The Keeper of the Bees/Chapter 10
Because of God
THE next time Jamie answered the telephone he got his call to the hospital. At two o’clock the following day he again boarded the trolley for the city and with no difficulty whatever made his way to one of its largest hospitals. Almost immediately he was shown to the room of the Bee Master, a big room where the sun shone in and the wind played through and the air was tinged with the perfume from a bowl of yellow roses. The instant Jamie saw those roses he realized that if they were not from the bush that grew beside Margaret Cameron’s door, they were from some other bush that belonged to the identical family and species. The yellow of the roses, the faint sweetness of their perfume, was in his nostrils as he rounded the screen by the bedside and stood facing the Bee Master.
Exactly what he had expected to see, he did not know. What he did see almost broke his heart. The man whom he had supported to the davenport, whom he had helped to the ambulance, had been ill; he had been in a sweat of agony; but he had been a man alive, with a chance for life manifest by the strength of his frame, the firmness of his muscles, the light in his eyes. It seemed to Jamie that the frame stretched on the bed before him was not tenanted by life, but by a spirit, a spirit that might flicker out and make its passing at any minute. There was not much strength left in the white hand that reached out to him. The voice that greeted him was scarcely above a whisper. The eyes that searched his face and rested on him were tired almost beyond endurance.
To cover his shock, his sense of pity, Jamie drew up a chair and began to talk about the thing he knew would be of most concern to the Bee Master.
“First of all,” he said, “I must tell you that I believe I’m bee immune. I’ve worn your coat and used the mint and the cinnamon pinks and the Madonna lilies prescribed by your partner, and they have been effective even above the dressings I’m carrying on my side. I can fill the water pans and gauge the right amount of salt and go past any of the hives with safety. I haven’t had much length of time to study, but in so far as I know, your bees are flourishing. Your partner sends you word that they are all right, and the youngster really seems to know.”
“Certainly,” said the Bee Master, “my partner does know. My partner knows bees rarely and finely well, even to performing the delicate operation of clipping the wings of a Queen.”
“All right, then,” said Jamie, “you can take it that the bees are fine. Margaret Cameron sends her love and her assurance that your flowers are flourishing, and I can tell you that your house is being cared for lovingly. I lock it carefully if I leave it, and I live in it sympathetically as behooves a man when he treads on antique rugs and touches antique furniture. You will find everything exactly as you left it when you come home again.”
The Bee Master smiled. “I divined that would be the case when I hailed you from the road,” he said. “You appealed to me, even in that hour of agony, as a man of fine perceptions and right instincts. I knew that I would be safe in leaving even my most cherished possessions with you. I had not any sense that you were a stranger. You seemed to me rather an instrument that had been sent to serve my dire necessity. And the little Scout? My little partner?”
“Your little partner comes to the garden, but I doubt if the garden is much of a garden without you. There are two things that I have to tell you.”
Jamie dipped in his pocket and produced the price of the hot dog and the strawberry pop and laid the coins in the outstretched hands of the Bee Master.
“My instructions,” he said, “were to have the bun fried, the hot dogs split and cooked crisp. The onions were to be browned. The exact amount of mustard was specified. I was to superintend the construction of that hot dog personally and with care. I’ll go now and see that it is made according to specifications, if you think Doctor Grayson would not cane me.”
The Bee Master smiled. He closed his fingers over the money, the identical pieces that his little partner had counted out for him.
“That money was carefully selected,” said Jamie, “from a collection of buttons and buckles and dice and moonstones, and it happened to just about clean out the treasury. There wasn’t much left. But your partner won a bet that was going to bring in two bits, so bankruptcy is not looming. I happened to be a witness to the winning of the bet. An accurately directed stream of saliva hit a bumblebee at about ten paces and knocked it off a red creeper.”
A dry chuckle shook the frame of the Bee Master.
“Good work!” he said, heartily. “My partner can be depended upon to hit ’most anything that happens to be the mark that’s aimed at.”
