Big Sur Queen
1975—Summer
I started spending so much time in the eucalyptus tree that I began packing a lunch to take with me. If anyone noticed that I’d withdrawn from the family, nobody complained. I’m pretty sure my whereabouts went unnoticed. Except by one person.
I was more than halfway through a peanut butter and jelly sandwich when I could’ve sworn I heard an owl. I twisted on my perch, looking this way and that, but it was hard to see through the curtain of slender eucalyptus leaves rattling in the breeze.
“Hoo! Hoo!” Louder now. I shoved the last bite into my mouth and climbed down to a lower branch with a better view to scan the yard.
Grandpa. I spotted him hiding behind the wooden shed where he stored his bee equipment. He had his hands cupped in front of his mouth, directing his birdcall toward me. He was wearing his bee veil, and hooting through the mesh.
“I know that’s you, Grandpa,” I called down to him.
“Hoooow doooo yoooou know it’s not an ooooowl?”
“I can see you.”
He stepped into full view and looked up to the treetop. We eyeballed one another, waiting for the next chess move. Grandpa cleared his throat.
“Whatcha doin’ up there?”
“Watching bees.”
“Coming down anytime soon?”
“No.”
Grandpa took his veil off and slowly folded it back down into a flat square. “That’s a shame,” he said.
I didn’t answer, waiting to see where he was going with this.
“I needed someone to help me find the queen.”
This was it! The invitation I’d been waiting for—to open up a beehive. It was the one thing, Grandpa knew, that could lure me out of the tree.
“Wait up!” I said. I scrabbled down the trunk so fast that the bark peeled underneath me in long, pink strips.
Grandpa kept more than one hundred hives sprinkled along the Big Sur coast. His largest bee yard was in a remote area at the foot of Garrapata Ridge accessible only by four-wheel drive, and even then sometimes he had to use a chain saw to cut through the occasional tree that fell across the road. Grandpa and a beekeeper friend owned a 160-acre piece of undeveloped Big Sur wilderness that he said was perfect for bees. Named for the Spanish word for tick, the Garrapata Canyon caught full sun, was protected on either side by steep chaparral ridges and isolated from people. All the bees had to do was fly out of the hive and feast on California sagebrush all the way to the mountain peak, then float back down as their bodies grew heavy with nectar. The land was an all-you-can-eat buffet for bees, offering them a year-round menu of sage, eucalyptus and horsemint, while Garrapata Creek provided a clean source of water.
Each year his hives produced more than five hundred gallons of honey that he delivered to Big Sur customers, plus a couple local restaurants and a grocery store. He never advertised, because demand always outweighed supply. By fall, he ran out of honey and had to put anxious customers on a list for the following spring honey flow. I’d heard Grandpa tell stories about Big Sur at the dinner table, and it sounded like something out of one of my fairy tales, untamed and magical. I wasn’t going to sit in a tree and miss my chance to finally go there.
Minutes later, I was bouncing on the passenger side of his work truck with my feet resting on a set of clanking metal toolboxes. It was a Chevy half-ton that farted like an old man and once upon a time used to be a glossy yellow, but now was weathered to the dull texture of chalk and pockmarked with rust. The odometer had flipped over to zero at least twice that he could remember before eventually it stopped spinning, and he attributed his truck’s good health to a regimen of regular oil changes. The windshield was crusted with dead bugs and mustard-yellow dots of bee poop, which Grandpa couldn’t remove with the wipers because they also had stopped working years ago. When rips appeared in the red vinyl bench seat, he covered them in duct tape; when he ran into something, he banged out the dings with a mallet. His truck was a handyman’s flea market on wheels; everything he might need for beekeeping or plumbing jobs was tied to the contractor’s rack, crammed in the back bed or jammed somewhere in the cab. The dashboard was packed several inches high with a nest of pipe fittings, grease-pencil stubs and rubber bands, opened mail and seed packets, and balled-up bits of beeswax. He used the hooks of the empty gun rack to hang his tattered work shirts, splattered with pipe dope.
