The Bee Line

Part One · The Birdbath

The unfamiliar 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 off the truck herself, gradually, with both arms, as though it were a wedding cake. Omar watched from the upstairs window. The box went to the top corner of their garden, where the ground rose toward the hill and caught the morning sun, and the girl set it on two concrete blocks and stood back with her hands on her hips. Then she pulled a plug of grass out of a slot at the bottom, and nothing happened for a minute, and then the air above the box began to fill with small moving dots. The dots made a sound like a refrigerator with musical ambitions.

His mother said they were honeybees, that it was completely ordinary, 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 fearless about everything in the universe except the bath drain, went out to the lawn with her juice and sat down to watch the dots, and for an entire week there was no difficulty whatsoever. The bees rose out of the box, flew over the hill, and returned, and did not seem 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 from breakfast until supper. Not one or two, either. Omar counted forty on a Tuesday afternoon, with extraordinary patience, 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. One bee rose off the rim and landed on her wrist and traced a slow circle, meticulously cleaning its face. Mina did not move, and she did not breathe, and when the bee finally left, she walked back inside, extremely cautiously, and did not come out again.

That was the entire problem, and it did not sound like much when Omar described it 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 life, and now she stood at the back door and gazed at it apprehensively, and that was not insignificant. His parents said that bees came with the neighbors, and the neighbors seemed perfectly pleasant, and his father said that if Omar wanted to raise the matter, 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 moved, it was going to be his job to ask.

The girl's name was Wren. She was thirteen, the same as him, and when he found her she was crouching beside the hive in grubby overalls with a mesh veil pushed back like a hood, writing numbers in a notebook. Omar had rehearsed a speech about his sister and the birdbath and the forty bees, and he got about halfway through it before she said she was sorry about the birdbath, truly sorry, but the hive was not moving. Not to the far corner, not anywhere. He asked her why not. She closed the notebook, looked at him for a moment as if deciding something, and asked whether he wanted the short answer or the real one. "The short one," said Omar. "Bees," said Wren. Then she sighed and gave him the real one.

Part Two · Three Feet or Three Miles

A hive, Wren said, was not a box 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 after 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 diplomatically as he could. Wren did not seem to mind, and she handed him a piece of chalk, told him to draw a line on the concrete block where the hive sat, and went in for lunch, abandoning 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 came in low over the plum tree, dropped, and landed on the landing strip at the entrance in exactly the same spot, as if there were a path in the air that only they could see. He imagined forty bewildered bees circling in the grass in the darkness, and he rubbed out the chalk line with his shoe, immediately.

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 of them was wrong, which Omar found considerably more irritating than if one of them had been. Water was the first solution 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 just to stay cool, so if the water were closer to home, they would stop crossing the fence for it. Omar filled a bowl from the tap and set it beside the hive.

By the next afternoon there were two bees drowned 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 wanted a shallow dish 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 next to 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 credit for half of it. Bees leave a hive the way planes leave an airport, she said, straight out of the entrance, low, picking up speed, and then they climb. If something tall was 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 come back down to lawn height 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 owned, but a trellis was merely poles and string. Wren's father had bean poles in the shed and a roll of plastic netting, and Omar's mother had a packet of runner beans that she had been meaning 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 have flowers on it. Omar wrote that down, and 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 absolutely no opinions. Four poles went into the ground in a line three paces in front of the hive, deep sufficient 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 cautiously planted the beans, each seed as enormous as a thumbnail and speckled like an egg. The whole thing looked like the net on a extremely narrow tennis court, with no court, and Mina announced from the step that she would be in charge of it.

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

The birdbath took another week. The old bees still remembered the way, but old bees do not last long in summer, and the new ones 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 all the way out to the birdbath and calmly submerged her whole hand in the water, looking up at the bridge of bees passing overhead, the way you look at planes.

That was exactly when the sky began to roar. It started as a hum and grew into a sound like a jet taking off, and a dark cloud erupted out of the hive, thicker than smoke, filling the air above the garden in an enormous, spinning, glittering tornado of insects. Omar's stomach plummeted. Mina stood frozen by the birdbath with her hand still in the water. "Swarm!" exclaimed Wren, vaulting the fence with her veil flapping frantically. "Mina! Stand still! Do not run!" Omar had never in his life wanted so badly to scoop up his sister and sprint, and he forced himself to stay exactly where he was, which was the hardest thing he had ever done.

The cloud swirled over Mina and sank, and then it settled, all of it, onto the low branch of the plum tree directly above her head, hanging there in a gigantic buzzing, living clump like a brown beard. "They are not furious," Wren said, extremely softly, approaching with a cardboard box. "A swarm has no home to protect. Half the hive has just moved out to find a new one. They are the most peaceful creatures imaginable." Mina stared up at ten thousand bees and did not move a single muscle. Then she whispered, in a small, clear voice, "They are truly soft." Wren gave the branch a single sharp shake, and the whole beard dropped into the box like a slow brown waterfall.

The swarm, Wren explained, would go to her uncle's orchard, which was precisely three miles away. Mina insisted on carrying the box to the car herself, with both arms, as though it were a wedding cake. By August the beans had climbed the entire screen and gone over the top, and the netting had vanished under leaves and red flowers, and the bees flew through the flowers on their way up and over. They ate the first beans on Omar's back step, the three of them, with the bee line passing so high overhead 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.