“And your partner,” said Jamie, “has got a heart that’s filled with love for you, love so deep and of such a nature that I truly believe that the offer to give a right hand that would be needed in riding a horse, in paddling a boat, in managing the Scouts, nevertheless, the offer freely and honestly made, of that same right hand in your behalf if it would ease the pain and bring you home safe and well.” The Bee Master shut his eyes tight and lay there fingering the dime and the two nickels. By and by he smiled stiffly at Jamie.
“You need not doubt the loyalty or the sincerity of that offer,” he said. “And you need not doubt that it would have been heroically fulfilled had necessity arisen. And you need not doubt, on my part, that in all the world there is no one left half so dear to me as the little fellow. One of the reasons I’d like to live is that I might go on further in what I am trying to teach that particular youngster about the keeping of bees and, incidentally, about the keeping of a soul that I happen to believe is immortal. Anything my partner has gotten from me will do no damage. In fact, I have a feeling that the damaging things of this world are going to go past a mind that is fully occupied with something legitimate and constructive. Don’t tell my partner that I dare not have the hot dog or the strawberry pop. Say that I am mighty thankful to be remembered. Give my love, and if you feel that I would not be too much of a shock, next time bring the little fellow along.”
“I’d be only too glad,” said Jamie. “And now, can you give me any instructions before I go? Doctor Grayson specified that I must stay only a few minutes.”
“I think there is nothing but to go on as you are. I’d be glad if you would put in your spare time among the bee books. It would help you with your job. It might interest you to an extent that would carry you on during the time of my weakness, provided your own strength is sufficient. Grayson wants to see you in his office here in the hospital before you go, and if you will pull out that drawer there on the left and put the envelope in it in your pocket, that will afford you at least some compensation for what you have done for me in easing my mind about my home and my belongings and my business. Tell Margaret that they will not allow me to write, but that I love the roses she sends and her notes are much company to me. Tell her I hope she will continue to indulge an old man until, let’s say until I reach home again, since I possibly have some chance. I will say good-bye now. I want you to know that I am thinking about you almost constantly in my waking hours. Be sure to see Grayson. He is mighty fine. He might be able to suggest something that would make you less white and help you to gather strength. Now it’s good-bye.”
“Good-bye,” said Jamie, “and rest easy. Among us, Margaret Cameron, the little Scout, and myself, we can manage the bees. There is no difficulty whatever about the flowers and the trees. I’ve already got that routine.”
Then Jamie went down and found the office of Doctor Grayson, and half an hour later he went home with a big bundle of antiseptic dressings and without a drop of medicine. He had been advised to follow his impulses. If his body cried out for cold salt water, to indulge it. If the demand was to lie in the sand in the sun, to go ahead.
“Since a year of the best care they could give you at one of our finest government hospitals didn’t budge your trouble, try doing exactly what Nature tells you she wants you to do,” said the doctor, “and see what result you get from that. I am not sure but salt water and sunshine and clean air are not the best doctors in all the world, anyway.”
In the office Jamie sat on a bench to rest a few minutes and decide what he would do next. He was thankful for the dressings because he had not known exactly what would be the best thing to use. The doctors and nurses had done what they pleased to him, but he had not known very much about what they were doing. Now he would have the assurance that what he was using could at least do no damage.
He thought about some necessaries he wanted and he wondered if the envelope contained enough to replace the sum he had borrowed for a ring and the marriage license, and so he opened it. Then he sat in dumbfounded amazement. It would not be a wise thing to go back and enter protest in the room of the sick man. He counted up the days that he had been on the job in the garden. He figured that he had had his room and his board and the use of the clothing he required, but it was not right and it was not reasonable that he should be paid any such sum as that envelope contained for what he had done. He sat there wondering if men all over the country for common day labour were being paid any such sum as that. He felt the money between his fingers. He spread it out before his eyes. He studied it searchingly. He could replace what he had borrowed and he could spend the same sum two or three times over, for only a few days of the protection of his presence about the bee garden.