I was wedged into a small space he cleared for me on the bench seat, separated from Grandpa by a barrier made of beekeeping magazines, his dented workman’s lunch box and a green metal thermos. His dog, Rita, was in her usual spot, curled on an old pillowcase beneath his seat, safe from falling objects. The three of us literally clattered down the road, creating a jangling chorus every time we hit a bump and jostled Grandpa’s collection of things that might come in handy someday.
When we turned off Carmel Valley Road south onto Highway 1 and entered Big Sur, nature woke up and suddenly started doing the can-can. Everywhere I looked, the jagged mountains were tumbling into the sea, like rockslides frozen in free fall—still yet dramatic at the same time. We navigated a thin, winding ribbon of road hundreds of feet above the exploding surf. I rolled the window down, and heard sea lions barking and waves booming into sea caves below. The spicy aroma of sage mixed with sea salt wafted into the truck. We dipped down into forests where the air dropped ten degrees and the massive redwood trees clustered together in tribal circles, then we burst back into the sun again. I twisted my head in every direction, trying not to miss a thing.
“There’s one!” Grandpa said, pointing toward the ocean.
“One what?”
“Whales. Look for their spouts.”
I squinted harder at the blueness.
“There it goes again!”
Grandpa was now driving with his head turned all the way to the right. I grabbed the armrest as he went around a tight left turn, but he stayed perfectly centered in his lane while he stared at the ocean. He’d driven this stretch of Highway 1 so many times he didn’t need sight to navigate it.
“Where?” I scanned the horizon, but it looked just as blank as it had a second ago.
“It should come up again, right about there,” he said, pointing farther south. “Sometimes you see two spouts, a little one next to a big one, then you know it’s a mama whale with a calf.”
As if on command, a white spray shot into the air from beneath the surface, and a beat later, a smaller one, just off to the right of the first.
“I saw it!” I yelped.
A turkey vulture circled effortlessly overhead on six-foot wings, its black feathers spread out at the wing tips like individual fingers. It was so huge it cast a shadow over the road as it passed above. I rolled the window down more, and the wind ruffled my hair as I looked up at the red of its head. We watched it glide above a cove with water the color of jade and kelp fronds waving on the surface.
“There’s where you catch abalone,” Grandpa said, pointing to the inlet.
“How?”
“You dive down with an abalone iron. You gotta get it under the shell quick, otherwise the abalone feel you doing something and clamp down on the rock.”
“Does it taste good?”
“Yeah, if you hammer it first.”
Sounded a little gross to me. I returned to whale spotting, but the ocean was a blank slate once again.
“See those two rocks?” he said, pointing to two triangular peaks jutting two stories high, less than twenty yards offshore. “I almost crashed right into them.”
Grandpa unscrewed the cup on his thermos and held it out to me—my signal to fill it with scalding chicory coffee. Then he settled into one of his Cannery Row fishing stories. Grandpa used to fish alone in his own skiff for sardines and sell them to the canneries, but it was hard to compete with the large Italian family-run fishing crews, and he had to catch lots of fish to make any money. One day his friend Speedy Babcock told him there was more money for less effort in salmon.
“I had never fished salmon before, and Speedy said he’d teach me,” he said.
They left Monterey for Santa Cruz in Speedy’s twenty-eight-foot cabin cruiser, and caught thirty king salmon, about six hundred pounds of fish—a fortune. But on the way back, they got lost in the midnight fog.
“We couldn’t see so we had to navigate by sound. The water sounds different in different spots along the coast, and he kept steering west, thinking we were turning into the Monterey harbor, but I could tell we were only at Point Lobos. He wouldn’t listen to me. We argued until those rocks suddenly appeared and I wrestled the rudder from him. We almost lost everything by that much,” he said, holding his thumb and finger an inch apart.
I asked Grandpa what happened after that.
“Never went fishing with that guy again,” he said.
Grandpa slowed, put on his blinker and we turned left into the cool shade of Palo Colorado Road, lined with eucalyptus trees. On the corner was one of Big Sur’s earliest homesteads, a three-story log cabin built in the late 1800s out of redwood slabs caulked together with lime, sand and horsehair. A sheep pasture encircled it, the lambs hopping straight in the air like grasshoppers. The ranch extended across Highway 1 to a stunning sea cliff pasture, where a herd of white-and-red Hereford cattle could stand close enough to the sea to feel the saltwater spray.
