The Pheromone

Colony

Chapter 6: The Pheromone

The queen produces a chemical. The chemical is called queen mandibular pheromone, QMP, a blend of five compounds secreted by the mandibular glands in the queen's head, and the blend is specific, is unique to the queen, is the olfactory signature that identifies her to the colony and that tells the colony, in the language of molecules rather than words: I am here, I am laying, the colony is whole. The five compounds have names — 9-ODA, 9-HDA, HVA, HOB, methyl oleate — and Meg did not know their names for the first twenty years of her beekeeping and did not need to know their names because the names were chemistry and Meg's work was not chemistry but husbandry, was not the analysis of the signal but the observation of its effects, and the effects were visible in the hive every time she opened one.

She explained this to Luz in the Morrison apiary on a morning in early April when the cherry trees on the hillside above the blueberry farm were in full bloom and the air smelled of stone fruit blossoms and the temperature was fifty-eight degrees and the bees were flying hard, the foragers streaming in and out of the hive entrances in the dense traffic that indicated a nectar flow, however brief, the first real flow of the season, the flow that said: spring is here, the food is coming, lay more eggs, build more comb, the colony can expand now because the environment is providing.

"The pheromone is how the colony knows it has a queen," Meg said. She held a frame up to the light, the frame alive with bees, the brood pattern visible beneath the walking workers, the capped cells in the center, the arc of pollen above them, the crescent of capped honey at the top — the natural arrangement, the concentric rings of brood, pollen, and honey that the colony builds on every frame, the arrangement that optimizes the nurse bees' access to both the larvae they feed and the pollen and honey they feed them with, an arrangement that no bee designed and no bee decided upon and that emerges from the individual behaviors of thousands of bees each doing the thing that makes sense in their immediate vicinity, the local decisions that produce the global pattern, the emergent order of a system that has no architect.

"The queen doesn't broadcast the pheromone," Meg said. "She doesn't spray it. She produces it on her body, and the retinue bees — the six or eight workers that attend her — they lick it from her. They groom her and they pick up the pheromone on their bodies and they walk through the hive and they contact other bees and the pheromone transfers. Bee to bee. Contact by contact. Within a few hours, every bee in the hive has received the signal. Every bee knows: the queen is here."

"A contact network," Luz said.

"Yes."

"So the pheromone moves through the hive like information through a social network. Each bee is a node. The retinue bees are the primary nodes, the ones directly connected to the queen, and they pass the information to secondary nodes, and the secondary nodes pass it to tertiary nodes, and within a predictable number of contacts the entire population has received the signal."

Meg looked at Luz. "Yes," she said. "That is exactly what it is."

She did not say that she had never thought of it this way. She did not say that the network metaphor was new to her, that she had always understood the pheromone transfer as a physical process — bees touching bees, the substance moving from body to body like a rumor at a party, spreading outward from the source — and had not mapped it onto the language of networks and nodes and information transfer. But the mapping was precise. The mapping was what Luz did — took the biological phenomenon and placed it in a framework that illuminated it from a different angle, the angle of systems theory, of network science, of the abstract patterns that underlie apparently dissimilar processes: a queen distributing pheromone, a person spreading a rumor, a virus moving through a population, a mood infecting a room.

"And when the pheromone weakens," Meg said.

She paused. She held the frame. A bee walked across her glove, its antennae waving, reading the chemical landscape of Meg's nitrile-covered hand, finding nothing of interest, moving on. Meg watched the bee the way she watched all bees, with the peripheral attention that was her default mode in the apiary, the wide-focus seeing that took in the whole frame and the whole hive and the whole apiary simultaneously, the seeing that was not looking at but looking with, the seeing that her grandmother had called "bee eyes" — "Use your bee eyes, Margaret. Don't look at one thing. See everything."

"When the pheromone weakens," Meg said, "the colony knows."

She set the frame back in the hive. She pulled the next frame — more brood, more bees, the queen somewhere in the box, her pheromone saturating the population, the signal strong, the colony cohesive, the ten thousand individual decisions that ten thousand individual bees were making all oriented by the chemical message that said: we are whole, we are queened, continue the work, continue the building, continue the laying and the feeding and the foraging and the comb-drawing and the defending, continue, continue.

"The workers respond to the weakening pheromone by building queen cells," Meg said. "Not immediately. Not the first day the signal fades. The colony has some tolerance for fluctuation — pheromone production varies with temperature, with the queen's age, with the colony's size. A large colony needs more pheromone to saturate the population than a small colony, so a queen that was adequate for twenty thousand bees may be inadequate for fifty thousand bees, not because she has changed but because the colony has changed around her, and her signal, which was sufficient, is now diluted, and the dilution is the trigger."

