1 — A Queen Is Chosen
Day Zero · 56 days left
"The hive is dying."
Bee Brief said it the way another bee might read out the weather, and then he turned a page.
It was the third thing anybody had said to her. The first was that she had been selected. The second was that they could skip the pleasant part.
"You might have opened with it," said Bea.
"I did."
She stood at the end of the table. Nobody had offered her a chair and she had decided not to ask.
Eight of them sat around it, and four of those were bees. The Board of Bees had met in this chamber on the first Tuesday of the month for eleven years, and for most of those years nothing much had been decided here. The chair had never let a meeting run past its hour. One had run honey operations her whole working life and had sat on this board through every year of the decline and could tell you the moisture in a comb by standing near it. One would not accept an adjective where a figure existed. The fourth said the least and left first, every time, and the others had long since stopped finding it rude.
The other four had put up the capital when the hive was founded. An opossum, a skunk, a martin, and a fourth who had inherited his share and treated the meetings as a social occasion. They loved honey. They also loved a good investment, and for a decade they had told each other that this was one: solid business, long history, considerable upside, somewhat undermanaged.
They still believed it. That was the strange part.
Bea waited.
"The beetles have laid their eggs in the honeycomb. The lower chamber, where production was idled. They are hatching now." He turned a page. "I'm told it may be too far gone."
"How long has that been known?"
"Longer than it was reported."
Bee Critical leaned in, and the room let her.
"Production is off by a third. Customers are drifting. Employees are leaving faster than we replace them. Faster than we try to replace them. And there are wasps in our territory selling a product we do not make." She spread her hands. "Any one of those, we manage. All four at once is a pattern."
"Drifting is not a number," said Bee Brilliant.
She had not brought papers. She had never needed them.
"Twenty customers are more than half of everything we sell, and nobody at this table can tell me what those twenty want next year. The guard on the south face was nine hundred two years ago. This morning it is four hundred and ten. That is not a colony with a sales problem. That is a colony that cannot defend its own front door."
"And our largest problem is none of those," said Bee Brief. "Our largest problem is that Queen Apis is failing. She can no longer produce the pheromone that holds a colony together. Without it a hive comes apart from the inside." He finally looked at her. "That is why you are here."
Bea stared at the board.
"We should have seen it sooner," said Bee Critical, to nobody in particular. "We read the same report every month for two years and every one of them looked survivable."
"Who knows about this?"
"The colony knows something is happening," said Bee Critical. "They don't know everything."
"They know enough to be frightened and not enough to be useful," said the opossum, who had put in the most money and said the least.
"What should I do?" asked Bea.
"Go and see Apis," said Bee Critical. "She's weak. She still cares, more than is good for her. Ask her plainly and she'll tell you the truth. She's the only bee in this hive who can afford to."
Bee Gone rose and put out his hand, and the others took it as the signal it was.
"It's time to lead, Bea. Or should I say, Queen Bea." He shook her hand once, firmly. "We're here for you. Anything you need, you ask. Just remember you have eight weeks to find us a suitable new home."
"Eight weeks."
"Fifty-six days. After that there is no hive to move."
"Why fifty-six?"
Bee Critical answered, because nobody else was going to.
"A comb goes a hundred days from the day the beetles are in it. Ours were found on the first of the month." She did not look away. "That was forty-four days ago. You get what is left of it."
"Thank you," said Bea. "I'll do my best."
Bee Gone was already moving. The martin stopped beside her on his way out and spoke in the mild way of an animal who has been polite for a very long time.
"We'd like the business to work," he said. "We'd also like our money back. Those two sentences are not always the same sentence, and I'd rather you heard that from us today than worked it out on your own in week six."
Then the door, and the corridor noise behind it, and eight chairs pushed back from a table nobody was sitting at.
Bea stood in the empty chamber a while longer. Nobody came back to tell her what to do first.
Apis's chamber was warm and too small and smelled faintly of old wax.
Apis was frail, and alert, and glad to see her.
"I'm so glad the board picked you," she said. "I know our future is in good hands."
"That's kind. You've known me about nine seconds."
"I've read about you for a month." Apis waved at the seat beside her. "How can I help?"
"Tell me about the business. Then the team. Don't be gentle. I'd rather be frightened today than surprised in three weeks."
"No problem." Apis settled herself. "It's a terrific business. Long history, good product, loyal customers. It has fallen on hard times, and I can tell you exactly where the hard times started, because I was in the room for every single step."
"Start there."
"Supply. We've always bought from one local farmer. Bob, at Happy Farms. His father sold to my predecessor. Over the last year or so he's become constrained. Less land, less bloom, less of everything."
"And before that?"
"Before that it was price. We sell traditional honey. We have always been able to get price. So when volume softened, we took a price increase, and the numbers held, and everyone was pleased with us. The next year volume softened again and we took another one, and the numbers held again."
"How long was volume falling before anybody said the word out loud?"
"Two years. About a year ago it dropped past the point where price could cover it. That was the month we stopped being clever."
"What was underneath it?"
"Turbo went and found out. That's the part I'd like on the record, that he went and looked. A group of wasps out of Latin America had set up shop. New flavors. We had competitors before. We did not have those. At first it was nothing. Then they launched lavender. It turns out badgers love lavender. Who knew, right?"