That was practically what his services had amounted to. He had kept the house open. He had given it the effect of someone on the job. He put the money in his pocket—in a pocket where he could slip his hand to it and feel it. He left the hospital and went on the street, and still he kept fingering that money. If a sick man could earn that much merely by "sticking around," as the little Scout had expressed it, what could he not do if he were well? Doctor Grayson had said that salt water and sunshine and clean air might possibly be the best doctors. Very well, then, he had the Pacific Ocean full of salt water. He had the whole sky full of sunshine. He had air absolutely dustless and clean wafting softly from the ocean every hour of every day, coming all the way from China. If there were dust in the air he breathed, Jamie reflected that it would have to be star dust.
So he squared his shoulders and with one hand he felt the money, with the other he felt his breast. He touched it deliberately, as probingly as he could through his clothing, and he discovered that since he had recovered from the strain of his tramp, it was not quite so tender as it had been. If he could earn money like that, if he had a garden of wonder to work in, if he could earn the Bee Master’s confidence, if he could daily make worth-while friends, if he had a wife, if there were going to be a child to bear his name, what was the use in dying? There might be something very well worth while that he could do in the world. At any rate, he could get an unlimited supply of interesting work and interesting amusement out of the bee garden and the little Scout.
So Jamie went to several stores and bought some things he needed with the assurance of a man who has the price in his pocket. Then he went home and for the first time in two years he changed his occupation; he was thinking about life instead of death.
He put away the things that he had bought and then headed straight toward the bench under the jacqueranda at the top of the blue garden. He found on the bench, curled up like a kitten, the little Scout sound asleep. In an effort to step lightly that he might not disturb the child, his foot turned on a stone of the border that had rolled from place and the slight grinding awakened the little Scout. Instantly the youngster was up, smiling ingratiatingly, and stretching two sleep-misted eyes to the widest extent in an effort to prove that sleep had not touched them since the previous night, at any rate.
In further effort to prove that a Scout Master was always awake and fit, the youngster stepped forward and inquired brusquely: “Now what shall we do?” Jamie sat down on the bench and drew the little Scout down beside him.
“I’m tired,” he said. “I’ve been in to visit the Bee Master and he is feeling fine. He sent you his love and he was very much pleased with your gift, and some day soon he wants you to come to see him.”
The little Scout nodded in acquiescence.
“But if you’re tired, what can we do?”
Jamie smiled.
“Must you have something active and vigorous to do every waking minute of your life?” he inquired. “Can’t you occasionally sit down and rest and commune with your soul? If you are so very anxious to do something, let me make a suggestion. I have everything to learn about bees that you already know. How would it work, if you have an hour to spare, to spend it on my education?”
The little Scout studied Jamie intently.“You mean that you want me to wise you up on all I know about bees, when there’s all the Bee Master’s books in there on the shelf to learn from?”
“But didn’t the Bee Master study out a world of things for himself? Didn’t he know enough to fill a book of things that he had figured out in a lifetime of experience with the bees? Maybe some of it was original with him. Maybe you know things that are not in the books.”
The little Scout chuckled.
“Well, there’s a good many things that are not in the books that we would like to know. Somebody’s got to do a lot more studying about bees before everybody knows everything there is to know.”
“Well,” said Jamie, “suppose you begin wherever your fancy strikes you and tell me what you think I should know about bees.”
The little Scout leaned forward, laid a pair of hands, not so clean as usual, palm to palm and dropped them between a pair of knees that gave evidence of active service in recent contact with the earth. Then suddenly an intent little face with eyes of deep introspection was turned to Jamie.
"Guess,” said the little Scout, “guess the first question I ever asked the Bee Master about bees?”
“Why do you keep bees?!” suggested Jamie.
Slowly the little tan and brown head moved in negation.
“Nope! You’re all wet!” said the little Scout. “You’re not even warm! First question I ever asked was, ‘Why is the bee garden blue?’ And I’ll have to tell you the answer because you would never guess it in a thousand years. The answer is, ‘Because of God.’”
Jamie’s face betrayed the astonishment he felt. His brow wrinkled in thought; his eyes narrowed. He stared at the little Scout and repeated softly: “Because of God’?"