She pulled another frame. She was looking for the queen cells — the long peanut-shaped cells that the workers built when the pheromone told them to, the cells that Meg checked for at every inspection because the presence of queen cells told her something about the colony's assessment of its own queen, the colony's chemical referendum on the queen's performance, a referendum that was continuous, that was happening in every hive at every moment, the workers constantly measuring the pheromone level, constantly assessing, and the assessment was not deliberate, was not a vote, was not a choice, was the aggregated behavior of thousands of individuals each responding to the same stimulus — weak pheromone — with the same response — build queen cells — and the aggregation produced the decision, the way an election produces a result not from the deliberation of the electorate but from the summation of individual preferences.

"They build queen cells," Luz said. She was watching the frame Meg was holding, scanning it for the elongated cells.

"They find eggs or young larvae — larvae less than three days old — and they begin feeding them royal jelly. Exclusively royal jelly. The same larvae that would have become workers. The same genetics. But the diet changes the developmental path. The royal jelly activates the genes that produce a queen instead of a worker. A longer body. Functional ovaries. The ability to mate. The ability to lay fertilized eggs. A lifespan of years instead of weeks. All from the food."

"You are what you eat," Luz said.

"In this case, literally."

Meg found a queen cell on the bottom of the fifth frame. A single cell, elongated, the wax stippled with the texture that queen cells have, a texture different from the smooth caps of worker brood, the cell hanging from the bottom bar of the frame like a stalactite, and Meg held the frame so Luz could see it, and Luz looked at it with the intensity that she brought to everything in the apiary, the intensity that was not excitement but was attention, the focused seeing of a person for whom this was not a demonstration but a revelation.

"Supersedure cell," Meg said. "See the position — bottom of the frame, but only one. If there were a dozen of them along the bottom edges, I'd think swarm cells. Swarm cells are the colony preparing to divide. But one or two cells in the middle of the frame or at the bottom — that's supersedure. The colony is replacing the queen. Quietly. Deliberately."

"What happens to the old queen?"

"She stays. For now. She and the new queen will coexist briefly — they may even lay side by side for a few days, mother and daughter. And then the old queen disappears. Sometimes the new queen kills her. Sometimes the workers stop feeding her. Sometimes she just — stops. The colony transitions."

"No ceremony," Luz said.

"No ceremony."

They stood in the apiary, the two of them, the hive open between them, the supersedure cell hanging from the frame like a promise or a verdict, and Meg felt the thing she felt when she taught, the thing that was not pride exactly but was the satisfaction of transmission, the satisfaction of the knowledge moving from her into another person and being received not as memorized fact but as understood principle, and the understanding was visible in Luz's face, in the way Luz looked at the queen cell and saw not just the wax and the larva inside but the process, the system, the colony's self-correction, the organism repairing itself by replacing the component that was failing.

"The colony does not wait for permission," Meg said.

She said this and she heard herself say it and she heard the sentence as both instruction and confession, both lesson and admission, because the sentence applied to the bees and it applied to her life and the application was not metaphor, was not Meg drawing a comparison, was simply the truth existing in two domains simultaneously, the way light exists as both particle and wave, the truth of the colony and the truth of the marriage being the same truth expressed in different systems: when the signal weakens, the organism responds. The organism does not ask the signal's permission. The organism does not consult the failing component. The organism detects the insufficiency and begins the replacement and the replacement is not cruelty, is not betrayal, is the survival response of a system that cannot afford to be sentimental about its own parts.

"The colony does not sentimentalize the old queen," Meg said. "The colony does not spend two years wondering why the pheromone faded. The colony does not lie on the couch. The colony does not stop eating or start drinking or sit in the dark watching television it is not watching. The colony detects the change and responds to the change and the response is immediate and practical and correct. The colony builds the cell. The colony raises the replacement. The colony continues."

She stopped. She had said too much. She had said the thing she did not say, the thing about the couch and the drinking and the dark, the thing that was not about bees but was about the year after Gavin left, the year she had spent in the house with the television on and the sound off, the year she had spent not answering the phone and not driving to town and not seeing Diane and not doing anything that was not the minimum of bee care, the February-to-October cycle contracted to its most essential acts — feed, treat, harvest, winterize — the beekeeping equivalent of survival, the reduced cluster of a woman who had drawn her life down to its smallest diameter and was vibrating just enough to stay warm.

Luz did not comment on what Meg had said. Luz did not say, "Are you talking about yourself?" Luz did not tilt her head or soften her eyes or make any of the gestures that people make when they recognize that someone has said something personal and they want to acknowledge the personal without violating the person. Luz picked up the smoker and gave the hive a puff and said, "How long does it take for the new queen to emerge?"

The question was a kindness. The question was the social equivalent of the smoker — the mediating gesture, the thing that redirected the moment from the personal back to the practical, from the confession back to the lesson, and Meg took the redirect the way the bees took the smoke, gratefully, gorging on the return to safe ground.

