Foulbrood
1978
Mom called out to me from the bedroom. She did this sometimes when she wanted more water or aspirin, so that’s what I figured it was—she needed me to bring her something. But when I came in, she was rummaging around in the closet, pushing boxes and sweaters aside on the top shelf. She pulled out a board game and handed it down to me.
“I need you to play with me,” she said, getting back into bed and reaching for the box. She took off the lid and pulled the game out.
“What is it?”
“Ouija,” she said, pausing to take a long suck on a Fresca soda, while simultaneously balancing a cigarette between her pale fingers.
She patted the bedspread, indicating for me to sit next to her. She placed the board in front of us, and I saw it had a moon in one uppermost corner and a sun in the other. In the center was the alphabet in a western font, curved above a row of numbers. On the bottom were the words No, Yes, Goodbye. Oddly, there were no cards, no dice and no playing pieces. This game looked like it would be exceptionally boring.
“How do you play?”
“You use it to communicate with spirits,” Mom said. “Like my dead granny.”
It took me a second to absorb what she’d just said. She wanted to talk to the ghost of her dead grandmother. With me. I had no interest in poking around in the afterlife, because everyone knows ghosts don’t like to be bothered, and they have the upper hand when it comes to revenge. But Mom wasn’t joking. Her instructions were matter-of-fact, as if she really believed she could do this. At some point while studying the star charts in bed, she had advanced from astrology to séance. I did not see this coming. I wondered if maybe she had been in her room so long that she was starting to make up imaginary friends. I didn’t know what to say.
“I had a granny, too, you know,” she continued. “I loved my granny—she was the only one who was ever nice to me. Too bad you never got to meet her.” A wistful expression flickered across her face. “She died just before you were born.”
She tapped the ash off the tip of her cigarette into the ashtray and held up a spade-shaped piece of white plastic with a small round window embedded in it.
“You and I both have to put two fingers on this. Then you close your eyes and stay very still. It will start to move when the spirits want to say something. They will spell it out.”
This did not sound very sane. But Mom was inviting me to do something with her and this was rare, and possibly a sign of improvement. Despite my trepidation, I put two fingers on the planchette next to hers. Our fingers touched, and it felt like a little embrace, a more intentional gesture of love than when she spooned me groggily in bed. We waited like that for several minutes, both hands on the plastic reader, staring at it, willing it to move. It felt nice to sit this close with my mother, and I really didn’t care if the reader moved or not. She had asked me to be with her, and that was enough.
Finally, I felt the tiniest vibration beneath my fingertips.
“Are you moving it?” I asked.
“Shhhh, I’m making contact. Granny, are you here?”
The planchette picked up speed and swung in an arc, stopping over the word Yes.
A shiver coursed through me. I was certain that I wasn’t moving it, and if Mom wasn’t either, that meant some invisible presence was really taking control of the disc. I went limp just to be extra sure I wasn’t moving it by accident. I could hear Mom’s breath pick up.
“Do you have a message for me?” she whispered.
The reader sliced back and forth across the board, so fast we had to lurch to keep up with it. Mom bent over the board to make out the letters through the clear circle on the reader, sounding them out one by one to decode the message.
I M-I-S-S Y-O-U.
My stomach flipped, and I suddenly felt like I had to pee. Somehow Mom’s dead granny was really talking to us. In less than five minutes, our innocent game had veered into the occult, and I suddenly felt like I was trapped inside a scary movie. I held my breath and checked the room for supernatural signs. I was so spooked that everything made me jump. What was that movement behind the curtain? Did I hear a footfall near the door? Was that a cold breeze, or was it dead Granny floating through the bedroom? I wanted to flee but was too petrified to move. The reader paused on the board, as the presence waited for the next question. Mom sat up and squeezed her eyes tight in concentration.
“Will I find another husband?”
The white disc didn’t budge. She asked the same question, six or seven times more. Nothing. Whatever entity was in the room just moments before had clearly crossed back to the other side. So much for that. Ouija was a dud, I decided.
But Mom wasn’t ready to give up. She remained hunched over the board, with the resolve of a person who was not going to quit until she got some answers.
That’s when I really became truly scared. Worse than a ghost was the realization that my mother might be losing her marbles. She believed Ouija was real. She needed this cheap dime-store oracle to assure her things were going to turn around.
