The Bee Line

Part One · The Birdbath

The new neighbors arrived on the first warm Saturday in May with a moving truck, a dog, and a girl approximately Omar's age. The girl carried a white wooden box from the truck herself, slowly, with both arms, as though it were a wedding cake. Omar observed from the upstairs window. The box went to the top corner of their garden, where the ground rose toward the hill and collected the morning sun, and the girl positioned it on two concrete blocks and stood back from it with her hands on her hips. Then she pulled a plug of grass out of a slot at the bottom of the box, and nothing happened for a minute, and then the air above the box began to fill with small moving dots.

His mother said they were honeybees, and that it was perfectly normal, and that plenty of people kept a hive these days. His father said the same thing, in the voice he used when he was not entirely certain. Omar's sister Mina, who was six and afraid of nothing in the world except the bath drain, went out to the lawn with her juice and sat down to watch the dots, and for a week there was no trouble whatsoever. The bees rose out of the box, and over the hill, and returned, and did not appear to notice that there was a fence, or a lawn, or a Mina. The two gardens shared a low wire fence and a plum tree that nobody had planted. It had simply happened, a long time ago, directly on the boundary.

The trouble was the birdbath. It stood in the middle of Omar's lawn, a shallow stone basin on a pedestal that his grandmother had delivered as a present, and by the second week of June there were bees on it continuously from breakfast until supper. Not one or two, either. Omar counted forty on a Tuesday afternoon, crowded around the rim like cattle at a trough, every one of them dipping its head to the water with its back end in the air. Mina went out with her juice and stopped three steps from the lawn, and one bee rose off the rim and landed on her wrist and walked a slow circle there, cleaning its face. Mina did not move, and she did not breathe, and when it departed she walked back inside, very carefully, and did not go out again.

That was the entire problem, and it did not sound like much when Omar described it aloud at supper. Nobody had been stung, and the lawn was still a lawn. But his sister had been in that garden every single day of her existence, and now she stood at the back door and looked at it, and that was not nothing. His parents said that bees came with the neighbors, and the neighbors seemed perfectly pleasant. His father said that if Omar wanted to raise the matter with them, Omar was welcome to go next door and raise it. Omar understood that this meant his parents were not going to do it, and that if he wanted the hive relocated, it was going to be his responsibility to ask.

The girl's name was Wren. She was thirteen, the same as him, and when he discovered her she was kneeling beside the hive in a pair of overalls with a mesh veil pushed back off her face like a hood, recording numbers in a notebook. Omar had prepared a speech about his sister and the birdbath and the forty bees, and he got approximately halfway through it before she said that she was sorry about the birdbath, genuinely sorry, but the hive was not moving. Not to the far corner, not anywhere. He asked her why not. She closed the notebook, regarded him for a moment as if deciding something, and asked whether he wanted the short answer or the real one.

Part Two · Three Feet or Three Miles

The real answer took a while. A hive, Wren said, was not a container of bees but a map. Every bee that left the entrance memorized the route home by the sun, and the hill, and the plum tree, and if you picked up the box and carried it twenty feet across the garden, the bees would return to the position where the box used to be and circle there in the grass, bewildered, until it got dark. You could move a hive three feet, she said, or you could move it three miles, and nothing in between, because three feet they could find and three miles they started fresh. Twenty feet across the garden was the one distance in the world you could not manage.

Omar did not believe her, and said so, as politely as he could manage. Wren did not appear to mind. She handed him a piece of chalk and instructed him to draw a line on the concrete block where the hive sat, and then she went in for lunch and abandoned him there. He drew the line, and then he lay on the grass by the fence for an hour and watched the bees come home. Every single one of them came in low over the plum tree, dropped, and landed on the strip of wood at the entrance, in exactly the same position, as if there were a path in the air that only they could see. He thought about forty bees circling in the grass in the darkness, and he rubbed the chalk line out with his shoe.

So they had a problem, and they laid it out between them on the fence like a puzzle with pieces on both sides. Wren wanted the hive to stay where it caught the morning sun, facing the hill, with its map intact, and Omar wanted his sister to have her lawn back. Neither one of them was wrong, which Omar found considerably more annoying than if one of them had been. The water was the first thing he attempted. The bees were on the birdbath because they were thirsty, Wren said, and a hive in June drank a cup of water a day simply to keep itself cool, so if they had water closer to home, they would stop crossing the fence for it. Omar fetched a bowl, filled it from the tap, and positioned it beside the hive.