“Yes,” said the little Scout. “That’s what makes bees so interesting. About half the things you’ll have to learn are because of God, and why the bee garden is blue is the very first thing. Now, you listen and I’ll tell you the reason.”
With uplifted hand to caution silence, slowly and deliberately, the little Scout repeated the explanation that had been given to the first question concerning bees.
“The bee garden is blue because blue is the perfect colour’ and bees are the most perfect of any insect in the way they live, and the most valuable on account of the work they do, and so blue would be the colour they love best, and it is! If you don’t believe it, watch them. And because why—the nearest we come to a perfect insect loves a perfect colour best, why, that’s because God made them as they are!”
The little Scout looked hard at Jamie and Jamie’s face was noncommittal.
“I guess you don’t get it," ventured the youngster. “Well, wait a minute and you will. The first thing you’ve got to learn is some figures. Because you are big and maybe been to college, you ought to learn ’em if I can. For one thing, there’s four thousand five hundred different kinds of wild bees. That’s one thing for you to remember. Another thing is that one hundred thousand kinds of plants would not live any more if all these bees were blown away or burned up or something, because, you see, a plant has to grow where the wind carries its seed or a bird or a squirrel sows it, and if one plant happens to be a male and another happens to be a female, they can’t get up and walk to each other and do their courting and make their seeds come good, now can they? So they have to have something to carry the pollen back and forth to make the good seed.
"Now, here’s something to remember about a bee itself—say a worker bee, because it would be the one that would carry the pollen. First you can remember that in every one of the little tubes on its nose a worker has got five thousand smell hollows, so it is no wonder it can pick you out if you got a scent about you that isn’t right. Then, a worker bee has got six thousand eyes on each side of its head so it can see the flowers that it wants to get the pollen and the nectar from. And a worker bee has got two stomachs, a little one more inside for itself, and a way bigger one more on the outside for the hive. Back on its abdomen every worker bee has got four pockets to secrete wax, and every worker has got baskets on its legs to gather pollen in, besides the nectar that they carry in their stomach for the hive. Every one of them has got a good sharp sting that it can use if it doesn’t like your scent or if it thinks you are going to hurt it or do something you shouldn’t around the hive. Every one of them is covered with hair that is long for a bee and it is soft and fine and when the workers go down into Mr. Male Iris to get nectar for their two stomachs and to fill their pollen baskets, the hair all over them fills with the pollen, too, and it is the law, because of God, that when any bee starts out to gather nectar and pollen it never mixes one flower with another. If it starts on iris, it keeps right on going to iris. You can see it now, can’t you? When the worker bee gets the pollen from Mr. Iris all over his hair and then goes on to get pollen from Miss Iris, the hair is going to scatter the pollen for her, that’s going to make the good seed come, 'cause the bees do the flowers’ courting for them. That’s a reason besides honey as to why bees are so useful.
"One time I asked the Bee Master if I couldn’t see God and if I couldn’t touch Him, how I was going to know that He was here. And he said, ‘Because of the hair on a bee.’ So that’s one of the ways you can know.
"Then there are a lot of ways you find out about God on account of how He made Queen bees. A beehive is just full of miracles and signs and symbols and wonders. The Bee Master said so. But perhaps the biggest wonder in the whole hive is just about the Queen. There is a lot about God mixed up with a Queen bee. Workers may only live five or six weeks, but a Queen may live five or six years. She is away bigger than a worker and she looks different. She is long and slender and has bigger wings, and she has a big abdomen ’cause she may lay a million or two eggs. She has only about half as many eyes as a worker, ’cause she only needs them when she goes out to find her lover, or maybe a few times more when she has a great hive full of one hundred and twenty pounds of honey and so many bees they are in each other’s way. So, when she gets everything ready, she tells part of them to come with her to found a new hive, and leaves the others to refill the old hive after the Bee Master takes his share of the honey.