It made me feel sorry for her, to watch her beg the air for a man to make her happy again. She was pleading to the universe, to skeletons, to nothingness, for some small measure of hope. She seemed to be getting more desperate since my summer visit to Dad’s, as if it had only intensified her feeling that she was stuck in place while life moved on without her.
Mom and I kept waiting, but the plastic reader didn’t respond. Mom asked Ouija again, louder this time so the phantoms could hear her. When no answer came, she resorted to bargaining.
“Okay, how about just a boyfriend? Will I get a boyfriend soon?”
We waited some more. My arm was asleep now, and it felt like an anthill burst open at the top of my shoulder, sending an army of insect legs scurrying down to my fingers. Finally my fingers slipped off and knocked the reader to the right.
“Wait! It was moving just now, moving toward Yes.” Mom lunged for my hand and placed it back in play. When the reader remained motionless, she compromised.
“I’m going to take that as a yes. It was moving toward Yes, you saw, right?”
“Definitely,” I said, rubbing out a cramp in my forearm. I heard Grandpa start his truck to let it warm up, and I stood up to go. We had plans to go check the bees down the coast.
“Not yet!” Mom shouted, yanking me back to the bed by my wrist. Her grip was too tight, too urgent, and pinched my skin. It had a trace of roughness to it that was unsettling.
“Ow, Mom, you’re hurting me.”
“Sorry,” she said absentmindedly, without looking up from the board. “Just a little more. Five more minutes.”
I rubbed at the redness on my wrist where her fingers had briefly handcuffed me. I had no choice and I knew it; I had to keep playing until she dismissed me. I was trapped inside my mother’s crumbling mind. I heard Grandpa rev the truck engine, and worried he might have to leave without me.
“About this boyfriend...will he be rich?”
This time I cheated and pushed the reader. Fast and hard over the word Yes. I think both of us knew what I had done, yet neither of us said anything. But I had to get out of the game somehow, because Mom was going to force the ghosts to tell her what she wanted to hear, no matter how long it took. So I came up with a white lie that we both could accept.
Mom’s face relaxed as she put the game back in the box. She handed it to me and I put it back in the closet, burying it under sweaters where I hoped she’d forget it. By the time I turned around, she was napping with a smile on her face. She was content, knowing that good days were just around the corner.
I found Grandpa sitting on his tailgate, picking the mud out of his boots with a hive tool.
“I almost thought you forgot,” he said.
“Mom wanted help with some fortune-telling thing.”
Grandpa tilted his head to one side. “Come again?”
“Wee-gee.”
“Never heard of it.”
“It’s not as good as cribbage,” I said, referring to Grandpa’s favorite game. He was teaching me how to play, using matchsticks for pegs and a piece of wood that he’d drilled with holes for the board. He smiled at my assessment, then opened the passenger-side door of his truck and waved me in with a dramatic bow just like a chauffeur.
When we reached Big Sur, the sky was a shock of pink and orange above the low morning mist that had not yet pulled away from the coastline. The earth was damp beneath our feet as we made our way toward one of his smaller apiaries at the Grimes Ranch. Grandpa cut a path through a wildflower meadow, and I followed behind with the smoker and our bee veils. This group of hives was the easiest of his bee yards to access, clustered in an empty pasture with a view of Highway 1 and the Pacific. Long ago, one of his cousins who lived at the ranch started beekeeping, but his interest lasted less than a year. The cousin asked Grandpa for advice a few times, which turned into lessons, which turned into bee-sitting, which eventually became a full takeover of the hive. In the intervening years, as bees are wont to do, the colony multiplied, and on this day Grandpa and I were walking into a little clearing with twenty-eight beehives just beginning to hum with the sun’s first rays.
The summer nectar flow was dwindling now, and the nights were coming sooner and colder. The late-autumn harvest would be smaller than the gangbuster summer crop, and Grandpa had to be more careful about how much honey he took from his hives so the bees had enough to eat until the flowers returned in spring. Once it got really cold, his colonies would sit out the winter, huddling together inside the hive and shivering their wing muscles to generate heat. The queen would be given the warmest spot in the nucleus, where she would slow her egg production and conserve energy. When the bees on the outermost edge of the cluster got too cold, they’d crawl inward to thaw, pushing other bees to the exterior, all the bees rotating and taking turns to keep everyone warm. It wasn’t hibernation, exactly, it was more like a slowdown, the bees venturing outside only to relieve themselves or fetch water. The colony planned ahead for this, Grandpa said, by storing large amounts of pollen and honey in the frames closest to the hive walls, where their winter pantries could serve double duty as nutrition and insulation. Grandpa knew the personality and foraging habits of each colony, and which hives could afford to spare honey, which should be left alone and which would starve if Grandpa didn’t feed them.