“My cousin Singy’s place,” Grandpa said, yanking his thumb at the cabin.
“Singy?”
“Yeah, everybody calls her that because as a girl she sang a lot.”
“Are we going there?” I wanted to pet one of those lambs.
“Not today.”
We continued on the narrow, winding road and soon the eucalyptus grove gave way to a cathedral of redwood trees. Palo Colorado Creek rippled along one side of the roadway, and sunlight filtered through the forest, making polka dots on tiny hillside cabins propped up on stilts over the creek. Staircases with too many steps to count zigzagged from the homes to the road. After a mile, Grandpa turned up a steep incline, driving through a tangle of greenery, the ivy-choked coyote brush and manzanita branches scraping our roof while the asphalt below became a dirt road the color of chalk rock. When we reached the plateau, we were in a meadow and we could see the sea again.
Grandpa stopped before a cattle gate that was secured by a locked chain. He reached into the glove compartment to pull out an enormous key ring just like the sort janitors carry. By the looks of it, everyone who had property in Big Sur had given him a key. He slid the keys around the ring, muttering to himself until he landed on the right one. He got out and popped the lock, unwrapped the chain and swung open the gate so we could pass through.
Grandpa shifted into four-wheel drive as we descended into Garrapata Canyon on an elevated wisp of a road with a severe drop-off on my side. It was barely wide enough for all four tires as the truck groaned around the tight switchbacks, bouncing over pits and boulders left by winter rains. Grandpa honked as he cranked the wheel around the turns just in case someone was coming the other way, and a few of the curves were so sharp that he had to do a three-point turn, backing up and turning, backing up and turning, before he could get the truck all the way around. One false move and we were toast. None of this seemed to bother Grandpa, who continued chatting away as rocks fell away from under his tires and skittered down the slope, but I couldn’t bear to watch. I kept my eyes on the horizon, looking in the distance for the patch of ocean peeking through the V formed by the two canyon walls.
When we reached the bottom of the grade, pine needles cushioned us as we drove around fallen trees. Grandpa revved the engine and we drove right through Garrapata Creek, the water coming halfway up the tires. We got a tire stuck between two granite river rocks for a second, and the truck rocked back and forth as Grandpa tried to get momentum to propel us out of the divot. He seemed to be enjoying our predicament, wriggling his eyebrows at me as he punched the gas. Third time was a charm, and the truck bucked and splashed and got to the other side. We drove through more redwoods, and because the earth was wetter here, there were ferns and snarls of orange monkey flower encircling the trees.
Finally, we emerged from the tree grove into a small wildflower meadow, and Grandpa cut the engine. At one edge of the clearing was a city of vertical white beehives, each with a small cloud of black dots waggling before it. We stepped out of the cab to the sound of scrub jays complaining about our intrusion. The air smelled as clean as mouthwash—a minty mixture of bay leaves and sage and lemony horsemint. Grandpa opened his door, and Rita’s long body shot out from underneath his seat, eager to hunt in the thicket.
“Get along, little doggie!” he sang after her. “Oh wait a minute,” he said, watching her gather speed on six-inch legs, “I already have a long little doggie.”
Grandpa laughed so hard his false teeth jiggled loose. He’d lost his real teeth, he said, when they rotted and fell out in his twenties, despite regular brushing. Now he put his fake ones in a glass of water on the nightstand where they grinned at him as he slept.
He rifled through the stuff in the truck bed and tugged out two plastic hats with full brims. They looked like white pith helmets, with vents on the crown. He put mine on first, then slipped a yellow mesh veil over it so my head was covered all the way around, then cinched the netting in place with two long cords that he crossed over my chest, circled around my waist and then tied in the back. The hat was adult-sized and kept slipping over my eyes, but it was all he had.
