What the Bees Know

Grandma Yetunde said the bees spoke in geometry. Not with words — words were too blunt, she said, too stubborn to carry everything a thing might mean. The bees spoke in the angle of a dance, the precise direction of a waggle, the distance encoded in the duration of a shimmy that no human had been fast enough to measure fully.

"They are always telling each other where the sweetness is," she told Kemi. "They have never once stopped to argue about whether the sweetness is worth finding."

Kemi was twelve and furious at everything that year. She was furious at school and at her parents and at the particular quality of boredom that came from spending summers in her grandmother's village. She was not furious at the bees, which surprised her. She did not tell her grandmother this.

They spent three weeks working the hives together. Grandma Yetunde moved through the bees without a suit — she had done it for sixty years and the bees, she said, knew her by now. Kemi wore the full suit and still jumped when a bee flew too close to her face net. Her grandmother laughed every time, not unkindly.

On the last morning before Kemi left, her grandmother pressed a small jar of honey into her hands.

"For the dark months," she said. "There will be dark months. There always are. But the bees survive them by knowing exactly where the sweetness was, so they know where to look when the world opens up again."

Kemi kept the jar for two years before she opened it. By then she understood.