The hungriest hives got a sticky pollen patty Grandpa bought from the Dadant beekeeping supply catalog, made from pollen and brewer’s yeast that came in flat pancakes the color of peanut butter pressed between waxed paper. He set the patties over the tops of the brood frames where the nurse bees could devour them quickly without having to travel far. Other times Grandpa mixed equal parts water and white sugar, and fed his bees sugar syrup by pouring it into in an old mayonnaise jar, hammering holes in the lid with an awl and then inverting the jar into a wooden block he cut to slide into the hive entrance and serve as a feeder. There was a space cut into the block to allow the bees in to lick the drips that fell from the jar. His third option was to take frames of honey from abundant hives and swap them into hives with paltry honey stores.
Our mission today was to open all his hives and redistribute frames of honey from the strong hives to the weak, and if any honey was left over, we’d take it back to the honey bus for ourselves.
As we approached his bee yard, a flock of birds vaulted from the ground to broadcast our invasion in their own languages: Chickadee, Bushtit, Warbler, Blue jay. All those wings at once sounded like the flags at my school on a windy day, and I stopped for a second, just feeling the sonic power of their collective outburst. Grandpa and I watched them soar toward Garrapata Canyon. When they were out of sight, I looked to the ground to see what the birds had found so interesting.
I felt something crunch under my shoe, and discovered I was standing in the middle of a bee battlefield, the ground littered with expired drones. Some of the male bees weren’t quite yet dead, and dragged themselves in aimless circles through the carnage, toppling over every few steps on legs that were broken or lame. One pitiful drone was trying to get back into his hive, but kept getting pushed back by the bees guarding the entrance. Two bees attacked him, each one biting and pulling on a wing until the trio tumbled to the ground and continued wrestling. I watched aghast as they bit off one of his wings, and one of the guard bees airlifted the feeble drone, carrying it up and away in its clutches to unceremoniously drop it several yards away from the hive.
Grandpa must have seen the drones, but he stepped indiscriminately, smashing them underfoot as he went about the business of getting ready, lighting the smoker and putting on his bee veil, as if nothing was amiss. I tugged on his sleeve and pointed at the catastrophe on the ground. He glanced down, then handed me the smoker. I was careful to grab it by the bellows, where it wasn’t hot.
“Winter’s coming,” he said. “Not enough food to go around. Time for the ladies to kick out the men.”
Just then a wasp homed in like a jet fighter, landing its smooth, streamlined body on the back of a fuzzy drone that was struggling to stand. The wasp bit the drone’s head off in two quick moves and devoured the eyes while its headless body continued to twitch. I grimaced and asked Grandpa 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 took offense to this, and many returned to the air searching for their stolen property. The bees zoomed in mad circles around Grandpa’s head as he flicked the returnees off the honeycomb with a crow feather, racing to outmaneuver them in a battle of wills.
When the frame was as bee-free as possible, he handed it to me and I sprinted to the truck, pursued by a handful of outraged guard bees. Once I reached the tailgate, I checked for stowaways on the honeycomb, and blew on them softly like Grandpa had shown me to irritate them just enough so they flew off. Once the frame was clear of bees, I slid it into the empty hive box and hid it under a sheet. The bees could smell the honey, and they would be back for it if we didn’t keep it concealed. They would cling to it, all the way to Carmel Valley, and that would be their undoing. They could survive the trip, but our house was too many miles away for them to navigate back to their hive, and they would die alone.
The first two hives couldn’t spare honey. Grandpa removed the top pantry boxes on the third, and then bent down over the box containing the nursery, his mustache practically pressed against the top bars, as if he were trying to dive inside. I came closer, and my nose picked up what he was smelling—a horrible stink like meat gone bad. Grandpa stood up and shook his head.
“Not good.”