He put his veil on, then lifted a burlap sack from the truck, fished inside for a dry cow patty, broke it apart and shoved the pieces into the can of the bee smoker. He lit the dung with a match, closed the lid and squeezed the bellows a few times to stoke the flame until white smoke coursed from the spout. As we approached the first hive, I saw a row of honeybees lined up at the slit at the base of the hive where the entrance was, beating their wings.
“Air-conditioning,” Grandpa said.
Bees, he explained, always keep their hives about ninety-five degrees inside, no matter what the weather. In winter, you can put your hand on the outside of a hive and feel the heat radiating from within as they cluster together and shiver their wing muscles to generate warmth. In summer, bees gather on the landing board near the entrance and circulate air with their wings to cool the hive down. No matter where a hive is, whether in snow or triple-digit heat, it’s always within a few degrees of ninety-five. How bees could regulate temperature so precisely without a thermometer was one of their biggest mysteries.
Grandpa handed me a metal tool, just like the one he always carried in his back pocket, with one flat end for scraping wax and a hook on the opposite end for lifting wooden honeycomb frames out of the hive.
“The bees glue the lid down,” he said, showing me how to wedge the hive tool into the crack to pry the inner cover off. Bees, he explained, don’t like cold drafts in their homes, so they make glue out of tree sap called propolis, and use it to seal any cracks in the hive. I mimicked his movements, and we each slid our tool under opposite sides of the inner cover. We popped it off, revealing a row of ten wooden slats underneath, each a removable rectangular frame of wax honeycomb resting on a groove cut into the box. The bees responded to the intrusion of sunlight with one quick, loud hum—a collective shout to warn the rest that something was happening to their home.
I peered closer, and noticed the bees were aligning themselves in rows in the empty spaces between the frames and peeking out to see what was going on. They wriggled their antennae, exploring the airspace where their honey pantry had been seconds before. The hive had a comforting smell of hot pancakes with butter and syrup. Grandpa reached in with bare hands and lifted out the first frame of honeycomb, which was blanketed on both sides by bees. They were a moving carpet, each an individual thread that together made one thing. Some went this way, others that way, bumping and crawling over one another but never causing injury or irritation.
Grandpa shook the frame over the hive to dislodge about half the bees, so I could see the honeycomb underneath. It was a masterpiece of mathematical symmetry. The interlocking hexagonal tubes were aligned in straight rows, every cell sharing one wall with six of its neighbors for economy of space and wax. To fight the laws of gravity, Grandpa explained, each honeycomb cell was slightly tilted upward a few degrees to keep the honey from spilling out. It was as if the bees knew that of the three shapes that can stack without creating wasted space—squares, equilateral triangles and hexagons—the hexagon uses the least amount of material for the largest storage room, thus saving on labor and supplies.
I reached with my fingertips to feel the geometry. The stacked configuration made the wax sturdy enough to hold several pounds of honey in one sheet of honeycomb, but the wax itself was pliable and crushed under my fingertip. Some of the cavities held gleaming honey, others small plugs of bright yellow and orange and reds where the bees had stored pollen grains. Grandpa turned the frame from side to side to examine it, bringing it so close to his face that his veil nearly brushed the bees.
“See the queen?” I asked.
Grandpa put the frame down on its side and propped it against another hive. The bees stayed on it, continuing to make their rounds on the honeycomb as if they didn’t even realize that they had been ejected from their own home.
“Nah, this one is full of food, no place for her to lay an egg. She’ll be in the middle somewhere, where it’s warmer.”
Some of the bees were now overflowing down the sides of the hive like a spreading stain. Instinctively, I took a step back.
“Okay, smoke ’em,” Grandpa said.
I pointed the snout of the smoker over the remaining nine frames in the hive and squeezed the folding bellows once. One white cloud puffed out.
“Keep doing it. More. Lots more,” Grandpa said.
I sent a storm of smoke clouds over the frames. The fumes had a wet cigar smell that tricked the bees into thinking their hive was on fire, sending them down into the hive to gobble honey before they fled their burning home. With full stomachs, Grandpa said, it made it harder for them to bend their bodies into stinging position.
When I had smoked most of the bees off the top bars of the hive, he lifted a second frame out. Grandpa worked barehanded because he said he’d been stung so much it didn’t bother him anymore. He swore all that venom prevented his joints from stiffening up with arthritis like Granny’s.