By the following afternoon there were two bees floating in the bowl, and forty on the birdbath, exactly as before. The bowl was too deep, Wren said, and too clean. Bees could not swim, and they would not land on water with nowhere to stand, so they preferred a dish that was shallow, with stones to perch on, and better still if it was a little old and a little green. He returned with a baking tray and a handful of gravel from the driveway, and that was an improvement, but the birdbath still won. They had been drinking there for three weeks, Omar realized, and it was on their map now. You could not remove a place from a map by putting a better place beside it.

It was Wren who had the idea about the fence, though it was Omar who had been staring at the fence, so he claimed half of it. Bees leave a hive the way airplanes leave an airport, she said, straight out of the entrance, low, gathering speed, and then they climb. If there was something tall in the way, a hedge or a wall, they went up and over it, and here was the important thing, they stayed up. They did not descend to lawn height again until they were nearly home. A barrier two meters high in front of the entrance would lift every bee in the colony over everyone's head, and the hive would not have to move an inch. The bee line would simply go over the top.

A wall was out of the question, and a fence that tall would cost more than either of them possessed, but a trellis was merely poles and string. Wren's father had bean poles in the shed, left over from the previous house, and a roll of plastic netting, and Omar's mother had a packet of runner beans that she had been intending to plant for two years. The beans were Mina's idea, in fact, offered from the back step, where she sat and watched them pace out the line for the posts. She said that if they were building something in front of the bees, it might as well be something with flowers on it. Omar wrote that down. It was the first time she had come out as far as the step.

Part Three · The Screen

They built it on a Saturday, with Wren's father holding the ladder and offering no opinions. Four poles went into the ground in a line three paces in front of the hive, deep enough that Omar's arm disappeared into each hole to the elbow. The netting stretched between them, two meters high, and sagged, and was tightened with string until it hummed when he flicked it. Along the bottom they planted the beans in a row, each seed as large as a fingernail and speckled like an egg. Wren had rotated the hive at dusk the previous evening, a little toward the screen, when every bee was home. The whole arrangement resembled the net on a very narrow tennis court, with no court.

On Sunday at noon the sun was on the hive and the air above it was thick with traffic. Omar stood on his side of the low wire fence with the baking tray of gravel at his feet and watched a bee emerge from the entrance. It flew directly at the screen. It rose. It cleared the top of the netting by a hand's width, and then it kept going, up and up, and crossed the plum tree, and the lawn, and the birdbath, and the roof of his house, and was gone, and never once descended below the top of the net. He watched the next one, and the next, and the one after that. The bee line had moved. It was over his head now, like a road on a bridge, and the lawn underneath it was simply a lawn.

The birdbath required another week. The old bees still remembered the way, but old bees do not survive long in summer, and the new ones that emerged from the hive learned the screen first and the baking tray second and never learned the birdbath at all. Omar counted every afternoon, and the numbers went forty, then twenty, then nine, then one, and then, on a Thursday, none. Mina watched the count from the step, and then from the grass beside the step, and on the afternoon of the none she walked out to the birdbath and put her whole hand in the water and left it there, looking up at the bridge of bees passing over, the way you look at airplanes.

Omar discovered that he could not stop going next door, and he told himself it was to check on the screen. Wren gave him the spare veil and showed him how to lift the lid of the hive with the smoker going, and how to ease out a frame with his thumbs, slowly, because bees did not object to slow. The first frame he held up to the light was heavier than he expected and warm, like a loaf, and the wax cells on it were capped with a thin pale skin, and under the skin was honey the color of the lamp in his grandmother's hallway. Forty thousand bees walked over his gloves, and not one of them cared about him in the slightest.

By August the beans had climbed the entire screen and gone over the top, and the netting had disappeared under leaves and red flowers, and the bees came through the flowers on their way up and over. Mina picked the beans. It was her screen by then, because the flowers had been her idea, and she mentioned this often. They ate the first ones on Omar's back step, the three of them, with the bee line passing overhead so high that you had to lean back to see it. Wren said a hive was a map. Omar thought that a garden was one too, and that he had just watched it get redrawn, one bee at a time, by a six-year-old with a packet of seeds.