This hive was different from the others. When I placed my hand on the side of it, the wood was cold to the touch, without the usual warmth emanating from the colony’s collective body heat. I looked down at the hive entrance and noticed very little traffic.
Grandpa took out a frame of honeycomb that was most definitely the wrong color. The wax was too dark, like coffee, and while it should have been covered with nurse bees tending to the brood nest, there were only a few sluggish nurses pacing over a rotting nursery, desperately looking for a healthy larva to feed. The wax seals over the birthing chambers were sunken and perforated, when they should have been smooth like a taut paper bag.
Grandpa plucked a foxtail out of the ground, and poked the stiff end into one of the wrinkled brood cells. When he pulled it out, a slimy brown string came with it. He examined the goo on the tip of the weed for a long time, as if he couldn’t believe what he was seeing. He checked a few more cells, and they had all the same snot-like stuff inside where a white bee larva was supposed to be. Somehow the grubs had liquefied before they developed into bees.
“Foulbrood,” he said. I heard defeat in his voice, and knew it was something bad. Something serious.
“Foul what?”
“A disease. Highly contagious. Only way to get rid of it is fire.”
Grandpa stacked the hive back together, then took a pencil from his back pocket and drew a big X on the cover. I gasped, realizing that meant he’d have to burn it with the bees inside. Grandpa squeezed his forehead like he had a migraine, then ran his hand through his hair and looked off in the distance. He was sorting something out in his mind, so I waited a bit before I asked my question.
“How’d this happen?”
“The nurse bees fed food to the larvae that had a nasty bacteria in it. Destroyed their guts.”
Grandpa could only guess where the bacteria came from. Could be anywhere, he said; a bee can pick up the bacteria from touching another bee, robbing honey from a sick hive, even from landing on a flower where a diseased bee had been. Developing bees get foulbrood when nurse bees feed them bee bread made from a mixture of nectar and pollen that has the bacteria.
“All I know is, it’s nasty stuff. Can last for up to fifty years.”
I watched Grandpa dismantle hive after hive and poke the brood cells with a dry weed. He moved methodically, more like a piece of machinery than a human being. By the time he was finished, a dozen hives had been doomed with an X. He would need to build a bonfire and burn them all together to keep the disease from wiping out the whole apiary. I watched him fetch a shovel from the back of his truck and, when he was a good distance away from the hives, begin digging a grave for his bees.
I had no idea that bees could get sick. In my mind bees were unstoppable balls of energy. Most died of exhaustion after six weeks, so they put every minute to use. Each day they visited thousands of flowers in a five-mile radius of their hive, stopping only when their tattered wings finally grounded them. Old bees were easy to spot; their bodies were thinner and balding, giving them a polished look. Now that I realized how vulnerable bees could be, I felt responsible for not protecting them. A good beekeeper was supposed to keep bees, not lose them.
Grandpa’s pit was a foot deep, and he was standing in it when I finally approached.
“Are you going to do it today?”
“I’ll have to come back tomorrow with gasoline,” he said, as he stepped on the spade and plunged it into the earth. He yanked the handle toward himself to loosen the ground, then bent over and heaved a scoop of dirt off to the side.
I’d never heard Grandpa’s voice sound so thin, and I wasn’t sure how to be around him. I sat on the edge of the pit and waited until he’d spent himself digging. He took a seat beside me and dropped his head in his hands. I leaned into him and felt the warmth of his exertion. We stayed that way for quite a while, keeping each other company without talking.
“Well, that’s that,” he finally said.
“Are you going to lose a lot of money?”
Grandpa was looking out toward the horizon, and I wasn’t sure if he had heard me.
“Money? You think I do this for money?”
His question made me feel like I was in trouble, but I couldn’t figure out what it was I had done. I had disappointed him again with my wrong thinking, despite all his efforts to raise me right.
“Honey isn’t what’s important,” he said.
I opened my mouth to protest but couldn’t assemble a sentence. Why have a honey bus if he didn’t care about honey? Everyone knows that honey is the absolute most important thing about bees. That’s why they are called honeybees.
“Do you think the only thing a bee does is make honey?”
I knew a trick question when I heard one. So I carefully answered with a question.
“Yes?”
“Wrong. Bees make food grow,” he said. “All the fruits and nuts on our trees. The vegetables in our garden.”