“The way a Queen comes to be a Queen, is this way: In a little cell all fixed up for it, the Queen bee of a hive puts an egg and she tells the workers ‘I want this egg to be a Queen.’ Then the workers get busy and make the royal jelly. That’s another thing the people who write the bee books haven’t found out. They don’t know just what royal jelly is or how it is made. But the workers know. God showed ’em how when He made ’em. So they make the royal jelly and they feed it to what comes from the egg that the Queen said should be another Queen. It grows to be a white nymph, and when a white nymph is ready to fly, it is a young Queen. With different food they feed what comes from each egg in each different cell and out of each cell there comes the thing that the Queen says she wants to come. For fear something might happen to a Queen, ’cause there can’t any hive get along without a Queen, she lays a whole lot of eggs that she says she wants made into Queens and then she lays quite a number for males and some for nurses and thousands and thousands for workers. Remember this: Bees make four different kinds of cells.
“Now, when the Queen has her hive full of honey and enough white nymphs to be sure that the hive will always have a Queen, and lots of bee bread to feed the nymphs and all the other bees that are shut up in the cradles, and when everything in the hive is just right, a thing happens that nobody understands about. Right here is where the Queen takes her Ladies of Honour and her architects and her masons who make the combs, and her workers who bring in the pollen and the nectar, and she takes some males and she takes some nurses, and she goes right away and leaves all the work that all of them have done so carefully. The thing that nobody knows is who decides, or how it is decided, who shall stay in the hive and who shall go. But it looks like two thirds of them go with the old Queen.
“Before the old Queen starts to leave the hive with the swarm that goes with her, all of them except the Queen go to the honey vats and take honey to last them five or six days so they will not starve while they’re finding a new home, and so the wax that they can distil from the honey will be right along with them to lay the foundations for the cells to begin work in their new home.
“Then the Queen walks out of the hive, and the ones that are to go with her all come, too. She flies a little way and settles on an orange branch, or maybe on a fig, or a jacqueranda, and close around her come her Ladies of Honour and all her swarm that are taking care of her. They hide her away down among themselves so no bird can get her or hawk moth, or anything, and the scouts go out to hunt a new home. When the scouts go to hunt a home, they hunt a place in the rocks up in the canyon, or a big dead limb in a live oak, or a sycamore. But if the bee master is truly a bee master, he has known for several days, by how busy the hive is and by the things he hears the bees say to each other, that they are going to leave their home and find a new one. So, if he wants to keep his bees and make his garden get bigger and bigger, he has some hives standing back, all ready, and he watches, and when the Queen comes out of her door and starts to fly, he takes his bee drum and slow and easy and deep, drum, drum, drum, he beats it. The bees wonder what that strange sound is. They forget just what they were going to do and settle on the nearest limb and hide the Queen like I told you, and quick the bee master goes and gets his smoker and smokes them just a little bit to keep them quiet and easy. If he loves his bees, he doesn’t smoke them very much, because a bee hates smoke the worst of anything in the whole world.
“Then right quick he cuts off the branch or he sets the hive under it and with his hand strips off the bees and tumbles them in. He always has to be sure that he has the Queen and that she is all right. Then he takes the hive and sets it on a new stand and puts it in his bee garden. If he wants to he can put it right beside the hive the bees came from and they will not ever again go back in the hive that they lived in before. They will always stay with the Queen and live and work in the new hive. The Queen never in all her life goes out again unless she wants to found another new hive. Then she goes just the same as she did this time. So that is the way the bee master gets new hives of bees.
“Back in the old hive that’s left they are feeling pretty blue, because along comes the bee master and takes his share of the honey, and their beautiful Queen is gone, and the lovely golden boxes of comb that fill the hive almost full are empty except for what the bee master leaves, and everybody stands around and feels blue and waits. The workers don’t go out after nectar like I get from the Madonna lilies, nor for pollen. They won’t hardly even clean up after the lazy old drones. It is the bluest time the hive ’most ever knows. So they all go and they gather around the cells that the old Queen laid the eggs in to make more Queens. The old Queen knows when she leaves that out of one of these cells pretty quick there is going to come a new Queen. So just when everybody in the hive is getting pretty well discouraged, one of the white nymphs sticks up her head and eats open the lid of her cell and comes walking out. The nurses go rushing to her and help her clean up and comb her hair and polish her wings. They kiss her ’cause they are so glad to see her.
