some, showering me in fine dirt. I scooted toward the front of the bus, and bumped into a discarded tire. Other than that, the only thing I found under the bus was a graveyard of corroded five-gallon Wesson Oil cans.
I gave up searching and rested for a moment on my back, trying to think. There had to be a solution that I was overlooking. Matthew called out to me, and when I turned to look over my shoulder, I saw him on his hands and knees peering under the bus. Then two legs appeared and framed my brother.
“What’s so interesting under there?” I heard Grandpa ask my brother.
“Mare-miss,” my brother said, pointing. His tongue still hadn’t mastered my three-syllable name.
Grandpa got down on his belly next to Matthew, and now both of them were staring. I held still because I felt like I had just been caught doing something, not anything bad, just something slightly embarrassing.
“Whatcha doing under there?”
“Trying to get in.”
“Don’t you know the door’s up here?”
“It’s locked.”
“To keep little kids out.”
Grandpa reached under the bus and crooked his finger, signaling me to come to him. I scrabbled out, and as he helped me to my feet, he brushed the dirt from my back and plucked off the burrs. Whatever was in the bus would have to wait. Until I got bigger, whenever that was. The only people admitted entry were Grandpa’s friends, so I imagined I would have to wait until I was an adult, which might as well be never.
“I thought you wanted to see the bees,” Grandpa said.
His counteroffer was exquisitely played, and I perked up immediately. As my part of the deal, I had to come inside for breakfast first.
Belly properly filled with pancakes, I followed Grandpa to the back fence, where he kept a row of six beehives. The sun was shining on the slit entrances at the base of the hives, illuminating the landing boards where the bees were flitting in and out. A small cloud of bees hovered before each hive, all the foragers waiting for a clear shot to get back inside. I noticed that the bees were buzzing in a different way than the one we caught in the house; their sound didn’t have the urgency of a shout, it was more contented and calm like a person humming a song. I stood in front of the right-most hive, about a foot away from the entrance so I could watch them. I felt Grandpa’s hand on my shoulder.
“Don’t stand there,” he said. “See what’s happening behind you?”
I turned and saw a traffic jam of bees jiggling in the air, unwilling to go around me to get into the hive. The backup was growing by the second.
“You’re in their flight path,” he said, guiding me to the side of the hive. As soon as I stepped out of the way, the clot of waiting bees whooshed in a comet back to their hive. I knelt down next to the hive so I was eye level with the bees. One by one they marched to the entrance, cleaned their antennae, then crouched and launched like a jet fighter.
“What do you see?”
“Lots of bees coming and going,” I said.
“Look closer.”
I did, and saw the same thing. Bees flying in. Bees flying out. So many it was hard to keep my eye on one bee at a time. Grandpa took a comb out of his back pocket and whisked it through his hair in three practiced swipes, top and sides, waiting for me to see whatever it was I was supposed to see. Then he pointed at the landing board. “Yellow!” he announced.
All I saw were bees.
“There’s orange! Gray! Yellow again!”
And then I saw it. Some of the returning bees had something stuck to their back legs. Every fifth or sixth honeybee that returned waddled in carrying small balls like the pills that collect on a favorite sweater, some loads no bigger than the head of a pin, others the size of a lentil, so large the bee strained under the weight.
“What is it?”
“Pollen. From flowers. The color tells you which flower they came from. Tan is from the almond tree. Gray is the blackberries. Orange is poppy. Yellow is mustard, most likely.”
“What’s it for?”
“Bee bread.”
Now he was just messing with me. Bees can’t bake bread. All they make is honey. Everybody knew that.
“Grandpa!”
“What? You don’t believe me?”
“No.”
“Suit yourself. Bees mix the pollen with a little spit and nectar and feed it to their babies. Bee bread.”
It made some sense, but it was just too weird. I waited for him to giggle at his own joke, but he kept a straight face. Grandpa had told the truth when he said it was safe to let a bee crawl on me, so I guessed he knew what pollen was for. For the moment, I played along.
“They’re making bread in there?”
“They push the pollen off their legs, chew it with nectar and store it in the honeycomb.”
“Can I see?”