He inspected two more frames, returned them to the box and lifted out another. Then he bent down on one knee and held the frame out to me so I could see.
“Look here, where I’m pointing.”
I let out a small gasp. The queen was so obviously the queen. She was elegantly tapered, twice the size of all the other bees, and with longer legs that looked like they belonged on a spider. Her abdomen was so heavy with eggs that it dragged behind her as she walked.
Like bodyguards parting a crowd for a pop star, an entourage of attendant bees formed a protective circle around her and cleared a path as she moved. She rushed across the honeycomb like she was late for something. Her royalty was apparent in the way the other bees grew visibly excited when she came near, rushing up to caress her with their antennae, some even wrapping their forearms around her head in what looked like an embrace. Curiously, none of the bees turned its back on her. As she moved about, each new group of bees she approached rearranged themselves to face inward, even backing up before her to keep their eyes and antennae focused on her every move. The only word for their behavior was worship.
“Why do they touch her like that?”
“They are gathering her special scent and passing it to the rest of the bees,” Grandpa said. “That’s how they know which hive is theirs. Every queen has her own smell. Her daughters never forget it.”
It’s true mothers have an aroma. Mine smelled like Charlie perfume and Vantage cigarettes, mixed with the faint musk of other people’s clothes from the church thrift shop. It was a unique scent that I recognized instantly whenever I climbed into bed. I thought of Mom at that moment, passing the hours in bed. I wished she could see this queen, how an insect was so perfectly designed to be a mother, how the queen was the heartbeat of a whole stunning society operating right under our noses. There were so many fascinating things happening outside Mom’s four walls, but she was missing out on all of it. Her days came and went without little miracles like this to lift her spirit.
The queen padded along the honeycomb with the impatience of the very pregnant. She seemed to be weary of all the attention, refusing to slow down for every bee that wanted to touch her as she single-mindedly searched for something. Every few steps, she ducked her head into one of the honeycomb cells, then retreated. She checked chamber after chamber, hunting.
I asked Grandpa what she was looking for.
“A good spot to lay an egg,” he whispered. “Gotta be clean and well built. Can’t have an egg already in there.”
The queen squeezed her body inside the honeycomb to inspect, and all that remained visible was her butt sticking out. She was picky about her nursery, but finally she found a space to her liking and backed her abdomen into it. As the queen crouched there for a second, her attendant bees came in close as if to tell her a secret. The queen then did a little push-up with her legs and exited as her admirers backed up to give her room. I peered at the hexagon cell where she’d just been and spied a white pin inside, like a miniature grain of rice, standing on end perfectly centered on the back wall. Two of her attendants dipped their heads into the cell to verify her work. I had never seen anything born before and realized I’d just seen my first miracle.
“Is she going to do it again?” I whispered.
“About a thousand times a day,” he whispered back.
Grandpa stood back up and gingerly slid the frame with the queen back into the hive, being extra careful not to squish her. He stacked the hive back together and closed it, then moved to the next one. He wedged his hive tool under the lid of the second hive and broke the sticky propolis seal, then twisted the top box off and set it on the ground, his cheeks puffing with effort.
What struck me most about the queen was how many children she had. That seemed like an impossible number for one mother to handle.
“Hey, Grandpa?”
“Hmmmm?”
“How can one queen take care of that many bees?”
He slid his tool into his back pocket, and pushed his mesh veil above his eyes and perched it on his forehead, so he had a clearer view of me.
“All the bees take care of each other. A hive is like a factory. All the bees have different jobs so they share the work.”
I gave him a sideways look and crossed my arms skeptically. Grandpa put the smoker on the lowered tailgate of his truck, away from the dry weeds. He squatted in front of a hive and waved me to come closer. He pointed at a handful of bees that were standing in a cluster at the entrance with their backsides facing outward, all ferociously beating their wings.
“Their job is to air-condition the hive,” he said. Then he pointed at another bee on the landing board.
“Now watch what this one does.”