“Another thing that God has done in a beehive is not to let one young Queen come out alone, because when she gets all ready and fixed she is going to go out into the great big world to find her King, and if a bee bird or a kingbird eats her up, why then the hive is in worse trouble than it was before. So maybe the same day, or a day or two later, another white nymph sticks up her head and eats her way out of her cell and comes walking out. But nobody goes to her or helps her very much, ’cause all of ’em are betting their money on the first one out.
"When the Queen that came out first sees another Queen has left her cell, it makes her awful mad. Right there the fight begins. They just go at it like I go at the Nice Child and Angel Face when I can see back in their eyes that they think maybe they’re going to mutiny on me. Only I stop when I got ’em licked. The young Queen doesn’t stop until she’s got the other Queen killed deader than anything and the workers carry her out to the bee cemetery.
“Then the young Queen wants to go on and kill every white nymph that’s sleeping in the rest of the cradles. Right then and there she wants to do it. But the workers and the scouts and the guards step up and they say, ‘No, you can’t do that. You have to go and find your King and come back ready to be the mother of the hive before you can do that.’
“So the young Queen rests up a few days and gets all ready, and one day when the weather is all bright and sunny, in the morning when the dew is on the flowers and the lark is on the wing and everything, like that morning Browning wrote about—the Bee Master made me learn it: that one about ‘God’s in His Heaven and all’s right in the world’; I expect your mother made you learn it, too—why, the new Queen goes to the door and she walks out of it backward. She goes away a little piece and she comes back to it three or four times. God told her to do that so she would be mighty sure when she came home from the first long flight she has ever made she would know her own door. When she is sure she knows where she belongs, why then she starts this flight, and God’s in the way she can fly, too, because she hasn’t had a chance to use her wings ever before. But when she does use them, she goes up and up, away up into the sky. She goes up higher than the trees. She goes up higher than the birds. She goes up so high that the men who write the books can’t ever see how high she does go.
“When she starts out, all through the line of the hives the something that the bee books call ‘the Spirit of the Hive,’ or Instink, or Nature, but that the Bee Master says is just another name for God, tells all the male bees that a young Queen has gone out to search for a King. They can’t ride a milk-white charger to find her; they have got to use their wings. But they are some punkins on looks. They are big swaggery fellows. On their heads they wear helmets trimmed in black pearls, and tall plumes. They have yellow velvet belts and long mantles, and they walk over everybody in the hive. They don’t even pay much attention to the Queen-till they start out to court her. They have been a big nuisance all their lives. They won’t work a lick. They don’t go out and hunt any honey. They just walk up to the cells that the workers are filling and eat all they please. They go out and curl up in the tulips and in the lilies and wherever they can find a beautiful flower cradle and lie there and sleep in the sun for hours. Then they come back and eat some more, and they are too lazy to live like the other bees do, but the worker bees know the hive can’t go on without them, so they clean up after them. Nobody likes them very well, but nobody says a word because they are part of God’s plan. It’s all right for ’em to have a good time while they’ve got the chance; they don’t know a little bit about what’s coming to them.
“So when the young Queen goes out, all the males think they would like to court her, and from all the different hives they go swarming up after her. They spread their wings so wide and they fly so hard and fast that they get all swelled up and get more air inside them than they ever had before, and they get different from the way they were before they started. It takes a good, fine strong one to go as high as the Queen goes. Finally, when some of them get ’way up mighty close to Heaven, all alone up there, where the sky is blue and the day is sweet and everything is so nice and fine, the Queen says which one may be her King. Then they get married. They don’t have but a little bit of a honeymoon, for the Queen says she must go straight home and go to work. So she doesn’t even wait to say good-bye to the King; she just gives him a big push, so big and hard it kills him and he falls down to the ground, deader than anything. And she goes home and goes into the door, and she’s lucky if she gets home and gets in the door ’cause on account of birds and things. That’s why there are more white nymphs waiting, so that if the young Queen doesn’t come back, another one can be got ready and sent out. You see how it’s all fixed up from the beginning to keep things going? That’s why God’s in it, because it is such a wonderful plan, and it is things that men couldn’t do in any way at all. It takes just God to plan life for the bees.
