The Honey Bus - Meredith May Page 0,69

why the bees had suddenly turned cruel.

Drones get pushed out of every hive, every year, he explained.

“Fewer mouths to feed,” he said.

The drones try their best to fight back, but a hive has tens of thousands of female workers and only hundreds of male bees, so the fellows don’t stand a chance.

“Remember how I told you the drones don’t do any work? They just sit around and beg for food?”

I nodded.

“Well, now it’s payback. If you’re helpful, people will help you back. If you’re only concerned about yourself, then...skeeeeeech!” He drew his index finger slowly across his neck.

“Jeez Louise,” I said, parroting one of Granny’s favorite expressions.

It’s no big deal, Grandpa said, when it warms up again the queen will simply make more drones.

At that moment, I felt very, very relieved to be female. A hive was a matriarchy built on a basic principle of work and reward, but the sisterhood seemed to be taking their power a little too far. It didn’t seem right, to kill your brother. Even if he was lazy. And I’d watched enough nature shows with Grandpa to know that all creatures needed both males and females to make babies. If a hive pushed out all the drones to die in the cold, how could the queen keep laying eggs?

Grandpa took my question and held it for a moment. He helped me secure my bee veil and lowered his voice: “Okay, smarty-pants, drones do have one job. To make the queen pregnant.”

I set the smoker on top of a hive where it wouldn’t catch the grass on fire, sensing a potentially intriguing story coming on. I listened carefully as Grandpa explained the cutthroat competition for the queen’s affections. It all starts, he said, when drones pick up the scent of a virgin queen flying nearby.

“Like when a dog’s in heat and the other dogs know?”

“Something like that.”

He continued, using hand gestures, to explain that the drones soar into the air and gather into a cloud, getting ready for the virgin queen to arrow through them. When she leaves the hive for her wedding flight, she mates in the air with only the fastest and strongest suitors that can keep up with her. She couples with a dozen or more drones one after the other, and then returns to the hive with their sperm stored in her body. She spends the rest of her life laying eggs and fertilizing them herself.

Because a healthy hive can go for up to five years with the same queen, and hundreds of drones hatch and die each month, the math isn’t in the drones’ favor. Few ever get the chance to actually do the one thing they were born to do. More often, a drone is just an insurance policy, on standby in case a virgin queen suddenly flies by. But even if a drone does get his chance to mate, he won’t survive the encounter, Grandpa said.

It was so quiet I could hear the waves hitting the rocky shore in the distance.

“How come?”

“His man part breaks off and he falls to the ground, dead.”

“Gross!”

Grandpa looked taken aback. I could tell that my squeamishness disappointed him, that all this time spent in Big Sur country should have made me hardier, or at least capable of accepting the laws of nature. My outburst came from a soft, indoor kid.

“Gross? What’s so gross about it? It’s just part of life. If it’s very quiet, you can actually hear it snap off. It makes a little popping sound.”

I shuddered, ready for his story to be over. I grabbed the smoker and began sending puffs of smoke over the hive entrances to calm the bees. I blasted the guard bees with more smoke than usual, feeling the need to even the score for the drones. The bees scuttled back into the hive to get away from the odor of burning cow patty, which masked the banana scent of their alarm pheromone. Grandpa realized that he had lost my interest and pried the lid off one of the hives to peer inside at the honey supply.

We had purposely parked the truck several hundred yards away from the apiary and placed empty hive boxes on the tailgate. It’s a little tricky to steal honey from bees, so we devised a system to outsmart them. First Grandpa removed a frame of wax comb solid on both sides with sealed honey, then he gave it one good shake to send the bees tumbling back into the hive. They