The Secret Life of Bees: Chapters 8–11

Even though the big honey flow was over, the bees were still out there sucking nectar, going about their business.

As August reached down inside the box for the labels, I studied the return address: Holy Virgin Monastery Gift Shop, Post Office Box 45, St. Paul, Minnesota.

It was a nice color coordination the way the Bohemian Madonna’s skin was set off by the golds in the honey.

Some things happen in a literal way, Lily. And then other things, like this one, happen in a not-literal way, but they still happen.

I had a nice tan color in mind, but May latched on to this sample called Caribbean Pink. She said it made her feel like dancing a Spanish flamenco. I thought, ‘Well, this is the tackiest color I’ve ever seen, and we’ll have half the town talking about us, but if it can lift May’s heart like that, I guess she ought to live inside it.’

The hives looked like an abandoned neighborhood, the air groggy with heat.

I told her the way they created hexagons, they must be the ones who could do math in their heads, and she smiled and said, yes, nest builders had true math aptitude.

Field bees were the ones with good navigation skills and tireless hearts, going out to gather nectar and pollen.

There was a group called mortician bees whose pitiful job it was to rake the dead bees out of the hive and keep everything on the clean side.

“Oh, yes, like ladies-in-waiting. They feed her, bathe her, keep her warm or cool—whatever’s needed. You can see them always circled around her, fussing over her. I’ve even seen them caress her.”

Later my mind would remember the plagues God had been fond of sending early in his career, the ones designed to make the pharaoh change his mind and let Moses take the people out of Egypt.

June made a pffff sound with her lips while August shook her head, and it washed over me for the first time in my life just how much importance the world had ascribed to skin pigment, how lately it seemed that skin pigment was the sun and everything else

We had a citywide emergency on our hands, as there is no greater affliction for the southern mind than people up north coming down to fix our way of life.

I thought this might set May off, the tragedy of a spilled drink.

The whole fabric of honey bee society depends on communication—on an innate ability to send and receive messages, to encode and decode information.

At eight o’clock in the morning it hit 94, with the ambitious plan of reaching 103 before noon.

The sting shot pain all the way to my elbow, causing me to marvel at how much punishment a minuscule creature can inflict.

Sometimes things of magnitude settle over you with excruciating slowness.

There wasn’t a trace of cunning in May, and you could depend on her not to overthink her answers.

I was a fugitive from justice, and here I was breezing into a jail where there were probably policemen trained to recognize me.

She went into minute detail about the way she’d searched high and low, into the dusk hours, combing the woods out past the watermelon fields, finally finding the bees in a magnolia sapling, the whole swarm hanging there like a black balloon caught in the branches.

During spring and summer—the most strenuous periods of foraging—a worker bee, as a rule, does not live more than four or five weeks.

I was surprised when the prayer we said after dinner each night, the one with the beads, started up of its own accord and recited itself in the back reaches of my head.

After the autopsy, after the police made her suicide official, after the funeral home had fixed May up as pretty as they could, she came home to the pink house.

I wanted to know, but it seemed like a holy ritual I shouldn’t interrupt.

She smiled at me in a way that made me feel I was about to get Part Two of the beekeeper’s induction, Part One being the sting.

“No, but back when the Christians hid from the Romans down in the catacombs, they used to scratch pictures of bees on the walls. To remind each other that when they died they’d be resurrected.”

August said we couldn’t leave them on too long, since the bees had memorized everything about their hive and a change like that could make them disoriented.

His conversations were all about the race riots in New Jersey, policemen taking their nightsticks to Negro boys who threw rocks, about Molotov cocktails, sit-ins, righteous causes, Malcolm X, and the Afro-American Unity group giving the Ku Klux Klan a taste of their own medicine.

I would be down there suffocating and never see August again.

The next morning I slept late, considering the on-and-off night I’d had, plus I’d been falling into lazy habits without the honey house to keep me industrious.

Rosaleen, on the other hand, had stopped all semblance of work and looked from June to Neil.

We had all these chores facing us, but some things you have to sit and mull over before you can go on.

Next I rummaged around in the hall closet for the Christmas lights, which she had me wind around the bushes by the back-porch steps, not to mention all the extension cords I had to rig.

The first carload of the Daughters drove up then, and June sauntered toward them with her hand outstretched.