12

Early in March, a week arrived that brought the sun to Hafeld every day. The hives began to stir, and the hardiest of the winter bees came out to forage. It was likely that the Queen was now laying eggs out of her well-kept store of semen from fornications consummated high in the air last summer. Now one hive began to weigh more each morning. That worried Alois. The other should be doing as well.

He decided to open the top of each Langstroth box and look in. Whereupon he discovered exactly what he had been fearing. The two colonies might have sat on the same bench through the winter, but only one was thriving, the other could not be termed healthy. While a few dead bees lay on the lowest platform of the good box, a tumble of minuscule carcasses covered the floor of the other.

Just before the warm spell, Alois, by way of the rubber tube, had heard a great deal of restless humming in this second colony. It had worried him. Now, open to examination, many of the brood combs were empty. Had the Queen died? He did not really know how to locate the lady—she was, after all, only a bit larger than her own worker bees, smaller, indeed, than the drones.

He would have been dispirited, but his acumen had also been confirmed. He had not worried for too little. It looked like some dread disease had laid waste to the hive.

So Alois decided that all the remaining bees of this colony had to be gassed. The good hive had to be protected. He was even ready to call on Der Alte for assistance but decided that he would not. His winter-long worries had engendered their own kind of fortitude.

He chose a Saturday. Adi and Angela, home from school, were his assistants, and the process was not difficult. He took a small cake of sulphur, part of the equipment he had purchased five months ago, lit it, and left it to smoke on the floor of the bad hive. The entrance was plugged, the hive lid at the top was laid on again, and the gas did the job quickly. When Angela began to weep over the death of the poor bees, Alois sent her inside. But Adi watched, sitting beside Alois on an adjoining bench, his eyes alive in response to his father’s lecture. “Your big sister is silly,” said Alois. “To become so upset! In nature there is no mercy for the weak.”

“I am not bothered,” said Adi.

“Good,” said Alois. “Now let us empty this box and clean the combs.”

Adi found himself thinking of Der Alte’s one lonesome bee, now dead, and that did bring tears to his eyes.

But, of course, there was no comparison. He blinked back his tears. Der Alte had loved one little bee, but the sick ones here in this bad hive dirtied the place where they ate and where they slept. No comparison.

That night, by way of a suggestion from the Maestro, I prepared a small dream-etching, simple enough to be installed by the best of my local Hafeld agents. It was a repetitive dream in which his father asked Adi to count each and every one of the dead bees. To make sure of the number, Adi was told to lay them out in rows, one hundred to each row—a tedious dream to be certain. All the same, he was proud of the high number he had managed to count. There had been forty rows of one hundred bees, all laid out on an immaculate white cloth. He had not realized until now that he could count to four thousand. No one in his class would come near. His only regret was that he had not finished the dream. There had been more mounds of dead bees to count.

Here, I would warn the reader not to make too much of the gassing nor the body count. It is not to be understood as the unique cause of all that came later. For a dream-etching, no matter how artful, leaves but a dot upon your psyche, a footprint to anticipate a future sequence of developments that may or may not come to pass in future decades. Most dream-etchings are not unlike the abandoned foundations one can see on the outskirts of Third World cities. Left to molder for lack of further funds, they lie there, excavations on a scraggly field.

It would be a gross mistake, then, to assume that this dream-etching determined all that was to follow. I assure you we would be the first to applaud if matters were that simple.