Grandpa’s grief must have been making him sentimental. I’d seen his artichoke bushes push up stalks taller than me and produce an artichoke with a punk rock head of purple hair on top—unassisted. The almond tree in our front yard made white flowers that eventually turned into green fuzzy pods, and then I watched those pods shed and leave behind woody husks with nuts inside. The tree did all the work.
“Plants make food,” I tried to clarify.
“Not without bees, they don’t,” Grandpa corrected. “Flowers need to exchange pollen with other flowers to become food. Because flowers don’t have legs, they need bees to carry their pollen for them. Pollen sticks on the bee when it flies from flower to flower, and there you have it. Pollination.”
Without bees making pollen deliveries, Grandpa explained, many of the things in the produce section of the grocery store would vanish. I would lose my beloved cucumbers and blackberries. No more pumpkins at Halloween. Summers without watermelon. The cherries Granny likes in her Manhattans—gone. The world would be bland, and boring, and flowerless without bees, he warned.
Now it made sense why Grandpa was so distraught. Losing his hives was so much more than a personal disaster; it was a setback to nature itself. Not only would we lose produce, Grandpa said, but other animals would be in trouble, too. We needed bees to pollinate alfalfa and other grasses so cows and horses could eat. Mother Nature knit a careful plan in place, and if you pulled one thread of it loose, the whole thing could unravel. These insects that made most people run in fear were the invisible glue of the earth that held us all together.
Grandpa had just revealed a hidden staircase in my mind, showing me that there were so many things to learn, beyond what I could see with my own eyes. Before, when I looked inside a hive, all I saw were bees going about their chores, never imagining that their labors had anything to do with me. It was astounding to realize that every creature, no matter how small, helped keep everyone else alive in a hidden organization. If something as seemingly insignificant as a bee was silently taking care of us, what about an ant, or a worm or a minnow? What else didn’t I know about the unseen contributions that nature was making all around me? It made me think that the universe had a plan for me, and although I couldn’t always see it or feel it, I had to trust that it was there. It just might be that my life wasn’t random, or unlucky, after all. I considered this possibility for a moment, and for the first time in as long as I could remember, I felt a trickle of worry slip away.
All this time I thought Grandpa and I were the ones taking care of the bees. When all along, the bees were the ones taking care of us.
“I’m sorry you lost your bees,” I offered.
Grandpa stood, put his fingers in his mouth and a piercing whistle ricocheted up Palo Colorado Canyon. He sat back down, and within seconds, Rita came bolting out of nowhere, hopped into his lap and licked his chin.
“Sometimes things get taken away from you,” he said. “But you can’t let it get to you too much.”
The good thing about bees, he said, is that they multiply quickly. If we were careful and attentive to the remaining hives, he could build his apiary back up to size within a year or two. Bees can take many hits, but they tend to always come back, he said.
I climbed into the truck and sat Rita on my lap to wait for Grandpa as he loaded honey supers in the back bed. Given the late season and the foulbrood fiasco, the yield was paltry, only a handful of boxes to take home. I heard the tailgate slam and when he sat next to me, I was struck by how tired he looked, with wilted cheeks and worry lines forming deep grooves across his forehead. He took one glance over his shoulder at the apiary and the awful chore that awaited him, and we pulled away.
The sun was directly over the ocean now, glinting like diamonds bobbing on the surface. This time there were no stories for the ride home. Grandpa was somber, lost in his own thoughts. Rita left my lap and curled up in his, as if she, too, could sense he needed cheering up. She nudged his belly a few times, and then rested her head on it and yawned.
“I’ll help you,” I said.
“What’s that?”
“I’ll help you get your bees back,” I said.
Grandpa broke into a wide smile, and his face was suddenly familiar again. He reached over and patted my knee.
“Thank you,” he said.
I reached over and turned on the radio, twisting the dial until the air came to life with a Johnny Cash song I’d heard Granny play on the record player.
Grandpa started to sing, and leaned over to ask me how high the water was, Momma. I knew the answer: two feet high and risin’.
Grandpa sang the question again, and again, louder each time and I responded in kind, yelling out, three feet! four feet! We shouted along with Johnny when he sang that his hives were gone and he lost his bees and his chickens were all up in the willow trees.
I heard the sadness in that song for the first time, but in a strange way it made us both feel better. We weren’t the only ones at the mercy of nature.