The Care and Feeding of Waspish Widows - Olivia Waite Page 0,34
below, so the honey harvest is a simpler process. With the leaf hive, I have to close off the passages between the two halves until the first half is empty of bees, so I can harvest honey unimpeded, and I still have to cut through the sides where the bees have glued it in place and then . . .” She checked herself with a wry twist of her mouth. “It’s complicated, shall we say.”
Agatha snorted softly. “So I see.”
“However . . .” Flood went on.
She was using her storyteller’s tone, which made Agatha automatically lift her eyes and still her pencil, curiosity chiming irrepressible notes inside her.
Flood stroked the side of the hive possessively. “The leaf hive’s great advantage is that it lets a person observe every hour in the life of a hive. Larval hatchings, the building and capping of comb, queens’ duels—”
“Duels?”
“Oh yes—when a new queen hatches before the old one’s set off with a swarm, the two bees will hunt each other through the hive. They pipe for one another, calling out threats, until they meet in some dark corner of the comb and then . . .”
Agatha was riveted. “And then?”
“And then: slash! Stab!” Penelope Flood’s mobile mouth was a mournful twist. “You can only ever have one queen to a hive.”
Agatha cast a newly anxious eye on the bees in front of her. “They sound almost as vicious as Jacobins.”
Flood laughed at that. “Not quite so bloody as that, to be honest. More like . . . Elizabeth and Mary, Queen of Scots. Only one head can wear the crown.”
“Have you ever seen a queens’ duel?”
“Not myself—but plenty of naturalists have, and written descriptions in some detail. We are in a great age for beekeeping, you know. There have been great advancements made these past few decades; they’ve made harvesting honey more productive and more pleasant, for both bees and humans. It’s about understanding the true nature of bees, and working with that nature instead of against it.”
Agatha looked again at the queen, basking in a circle of her daughters, their small front limbs combing her attentively. “You mean, because bees are so well governed by their queen, it means they are governable by beekeepers?”
Flood’s lips thinned. “Some keepers think so. For myself, I find that bees do best when left to govern themselves as much as possible. A keeper is there to provide help, not to impose a human’s notion of order. Because as much as it looks like a monarchy, a hive does not depend on any individual bee, not even the queen—on her own, without her attendants or her drones or her daughters, she is nothing. And she keeps nothing for herself. The colony shares everything.”
“But surely the queen is needed to make more bees,” Agatha said. “Even I know that much.”
Flood’s grin was a revolutionary slash. “On the contrary: if a queen dies, the workers will simply raise themselves another. The lineage may be broken, but the colony endures forever.”
Agatha stared at the hive, and all its miniature architecture on display. Brown and ochre, spring green and bright gold—after she counted the tenth different shade in the cells of the comb she was compelled to ask: “What do the different colors mean?”
Flood looked up from her notebook, where she was penciling observations of the leaf hive. She smiled to see Agatha all but pressed up against the glass. “The colors tell you what kind of plant the bee visited,” she explained. “Different plants make different kinds of honey.”
Agatha could only stare at all those tiny hexagons, brilliant and beautiful as a church window. “How do you keep them separate?”
“You don’t. The bees do, when they find something that’s blooming well. Cherry and plum trees, heather, raspberries. They take as much as they can from one plant before moving on to the next.” Her smile widened. “It’s a good deal more fun if I show you.”
That was how Agatha found herself in Penelope Flood’s honey larder, sitting at the low table with a half dozen jars of honey awaiting her pleasure. “Start with the wildflower,” Flood urged, and held out a spoon.
Agatha took it warily, careful not to let her fingers brush Flood’s. The metal was warm from her hand, though, which was almost as bad for Agatha’s peace of mind. She took up the jar of wildflower honey and spooned up a small dollop: light amber, very clear.
It tasted, as she’d expected, like honey. Sweet and delicious. “Very nice.”