“If the Queen gets home everybody is so tickled when she comes through the door that they kiss her and they comb her hair and they polish her wings and they fix her all up fine. You wouldn’t think there was a thing but love and goodness in their hearts.
“Then what do you think the workers do? You couldn’t ever guess, not in days and days, so I’ll have to tell you. All the white nymphs that they have been feeding royal jelly and that the nurses have been taking care of so fine, get stung. Can you beat it? You know how when any man cheats in business and loves another man up and makes him think he is his friend, and then turns around and takes all his money and maybe kills him, why people say the good man ‘got stung.’ Well, right there in the beehive what happens is ’cause the reason why they say that. All the white nymphs that have been loved up so good and fed the royal jelly, the minute the young Queen gets home all safe and sound, why the white nymphs that would be Queens if they got a chance, they all gee stung to death, and maybe there’s forty or fifty thousand of them—that’s how sure the bees want to feel about having a Queen. They are so dead that the workers carry them out and put them all together with the dead ones.
“The next thing they do is for all the workers to get together and every big, bluffy drone that has been lazing round the hive and getting waited on by five or six worker bees and everybody has stood everything from him, why, every one of them gets stung, too. When it happens in the observation hive, you can sit with the glasses on ’em and see their faces, and they look so surprised and scared you can’t help feeling sorry for them. They don’t know what they’ve done, and they don’t know why what’s happening to them happens, and they can’t understand why workers that waited on them, just a whole army of workers, mad as Alice’s March Hare and the Hatter out of Wonderland, come roaring at ’em singing a war song and whooping battle cries. The old Mr. Drones get their wings pulled off and they get their eyes stung out and they get punkshered everywhere, and every last one of them gets killed good and dead, and pushed out of the hive.
“There’s not anybody left but the young Queen and the Maids of Honour and the workers and the nurses that are going to stay with her. If there’s any danger, all of them make a shield and cover up the young Queen. If it is a hard winter, they get close around her to keep her warm; and if there isn’t enough food, they all go hungry and feed her. No matter what happens to them,, every one of them, as long as they are alive, takes care of the Queen, because it is the eggs she lays that make the new brood and keep the bees alive in the world. So something tells every bee, ‘No matter if you die yourself, take care of your Queen so that bees will not vanish off the face of the world like everything did that time of the flood.’ The thing that tells them, that’s God again.”The little Scout looked Jamie straight in the eye.
“You begin to see now, don’t you, why the Bee Master said the hair on a bee was God?”
“Yes,” said Jamie, “I begin to see. It is the most wonderful thing I’ve ever heard about in all the world! Go on and tell me more. Tell me every least little thing you know.”
“There isn’t much more to tell,” said the little Scout. “There’s more figures I could tell about—how the old drone males have got just oodles more eyes and more smell hollows than the workers. The old drone males have got thirty-seven thousand eight hundred smell hollows and that is so they will be dead sure to find the Queen, and that’s God again. And the old drone males have got thirteen thousand eyes on each side of their heads. That’s so they can see better than anybody else and be certain to find the Queen, ’cause they’ve got to find the Queen, and they’ve got to get married, and the Queen has to lay her eggs to keep the world having bees, and to make the nice, sweet honey for everybody, and to keep the hundred thousand flowers alive.
“When the Bee Master gets the old Queen and her family in a new hive, he sets it up in a nice place. The scouts come back to where they left the Queen and they hunt until they find the new hive. They know their family and they go in, and then everybody goes to work. The workers build the cells, and the old Queen lays all the eggs and tells the workers what she wants to come out of each egg. They go straight ahead just like they did in the hive they came from. The workers clean up everything and the old Queen fills the cells again with eggs that she wants to be Queens and drones and workers and nurses, and maybe scouts, and they go on making more honey and hatching out more bees, until the hive gets so full that the old Queen says they will have to bring out a young Queen and turn the hive over to her, while they go out and start another family.
