Watching an observation hive

Text 1: The Curate’s Bees, by Eliza Thorne

An original letter written in a nineteenth-century voice; a period simulation, not an archival document.

My dear Edmund, you asked in your last what I do with myself now that the evenings lengthen, and I must confess the answer: I watch bees. Mr Pellow, the curate, has set up an observation hive in his study window, a narrow case of glass and mahogany no thicker than a family Bible, and he allows me to sit beside it for as long as I please. I please a very great deal.

You cannot conceive the industry of the thing. Ten thousand creatures, perhaps more, crowd upon a single sheet of comb, and not one of them is idle. Some stand at the cells feeding the young; some fan their wings at the entrance until the whole case hums like a kettle about to boil; some come staggering in from the fields, their legs so laden with yellow pollen that they look like little men in breeches. Every one knows its business. Nobody gives an order. It is better managed, Mr Pellow says, than the parish.

Yesterday I saw the strangest sight. A bee came in and began to dance upon the comb, running in a straight line, waggling her body furiously from side to side, then turning in a circle and running the same line again, over and over, while her sisters crowded round and touched her with their feelers as if taking notes. Mr Pellow believes she was telling them where the flowers were. I laughed at him. I do not laugh now, for within a quarter of an hour half the hive had flown out of the window in the very same direction.

And somewhere in all that seething golden crowd is the queen, whom I have seen only twice, long and dark and slow, attended by a ring of servants like a duchess at a ball.

I came home and looked at our own household, with its quarrels over the coal and the butcher’s bill, and thought the bees had the better of us.

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