"Sixteen days from egg," Meg said. "If they're raising her from a freshly laid egg. If they're raising her from a larva that's already a day or two old, less. The queen cell is capped on day nine. She pupates. She emerges on day sixteen. She spends a few days in the hive, eating, hardening. Then she goes on her mating flight. She mates. She returns. She starts laying. The whole process, from the colony's decision to the new queen's first egg, is about four weeks."

"Four weeks to replace the center of the organism."

"Yes."

"That's fast."

"The colony can't afford slow."

They closed the hive. They moved to the next one. The morning continued, the work continued, the rhythm of the apiary absorbed them the way the apiary always absorbed Meg, the way the repetitive physical work of opening and inspecting and closing created a state that was not meditation but was meditative, was the focused absence of self-consciousness that comes from doing something you know how to do in a place you know how to be, and Meg existed in this state the way she existed in no other state, fully present, fully herself, fully the beekeeper and nothing else — not the divorced woman, not the woman whose husband had left, not the woman who had spent a year on the couch, not the woman who did not answer the phone — just the beekeeper, just the hands on the frame, just the eyes on the brood, just the smoke and the wax and the hum.

They broke for lunch. Meg had packed sandwiches — she had packed two, without thinking about it, without noting that she had packed two, the second sandwich appearing in the cooler as naturally as the first, the arithmetic of two emerging unbidden from the arithmetic of one, and she had not noticed until they sat on the tailgate of the truck and she opened the cooler and handed Luz a sandwich and Luz took it and said, "Thanks," and Meg said nothing because there was nothing to say, it was a sandwich, she had packed it, and the packing was not significant, was not a gesture, was just the sandwich.

Except it was significant. It was the first time in two years she had packed food for another person. It was the first time in two years that the arithmetic of one had shifted, even slightly, toward the arithmetic of two, and the shift was so small that Meg did not consciously register it, the way the colony does not consciously register the first faint weakening of the old queen's pheromone, the change too subtle for any individual to detect but present, present in the system, present in the aggregate, the first molecule of the new signal in a colony that did not yet know it was changing.

In the afternoon they drove to the Kowalski apiary, twenty-five hives on a cattle ranch east of Sheridan, the hives placed along a fence line bordering a meadow that in summer would be thick with clover and vetch and bird's-foot trefoil, the wildflower mix that was Meg's best honey source, the source that produced the amber floral honey she sold at the farmer's market under the label she had designed herself — Hollis Apiaries, Willamette Valley Wildflower Honey — the label handsome in its simplicity, the design the one thing she had accepted Gavin's help with, years ago, his eye for layout and typography producing a label that looked professional without looking corporate, a label that said: this was made by a person, in a specific place, from specific flowers, and the specificity is the value.

At the Kowalski apiary Meg found a colony that was queenless and had been queenless long enough that the workers had begun building emergency queen cells — not the deliberate, single supersedure cell of the earlier colony but multiple cells, five of them, scattered along the bottom bars of the frames, the colony's frantic response to the sudden absence of pheromone, the emergency protocol that activated when the queen disappeared not through the gradual fading of supersedure but through the sudden absence of death or departure, the colony throwing every resource into raising replacements because the clock was ticking, the three-day window for starting queen cells closing, the larvae aging out of the stage at which royal jelly could transform them, and the colony was racing the biology, building five cells to improve the odds that at least one would produce a viable queen.

"Five cells," Luz said. She was holding a frame, the queen cells visible along the bottom edge, the cells at various stages of development, some still open with larvae visible in the pool of milky royal jelly, others capped, the pupating queen inside.

"The first one to emerge will find the others," Meg said. "She'll chew into the side of each cell and sting the developing queen inside. Kill her sisters. There can be only one."

"And if two emerge at the same time?"

"They fight. They sting each other. One survives. Usually."

Luz held the frame and looked at the queen cells and Meg could see her processing this, the brutality of it, the unsentimentalized violence of succession, the biology that did not distinguish between replacement and regicide, that used the same instrument — the sting — for defense and for power, the queen's sting being the one sting in the colony that was not suicidal, the queen's stinger being smooth rather than barbed, designed to be used and retracted and used again, designed for exactly this purpose: the elimination of rivals, the consolidation of reproductive power, the absolute monarchy of the hive maintained not by consent but by chemistry and by violence.

"It's not cruel," Meg said. "I know it sounds cruel. But the colony needs one queen. One queen, one pheromone signal, one reproductive center. Multiple queens would mean multiple signals, conflicting pheromones, confused workers. The colony cannot function with ambiguity. The colony requires certainty: one queen, present, laying, sufficient. And the mechanism that produces certainty is competition. The strongest queen survives. The strongest queen is the one whose genetics, whose vigor, whose mating success will be most likely to produce a strong colony. The killing is the selection. The selection is the survival."

