Martin Greenberg - Sherlock Holmes In America

I stopped. “Are you certain it is safe for us to proceed?” I had no wish to appear a coward, but neither did I fancy being stung by the thousands of little warriors that circumnavigated the hives.

“It is never safe,” the beekeeper replied, and I sensed a smile I could not see through the thick veil. “The bees will die in defense of their hive and their queen. They see us as the enemy, and because we are bent on having their honey, they are right. We tend them, and then we rob them. That is the cruel reality of bee culture.”

Holmes stepped closer to the buzzing hive and seemed to take a great interest in the worker bees flying to and fro. Several of them seemed to be engaged in what would be called a scuffle, had the participants been human. They zoomed and darted, thrust and parried, like guards repelling an assault. I said as much, and Mrs. Imbler remarked, “You are quite right, Doctor. These bees will repel any intruders who come from other hives to steal the honey.”

“How can they tell these bees are intruders?” I wondered. “There must be thousands of bees in each hive.”

“There are nearly fifty thousand at the height of the season,” the beekeeper said. “And the bees know their own through scent, although they have no olfactory organs such as we would recognize.”

The hives were tall rectangular boxes with three sections. The bees made their way in and out through a slit at the bottom. Mrs. Imbler explained that the top box was where the honey was stored, the middle box was where the bees kept the pollen they fed their larvae, and the bottom box was where the queen lived and laid her eggs.

“There is but one queen to a hive,” she said, “and she is the only fertile female. There are a few drones, kept for mating with the queen, but they are driven from the hive at the end of mating season when they are no longer needed.”

“It is a cruel society,” Holmes murmured.

“Nature itself is cruel, Mr. Holmes,” the beekeeper replied. “It is survival of the fittest.”

Mrs. Imbler stepped toward one of the boxes, and I saw what the canister was for. She applied pressure to the bellows, and smoke emerged from the conical top of the device. Smoke encircled the hive, and the bees all flew inside.

“The bees believe their hive is on fire,” the beekeeper said. “They are going inside to save their most precious asset: the honey. They will drink their fill and then come outside again, only they will be too heavy with honey to fight us.”

I glanced at Holmes. I could not see his expression underneath the veil, but I knew he must have been thinking of the late Irene Adler, whom he had smoked out of her home, and who had also taken her most precious possession with her.

Mrs. Imbler walked behind the hive and motioned us to follow her. “Never stand in the way of the bees,” she advised. “Always open the hive from behind.” She set down the smoker and lifted the metal tool. She wedged it under the top of the hive and levered the top off. Bees streamed out the bottom of the box, but there were many more left inside, squirming and jostling one another. Mrs. Imbler lifted the top box and set it on the ground. Golden honey glistened in the sun, dripping from hundreds of six-sided combs.

Beside me, Holmes stood poised in what I began to realize was quivering excitement. “It is a city,” he murmured. “A city as complex as London, with a hierarchy of work and government and productivity. Tell me,” he said, eagerness in his tone, “how do the bees communicate? How do they know what to do, where to go?”

“You have put your finger on the great mystery, Mr. Holmes,” Mrs. Imbler replied. “No one knows how bees do what they do. All we know is that they are able to communicate quite complex messages to one another, and that somehow the queen is the center of that communication network. She gives orders that are followed as far as five miles away-but exactly how she conveys her wishes is not scientifically established as yet.”

As she spoke, Mrs. Imbler lifted the second box off the stack and set it on the ground. More bees tumbled over one another in writhing profusion inside the wax cells of the honeycomb. Several flew in my direction, and I lifted my arms to swat them away, and then blushed as I remembered the veil’s protection.

She directed our attention to the third, lowest box. “Here is the birthing chamber,” she explained. Holmes leaned in to look closer. I did not care to crowd him, so I stood back a few steps.

“Those little grains of rice,” he asked, “are those the larvae?”

“Yes,” the beekeeper said. “They will become workers or drones. They will make their way into the cells of the comb when it is time for their metamorphosis.”

“Which is the queen?” I asked.

To my surprise, it was Holmes who answered. He pointed to a space deep within the box and said, “There. She is longer than the others and she has three black stripes on her back.”

“However could you tell?” I asked. “They all look alike to me.”

“It is a matter of seeing the anomaly,” Holmes replied. “I could not have picked out the queen had she been alone, but I could see that one bee was not exactly like all the others. She is not only larger, but also more purposeful, and the other bees are crowded around, tending her. She did not fit the pattern.”

Mrs. Imbler’s response was tinged with something like respect. “You have the makings of a bee master, Mr. Holmes.” She pointed to a section of the comb that contained closed-over cells, some of which bulged out like miniature wasps’ nests.

“That is where the new queens are hatching,” she said. “They are fed with a substance called royal jelly. The hive feeds several larvae, so there will be a new one when this one dies. The first to hatch will immediately kill all her rivals. There can only be one queen to a hive.”

On that ominous note, we took our leave and asked directions to the avocado groves. They lay a hot and dusty distance from the main beehives, and I was perspiring freely by the time we arrived at the stand of glossy trees. As yet, I had learned nothing that justified our visit to this improbable place, but Holmes seemed to be enjoying himself.

Avocados, I learned, were alligator pears, and were particularly suited to the California climate. The trees were large and had thick spreading branches and dark green leaves that created a welcome shade in the burning sun. A small gardeners’ shed stood at the edge of the grove. As we approached, the door opened and out stepped a wiry little man with ginger hair and a ginger moustache. He introduced himself as Jonas Imbler.

We must have looked startled, and I hastened to explain that we had just met Mrs. Imbler. The little man said, “My wife. We had a small bee farm in Alpine before we came here, but Mrs. Tingley believes that beekeeping is women’s work, so my wife tends to the hives while I manage the avocados.”

Holmes went straight to the point. “We were informed that you had a bit of bad luck with your pollination experiment.”

Imbler motioned toward a beehive that stood between the avocado groves and the bluff overlooking the canyon. “I thought surely the bees would pollinate the trees better than any horticulturist could possibly do by hand.”

“What happened?”

“The queen died,” Imbler said shortly. “And when the queen dies, the bees get dispirited. They behave like rudderless ships, aimless.”

“They no longer pollinate,” Holmes said, “because without larvae, they have no need of pollen. Pollen is food for the larvae.”

Imbler nodded. “You know your bees, Mr. Holmes. The queen is all in all to the hive. She is their reason for living, the beacon around which they all swarm and gather. Not unlike our own Mrs. Tingley.” This last was said with a sly little wink, as if he’d made a mildly risqué joke. The image of Katherine Tingley sitting inside a giant beehive, surrounded by buzzing insects, was one I had no desire to contemplate. And yet, gazing around the peaceful grounds and remembering the white-clad students walking to and fro, I could not help but see Mr. Imbler’s point. But for the queen, the hive would die. But for Mrs. Tingley, what would happen to the good people of Lomaland?