The bee marched left, then right, then left again, as if it couldn’t make up its mind where it wanted to go. Just then a second bee landed nearby, and the pacing bee scurried over, crouched defensively and blocked it from entering the hive. The first bee circled the new arrival, tapping it with its antennae, then stepped aside and let it continue inside.
“Guard bee,” Grandpa said. “Making sure no strange bees enter the hive.”
I was stunned. Until now, besides the queen and the stocky male drones, all bees looked identical to me. What had seemed like aimless crawling of thousands of bees now snapped into tight organization, once I understood that the way to see bees was to watch their behavior. I pointed at the bees landing at the entrance.
“What kind are those?”
“Field bees. They bring nectar and pollen. House bees that stay inside the hive will take it from them and store it.”
“Can I see?”
He reached into the hive and lifted out a honeycomb frame blanketed with bees. I pointed at a bee that had its head buried in one of the cells, and asked if that bee was storing honey. He brought the frame closer to his face and blew on the bee gently, and it backed out of the cell so he could see what was inside.
“Nope. That was a nurse bee feeding a baby.” He lowered the frame and pointed. Inside the cell was a small white grub.
The more Grandpa taught me, the more excited I became. I wanted to understand everything that the bees were doing, to be able to read them the way he could. Because when I let myself get lost in a beehive, my mind could stop spinning. I was able to slow down and relax with the task of simply paying attention. Serenity came as I shifted my worried mind to the bees and their behaviors. I felt a comforting assurance that there was hidden life all around me, and that made my own problems seem smaller somehow.
I learned that some bees are wax makers, others are builders that construct the honeycomb, and there are even undertaker bees that remove the dead, flying out of the hive with bee corpses in their clutches and dropping them far from the hive. Grandpa explained that a bee will have many different jobs during its life, but every bee’s first job is janitor, cleaning the debris out of the honeycomb and polishing the cells so they can be reused for storing honey or laying eggs. A bee promotes upward through the various in-house jobs, nursing the babies and curing nectar into honey, until reaching its final job foraging for food outside the hive. Now it made sense why the queen could lay so many eggs a day. She had a massive day care system in place. Her only job was to drop eggs in cells.
“The queen can’t even feed herself,” Grandpa said. “Those bees you saw in a circle around the queen? That’s her royal court. They bring her water drops when she is thirsty, food when she is hungry. They keep her warm at night, and they even clean up her poop!”
“What happens if the queen dies?”
“The bees will make a new one.”
You can’t just make your own mom. No animal had ever done that on one of our nature programs. I wasn’t buying it.
“That’s impossible,” I said.
“Not for bees,” Grandpa said. As soon as the bees sense that their queen is failing or missing, he said, they select a handful of eggs and start feeding them royal jelly—a milky superfood the nurse bees produce from glands in their head. It’s full of vitamins, and a steady diet of it will make a regular worker bee larva start to develop into a large queen. The bees build protective wax chambers for the incubating queens that look like unshelled peanuts dangling from the honeycomb. Wait a couple weeks, and the tip of her birthing chamber turns papery and thin. She chews her way out and, Presto! New mom.
“Bees are very smart, but most people don’t see it,” he said.
“But you said a hive can only have one queen,” I countered.
A colony raises more queens than they need for insurance, he explained. The first virgin queen to emerge races to tear open the other queen cells and stings her rivals to death. Grandpa wiggled his eyebrows at me for dramatic effect.
“Really?” I whispered. Grandpa had convinced me that bees were gentle, and now they seemed capable of terrible brutality. I bit my lower lip, unsure of what to think.
“Why would I kid you?” Grandpa said. “You can even hear the queen fights. They let out a battle cry that sounds like a duck quacking. Yeah, it goes like this—waaaah...waaaah...waaaah...wah-wah-wah.”
It was an astonishing thought, to replace your mother. What if humans could do that? I imagined a store that sold mothers, and I all had to do was walk down the aisles of ladies packaged in Barbie boxes and choose. What kind of mother would I pick? Mine would have long, shiny blond hair and a name like Gloria. She would wear pantyhose that came in those plastic eggs, and her high heels would click-click-click when she walked. She would come to my classroom and help all the kids with their art projects, and put Snoopy Band-Aids on my knees when I fell down. I imagined us driving in a convertible, and she’d have a long yellow scarf that would blow behind her. She would always let me pick the song on the radio, and take me to a drive-through for burgers and fries whenever I wanted.