She heard herself. She heard the dispassion. She heard the clarity with which she described the destruction of potential queens by their sister, the flatness of tone that was not coldness but was the particular register of a person who has accepted a biological fact so thoroughly that the acceptance has become her voice, and the voice was the voice of the apiary, the voice of thirty years of watching queens emerge and fight and mate and lay and fail and be replaced, and the watching had stripped the anthropomorphism from her, had removed the temptation to overlay human emotion onto insect behavior, had taught her to see the colony as the colony was rather than as she might wish it to be, and the seeing was honest, and the honesty was the thing her grandmother had meant when she said: "Bees don't lie. They do what they do. The hive is honest the way most people aren't."

Most people weren't honest the way bees were honest. Most people — Meg included, Meg especially — layered their behavior with ambiguity, with implication, with the possibility of multiple interpretations, with the deniability that came from never saying directly what you meant. The bees had no deniability. The pheromone was or was not sufficient. The queen was or was not laying. The colony was or was not building queen cells. There was no subtext. There was no reading between the lines. There was only the line, the chemical signal, the biological fact, and the fact was legible to anyone who knew how to read it.

Meg envied this. She did not say she envied it. She did not think the word "envy." But the feeling was there, had been there for years, the feeling of a woman who lived among organisms that communicated with perfect clarity and who went home to a species that communicated with perfect ambiguity, and the gap between the two was the gap between the apiary and the house, the gap between the work and the life, the gap that Meg crossed every evening when she unzipped her suit and hung it in the shed and walked to the kitchen and stood in the silence that was not pheromonal but was emotional, the silence of a house without a signal, without the chemical announcement that said: someone is here, someone is present, the unit is whole.

The pheromone had faded. The signal had weakened. And Meg had not built queen cells. Meg had not raised a replacement. Meg had sat in the weakening signal and waited for someone else to notice, and someone had noticed — Gavin had noticed — and Gavin's response had not been to build a queen cell but to leave, to remove himself from the colony rather than replace the failing component, and the leaving was the thing, the leaving was the response that had no analogue in the hive because bees do not leave, bees respond, bees build, bees replace, bees continue.

But Meg was not a bee. And the colony of two that she and Gavin had constituted was not a hive. And the pheromone that had held them together — whatever the human equivalent was, love or habit or the contractual inertia of marriage, the legal and social and domestic bonds that functioned as the human version of the chemical signal — had weakened according to its own biology, had faded according to its own schedule, and neither of them had responded the way the bees responded, with the immediate practical clarity of organisms that detect a problem and solve it.

She closed the last hive at the Kowalski apiary. She made her notes. She drove home with Luz following in the green Subaru. At the house they unloaded the truck, cleaned the equipment, logged the day's inspections. Luz left. The gravel crunched under her tires on the drive. The sound faded. The evening settled.

Meg stood in the kitchen. The house was quiet. The house was always quiet now, the silence not oppressive but factual, the acoustic signature of a space that contained one person and the objects that one person needed and the residual objects of the person who had left and the particular quality of air that exists in rooms where breathing has been halved.

She thought about the pheromone. She thought about the signal that holds the organism together, the signal that says: the center is here, the center is functioning, the organism is whole. She thought about what happens when the signal fades and the organism does not respond and the not-responding becomes the response, becomes the new normal, becomes the steady state of a system that has accepted insufficiency as its operating condition.

The bees did not accept insufficiency. The bees built queen cells.

Meg opened the refrigerator. She took out a beer. She drank it standing at the counter, looking out the window at the apiary in the last light, the hives in the shadow of the barn, the bees done flying, the colonies clustered in the dark, the pheromone moving through each hive, bee to bee, contact to contact, the signal strong, the signal saying: the queen is here, the queen is here, the queen is here.

The beer was cold. The kitchen was warm. Meg stood in the kitchen and the pheromone of her own life was whatever it was — the smell of beeswax, the taste of the beer, the weight of her body on the linoleum, the sound of nothing, the feel of the bottle in her hand — and the pheromone was weak, was dilute, was the signal of a colony of one, and a colony of one was not a colony, a colony of one was an individual, and an individual was what Meg was, and the being-individual was the condition, and the condition was what the bees would have responded to by building queen cells, by raising a replacement, by beginning the process of renewal.

But Meg was not a bee. And the queen cell was not built. And the evening was dark. And Meg finished the beer and rinsed the bottle and went to bed and lay in the dark in the house that smelled of honey and listened to the silence and the silence was the pheromone, the silence was the signal, the silence said: no one is here, no one is here, no one is here.

And outside, in the apiary, the queens were laying in the dark.