"So we make lavender."
"So we decided to. Rusty went to Bob and Bob was very sorry about it. He'd have loved to sell to us. He'd already signed exclusive to the wasps." Apis shrugged. "We checked every other supplier in thirty miles. Nobody has anything comparable."
"And then the staff."
"And then the staff. Sales were down. We didn't need as many bees, and we couldn't have afforded them if we had. So we cut cost." She looked at the far wall. "We were fifty-eight thousand two years ago. We are forty-one now. Sixteen thousand of that gap is bees who were never born, because I held the brood back for eighteen months to hold the line."
"And it worked."
"It worked beautifully. The business stabilized. We thought we'd bought ourselves a year to find a new source of material." Apis's hands went still. "While we were looking, we lost the comb."
"Tell me how."
"We idled the lower chamber. There was nothing wrong with that on its own: no volume, no reason to run it." She said the next part carefully, as though she had said it to herself many times. "The bees who used to walk that chamber every week, and lift the frames, and look — those were bees I'd let go. Nobody was neglecting it. It simply stopped being anyone's."
"Beetles."
"Small hive beetles. By the time we saw it, it was not small." Apis closed her eyes briefly. "It's ruined the comb. Rusty thinks he can fix it. Rusty thinks he can fix everything, and I love him for it, but this one is past us. We'd need outside help, and the only outfit capable of it is the carpenter ants. They're excellent. They're expensive. And they're quoting ten weeks minimum, six of that demolition before they set a single new cell."
"Wow," said Bea. "It just keeps getting better."
"There's good news in all of it."
"I would love some."
"You have a great team." Apis said it as a fact she had checked. "They're not perfect. They are dedicated and they are loyal to this hive, and you cannot buy either of those things."
"Tell me about them."
"Turbo is fantastic. Knows the customers better than they know themselves, and they love him for it. He gets excited, and when he's excited he gets out ahead of the team, and then he's standing somewhere on his own waving at everybody." She smiled properly for the first time. "I've always believed I'd rather guide a rocket than kick a rock. Turbo is all rocket."
"Rusty."
"Terrific operations bee. Knows this hive like the back of his hand and treats it like his child. Some days I think it is. He's superb with the suppliers. He has always, always got us what we needed." A pause. "Which is why it surprised us all that he couldn't get the lavender."
"Did anyone ask him why?"
Apis was quiet for a moment.
"No," she said.
"Gabby."
"Closest to the colony of anybody here. Cares deeply, wants what is best for everyone, and will not be managed. I'd stop trying if I were you. She gets emotional in the hard conversations, which only endears her to them, and it means she'll tell you the true thing before she tells you the safe one."
"Nelly."
"Nelly is our rockstar. She knows her numbers cold and she is wonderful with the board and the investors, because she understands that the investors don't run this company but they do own it, and she has never once confused those two facts." Apis nodded slowly. "She was my right hand. I trusted her completely."
"The investment in the new products. Was that Nelly's idea?"
"It was ours. We think so much alike we finish each other's sentences."
Bea wrote that down and did not say why.
"And Hustle, Bustle and Tussle?"
"They bring the raw goods in and take the honey out, and they're efficient, and the customers enjoy them, which matters more than anyone gives it credit for." Apis lifted a wing. "They're your eyes and ears in the field. If something out there is changing, they will have seen it first."
"It's clear to me you've done an awesome job running this hive," said Bea.
"To be honest? I've made a lot of mistakes." Apis did not soften it. "I should have moved faster on new products. I still have no idea how we missed the wasps arriving. They didn't sneak in, they rented a field." She stopped. "But my biggest regret is not catching the beetles in time to save the comb."
"Don't carry it. You did the best you could with what was in front of you."
"I know. But—"
"No buts." Bea leaned forward. "Everything you've done your whole life brought you to that chair, and everything I've done brought me to this one, and if you change one thing we aren't sitting here having this conversation. This colony is grateful to you. So am I."
Apis looked at her.
"Then let me give you the only thing I have left that's worth anything."
She reached behind her and brought out a book.
It was old. The corners were soft, the spine had been rebound more than once, and there was handwriting on the first page in an ink that had gone brown.
"Every journey is different," said Apis. "The process is not. This has been handed along since the founding of the original colony. My predecessor gave it to me on her last day and I have carried it ever since."
"What's in it?"
"Not answers." Apis's mouth twitched. "I looked. I kept turning pages waiting for the chapter that told me what to do. It never comes. What it shows you is how to help your team find the answers."
"Why not just find them myself? It would be faster."
"It would." Apis pushed the book across the table. "And not one bee would carry them. The answers have to be theirs, or there is no ownership, and without ownership you will be the only bee in this hive doing anything at all." She let go of the cover. "Ask me how I know."
Bea took it. It was heavier than it looked.
"Thank you for taking the time to see me. This has been invaluable."
"One more thing." Apis's voice had gone quiet. "Not one of those decisions took a day. Every single one of them was the right call at the time, with what was on the page in front of me."
"Which one would you take back?"
Apis thought about it for a long while.
"All of them," she said. "And I'd make every one of them again."