“The Queen keeps giving orders all the time about what she wants done. She may rule for five or six years. She lays eggs all the time. You couldn’t believe how many eggs—maybe as many as two million. She has only got seven or eight thousand eyes, ’cause she’s a stay-at-home-lady. Right-on-the Job is her first and last name, both all two of them. But she hasn’t any wax pockets, and no brushes, and no pollen baskets. She doesn’t like light, and she doesn’t know how Madonna lily nectar tastes, ’cause all her food is digested for her before she eats it.—If I could work that scheme on hot dogs, you wouldn’t think they were so bad, would you?”
Jamie laughed.
“Go on,” he said.
“Well, the Queen just keeps right on laying eggs all day, maybe all night, for all I know. Anyway, she lays ’em. I tell you, boy, she lays 'em! And every time she lays an egg she says what she wants it to be, and her nurses go right to work to feed the royal jelly to the white nymphs, and bee bread to make more drones, and to make the workers and the nurses, and the scouts, maybe, like I said before. And some of the workers are builders and some are masons and some are dancers. It’s the dancers’ job, when the hive gets very hot inside, to dance and wave their wings until they start a breeze to cool the cells. And sometimes they dance the queerest dance for the white nymphs.
“That’s part of what I know about bees. I couldn’t tell all I know about them ’cause I can’t think of it all at once. There’s too much of it to tell right hot off the bat. But you can watch ’em in the observation hive and pretty quick you can see which cells have got the big, soft, white nymphs in them, and which ones have got the big fat drones, and which ones have the little workers, and the nurses, and the scouts, maybe. After what I’ve told you, you can see the old drones crawling around over the cells eating honey where they please, and being as dirty and mussy as ever they want to. Then you can see the workers go and clean up after them. You can see the cells where the eggs are being taken care of. You can see the cells that are being filled with honey. You can see the cells that have gold and red and purple pollen in for wax. Next time I come, I’m going to ask you about the figures that I told you, like the Bee Master asked me. You have to be ready and not make any mistakes, because if I can remember, a big man like you ought to remember!”
The little Scout stood up, pushed down the tail of the green shirt that seemed habitually to work up, tightened the belt buckle at the waist, and drew a deep breath.
“I don’t know as I’ve told you so very well. In there in the library you can find the books like I showed you that tell what people used to think. The books that are the bunk. Then you’ll find the books like Lubbock and Swammerdam, which have the wonderful pictures, that will tell you what really happens. Then there are the books like Fabre and Maeterlinck that the Bee Master says are three things at one time. First they are the truth, and next they are poetry, and third they are the evidence of a Master Mind that plans every least little tiny thing. He says the only name for that Master Mind is God. He doesn’t see any use in trying to dodge God and side-step Him and call Him ‘the Spirit of the Hive’ and Instink and Nature and things like that. He says a great scientist, one of the best, almost went crazy trying to do that very thing. His name was Charles Darwin, and the Bee Master says C. D. would have been a heap bigger Injun if he’d been willing to put God in where He belongs. He says when God does anything with such care, and puts so much thought in it, and deals out such splendid justice’ as there is in a beehive, that a wise man will just take off his hat and lift his eyes to the sky and very politely he will say, ‘Just God.’”
Then in a lightning-like change, the little Scout kicked a high-standing pebble with fine precision against a mark several yards away, plumped down on the seat beside Jamie, and inquired casually, unconcernedly: “What do you say?”
Under the spell of the magic of the story he had heard, Jamie ran his fingers through his hair. Then he cupped his right hand over his knee, and put his left arm around the little Scout and drew the child up to him closely. He dropped his lips against the tow hair, worked down through its bleached exterior, down through the dark strands underneath, and close to the small ear he brought his lips and whispered very reverently: “I say, ‘Just God!’”