Grandpa tapped my shoulder and my daydream popped. He had another frame in his hands, but on this one the honeycomb in the center of the frame was not orange with honey, but the cells were sealed shut with dark wax the color of a brown paper bag. He pointed again, and at the tip of his finger I saw two small antennae poking through a very small hole in the brown wax, where a bee was emerging. From behind the wax, the bee pushed and bit at the hole until it was large enough to poke its head through. The fuzz on its head was bright butter yellow, and matted down like it was wet. Its antennae swiveled as it explored the outside. Several bees ran over to touch the newcomer, and it startled and retreated back into the cell. Grandpa pulled a dry weed out of the ground and used the tip to pull the wax away from the cell opening, giving the baby bee a clear path to come out. It ambled out on wobbly legs, stood for a moment and stretched its wings. The newborn immediately began begging for food from passing bees, and within seconds an older bee stopped and linked tongues with it to pass honey, and the baby ate greedily.
I had no idea there were so many things going on inside a beehive. Grandpa examined all thirty of his colonies, and each one was different from the next. Some hives were swelling with bees, and others looked lonely for company. Some had cranky bees that ran over the comb like they had the heebie-jeebies, and some had sweet bees that ignored us as we inspected. Some were busy making queens, and others were hoarding pollen. Some colonies made wacky wax sculptures inside, and others formed precision sheets of straight comb. One hive even had two queens, which while rare sometimes happened when the queens decided to be friends, which made me relax a little bit about the power struggles over the throne. I was beginning to see that every hive had its own mind, and a good beekeeper keeps track of which hive needs what kind of attention.
The sun had settled down to the waterline by the time Grandpa had finished, and the beehives were making long shadow bars on the grass. As we walked back to the truck, two quail parents heard us coming and hustled their brood behind the safety of the sagebrush, the babies scurrying like cotton balls blown by the wind. Once we were settled back in the truck, he reached down under his seat to see if Rita licked his fingers. Satisfied she was onboard, he put the truck in gear and we bounced back up the pitted dirt road, but this time I knew Grandpa had it under control.
“I like it here,” I said.
“Yeah, me, too. A person can think in Big Sur.”
I understood exactly what he meant. I’d just spent the last several worry-free hours thinking about nothing but bees.
Once we reached the smooth pavement again, Grandpa pointed south down the Coast Highway and told me that when he was in fifth or sixth grade, every day he’d hike five miles up Bixby Canyon to work on the Chapman Ranch with the Trotter brothers. The siblings were teenagers, already huge for their age, and they taught Grandpa how to haul hay, split redwood into timber, brand cattle and shear sheep. Eventually, they were the ones who taught Grandpa how to be a plumber. Grandpa paused his story for a moment as if remembering something, then he began explaining the proper way to pull a lamb out of a ewe.
“If it’s coming out backward, you have to reach in and grab what you can and turn it around.” His voice was grave, as if what he was sharing with me would one day save my life. I didn’t have the heart to tell him that I would never, ever, stick my hand inside an animal of any kind, for any reason.
I rolled my window down to let in the salt air. The mountains were turning dusky purple in the fading light, and a red-tailed hawk tracked our passing truck from atop a telephone pole. I felt oddly content, as if nothing bad could happen to me in Big Sur. I had managed to spend a whole day exploring inside a hive, too absorbed in learning about the bees to feel a pang of sadness. Big Sur was like a secret trapdoor to a pleasant dream.
Watching the queen bee work tirelessly for her family, and her children jostle to take care of her, helped me feel a little less bad about the family I had lost. It reassured me that motherhood is a natural part of nature, even among the tiniest of creatures, so maybe there was hope yet that Mom would come back to me. Even though the bees left the hive every day, they always came back. There was never any doubt that a bee had any other purpose than to be with its family. The hive was predictable, and that was reassuring. It was a family that never quit.