“What is it?”
“Pollen. From flowers. The color tells you which flower they came from. Tan is from the almond tree. Gray is the blackberries. Orange is poppy. Yellow is mustard, most likely.”
“What’s it for?”
“Bee bread.”
Now he was just messing with me. Bees can’t bake bread. All they make is honey. Everybody knew that.
“Grandpa!”
“What? You don’t believe me?”
“No.”
“Suit yourself. Bees mix the pollen with a little spit and nectar and feed it to their babies. Bee bread.”
It made some sense, but it was just too weird. I waited for him to giggle at his own joke, but he kept a straight face. Grandpa had told the truth when he said it was safe to let a bee crawl on me, so I guessed he knew what pollen was for. For the moment, I played along.
“They’re making bread in there?”
“They push the pollen off their legs, chew it with nectar and store it in the honeycomb.”
“Can I see?”
“Not today. I don’t want to disturb them right now. They are building new wax.”
Just then the fattest bee I’d ever seen lumbered out of the hive. It was wider and stockier than all the others, and its head was comprised almost entirely of two massive eyes. I watched it approach several of the regular-size bees and tap its antennae against theirs. Every bee it touched backed up and walked around it, as if irritated by being bumped.
“Is that the queen bee?”
Grandpa picked it up and put it in his palm. “Nope. A drone…a boy bee. He’s begging for food.”
I asked Grandpa why he didn’t just get his own food.
“Boy bees don’t do any work. All those bees you see with pollen? All girls. Boys don’t collect nectar or pollen for the hive, they don’t feed the babies and they don’t make wax or honey. They don’t even have stingers, so they can’t protect the hive.”
Grandpa returned the drone to the hive entrance where it resumed the search for handouts. Finally, one of the returning girl bees paused and linked tongues with him. Feeding him nectar, Grandpa said.
“He only has one job, but I’ll explain it to you when you’re a little older.”
Grandpa had set up two stumps near his apiary, and we took seats and watched the bees flying as one would watch a fire, or the sea, lulled by all the individual movements that combined together into a single flow. I liked interpreting the patterns of their routine, to know that the bees weren’t just flying willy-nilly; there was an order to what they were doing. They were out grocery shopping for bread and nectar. A beehive could seem chaotic if you didn’t understand that bees had a plan for everything.
I could have never guessed that a beehive is a female place, a castle with a queen but no king. All the worker bees inside are female; around sixty thousand daughters that look after their mother by feeding her, bringing her water droplets and keeping her warm at night. The colony would wither and die without a queen laying eggs. Yet without her daughters taking care of her, the queen would either starve or freeze to death.
Their need for one another was what kept them strong.
1975—Summer
Our grandparents had the incredible good fortune to live only steps away from the Carmel Valley Airfield, where two-seater planes landed and took off a handful of times a month. It was nothing more than a dirt landing strip, with just one runway and a taxiway, and no lights, fences or security of any kind. There were no markings or signs to direct pilots and the tattered wind sock was rendered useless. Pilots had to radio in to a neighbor with a view of the runway and ask which way the wind was blowing.
Uprooted as we were without access to our playthings or our former playmates, Matthew and I had to get creative in our diversions and make use of whatever was readily available. We tried to build pyramids with Granny’s poker cards, we put out birdseed and waited for birds, but an airport with real live planes was an entertainment jackpot.
All it took was the rumble of an incoming propeller, and Matthew would drop whatever was in his hand and go streaking out of the house to look for a plane. He was mad for those planes, falling into a near trance as he watched them come in for a landing. He’d run for Grandpa and yank him by the hand, urging him to take us across the street so we could stand by the runway and feel the wind wash over us as the plane whooshed down from the skies.
One afternoon we heard the telltale engine noise, but Grandpa was working in Big Sur and we didn’t have an escort. But now that we were spending so much time alone together, a budding solidarity was forming between Matthew and me, and sometimes our companionship crossed over into mischief. We hesitated ever so slightly, looked back to the quiet house, then grinned at one another and bolted across the road, huffing it up the small incline to reach the airstrip just as the plane was circling overhead.
Matthew wanted to get closer to the plane this time, so we crept to the median between the two runways and sat down in the grass to wait for the plane to fly over us. I snapped off a mustard blossom and ate it, like I’d seen Grandpa do. I offered a yellow bloom to Matthew, but he wrinkled his nose. We could hear the propeller approaching, beating the air like thunder. Matthew reached for my hand, and we stretched out on our backs and looked skyward.
When the plane’s underbelly crossed not twenty feet overhead, we felt the growling engine in our chests and screamed with the same mix of joy and terror that roller coasters were designed for. I can’t imagine what the pilot must have thought when he saw two small children pop into view at the last minute. We waved, innocently hoping he’d see us; he probably had heart palpitations.
We sat up and watched the plane make a few short screeching hops and then touch down. It rolled toward the end of the landing strip where a collection of similar planes was parked, their wings chained to the ground.
Just then the plane, its blades still whirring, made a U-turn and started slowly approaching us. It was halfway down the runway when the plane stopped and the pilot got out and shouted something at us. We couldn’t hear the words, but picked out the unmistakable tone of an adult who “would like a word” with us. We sprang to our feet and took off, and before I could count to ten, we were back behind our little red house, bent over, sucking in oxygen. I hoped the pilot hadn’t seen which house we ran to, and secretly promised myself never to do that again.
When we caught our breath, we walked as innocently as possible into the kitchen, where Granny was scorching something in the electric skillet. She’d given up on the oven long ago, insisting the temperature dial had a manufacturer’s defect that burned her food. The oven became a tabletop for a square electric frying pan no bigger than a pizza box, and although her cursing had subsided considerably, every breakfast, lunch and dinner still came out blackened and overdone.
“Where have you two been?” she asked, keeping her back to us and furiously scraping at something with the spatula. I put my finger to my lips to remind Matthew we couldn’t tell. He nodded.
“Nowhere. Just outside,” I said.
“Well, stay close. Dinner’s almost ready.”
“We saw a plane!” Matthew piped. The kid just couldn’t help himself. Before the conversation could progress, I quickly grabbed his hand and led him to the living room, distracting