The Metal Bees

My gran was the last of our family to see a honeybee. She said they were beautiful, little fluffy beams of sun always busy, their hums the soundtrack of an April afternoon in the blueberry fields. When the honeybees had all died, their visage laid to rest on a long list of extinct specimens of the 21st century, the government didn’t miss a beat in launching a solution – BeeX1. The project was lauded as an amazing feat of technology, a victory of human ingenuity – millions of little diamond-shaped titanium drones swarmed the acres of Washington cherry tree orchards, the swaths of Texas broccoli fields, and the stretches of apple tree land in Michigan. My gran had a potent distaste for the metal bees, as she called them, but she had little choice when a man in a suit dictated renewed terms of her contract for leasing the land. No metal bees, no more Kellington Family Farms.

My gran, my mama, and I are the descendants of a long line of berry growers, or “blueberry-tiers” as my papa used to say. As a genuine blueberry-tier, gran said that the metal bees tainted the soil, made the blueberries sour. But where my gran hated the metal bees having known their living, breathing counterparts, I had a fondness for them. On lazy days in the Mississippi summer heat, the light shining off their brushed titanium sides, they shone with a twinkling ripple of light I delighted in. The metal bees worked meticulously over the rows of neatly aligned blueberry bushes, attaching with their thin metal legs to the white bell-shaped flowers crinkled like tissue paper at the ends, extracting pollen with a small vacuum, storing it in a tiny box in their metal bellies, and moving dutifully to the next flower.

My gran got old fast once the metal bees came and gave over the day-to-day business of tending the blueberry fields to my mama and me. We’re a good team. Mama tends the machines that pluck the blueberries from the branches and store them for washing. I keep the metal bees working – tightening loose screws, opening up the shed doors each morning to let the swarm out, and calling them back in every evening before the fireflies mistake them for rivals.

It was a hot, wet June afternoon. I had just brought the metal bees back to life from their slumber and sent them to the fields with a swipe of my finger down a dusty tablet screen when mama started calling.

“Caroline! Caroline! Come up to the house.”

I set the tablet back on the workbench and started up the small rise to the house, a yellow ranch-style home with green shutters chipping paint and a wraparound porch. The Kellington family home was quickly becoming a place out of time.

“Yes, mama.” I found her standing on the welcome mat looking down at an unmarked package shoved to the corner of the porch. She was wearing her sweat-stained wide-brimmed sun hat and her muddy toes curled up from her sandals.

“You order something?” she asked, pointing to the package.

“No, ma’am.”

“Well it must be for your gran then.”

“Does gran order things?”

Mama simply shrugged, picked up her thick leather gloves from the porch railing, and turned toward the fields, “open that up for me and get it where it goes, would you Caroline? I’ve got to rake the berries by hand this morning seeing as how Muck and his cronies up and quit on me earlier. Damn robots.”

Muck was mom’s disgruntled nickname for the harvesting bots we used, big baskets perched on three wheels, eight hoses topped with rakes extruding from the baskets’ sides, an unsophisticated design that, if they didn’t know better, folks would assume were the sorry results of a middle school science fair.

As drones had long since taken over the minutiae of the post, there was no mailman to ask where the package had come from or to stop in the road crying “wrong address”! I wiped the sweat from my palms on my worn jeans and picked up the package. Its lightness confused me—most the packages delivered to the farm were heavy, full of equipment to fix bugs in the metal bees or reoil the Mucks. I shook it carefully, my ear pressed to the side of the box. No sound.

I opened the door to the house, a loud creak sounding from its rusted hinges, and cringed, hoping the harsh sound hadn’t bothered gran. I pulled off my muddy boots and walked to the kitchen. Mama had left the breakfast plates in a haphazard heap in the sink, a fly gorged on the remnants of strawberry jam streaked across a dirty plate, thanking his lucky stars for mama’s hurried morning. The smell of burned toast hung in the air. I pushed aside a box of circuit boards I had been tinkering with, grabbed a pair of scissors, and cut the box open.

I pushed aside flimsy cardboard flaps to reveal a little clear case with holes punched in the top. I bent down to get a closer look: inside the case were rows of a thin parchment-like material, kind of like the chewed-up wood wasps make their nests from. Ten small oval holes had been carved out of each row. In these holes, little white bodies wriggled, an unpleasant sight. I lifted the case from the box, ill at ease in doing so. A small white paper fluttered to the floor as I moved the case. I picked it up and opened a crudely folded note:

The sample worked.

T. Marston

I mouthed the words, weighing them with my tongue as though by doing so, I could divine some meaning from them.

A cold hand touched my shoulder, near sending me through the roof. It was gran. Her hair was askew, set in curlers, probably a midnight fancy that had sent her hands working on her hair before her brain could catch up. Her wedding ring, an atavism of a previous life, caught the light as she moved her hand down to the case.

“My god.” Gran leaned down, peering at the wriggling bodies tucked away in their paper dens. “She did it.”

“Did what? Who did what?” I handed her the note. She didn’t need to read it.

“Marston.”

“Who?”

Gran opened the case, uninterested in my questions. She moved her finger to trace the edges of an oval den but stopped short.

“They’re too delicate. Too precious.” She pulled her hand back.

“Gran,” I endeavored, but she was in trance, bewitched by the white larvae.

“Gran,” I said more loudly, “Gran!”

She recalled my presence.

“Do you know what these are, Caroline?”

“I’m not sure. They look like the wasp larvae we used to burn in the elm trees.”

She pushed her eyes closed, disappointed in my ignorance.

“Honeybees.”

I responded in the only way I could. “But honeybees are extinct.”

“Not anymore.”

“Not anymore?”

“I,” she hesitated, returning her gaze to the honeybee larvae and softly closing the case’s lid. “I wrote to a man, a writer, from the Gazette a year or so ago. He had written this article about the de-extinction of honeybees, and he put me in touch with a scientist, a woman with a bunch of letters behind her name. This scientist, Teresa Marston, she came here when you and your mama went to Tupelo last month.”

“She came here? Why?”

"She was missing a piece of genetic material, she said. She was real close to bringing the honeybees back. I have a collection of bees, you know that, from my girlhood. I told her about it, and she thought I might have what she was looking for.”

“And you did?”

“A queen with undamaged DNA, a perfect genetic specimen, the good doctor called her.” Gran beamed, like a child showing off brand-new sneakers on the playground.

“Gran,” I gestured toward the case, “why did this Marston send these here?”

“She promised to send me some of the larvae if she got it right. Said I ought to be one of the first to release the honeybees back into the Mississippi summer, seeing as how I was one of the last to see them leave it.”

Gran, sharp tacked even in her old age, must have noticed the furrows in my brow, the skepticism clouding my eyes: “what’s wrong? Don’t you – can't you see it – it's a miracle. We’ll care for these girls until they’re ready to buzz right back into the fields. I never thought I’d see such a day.”

“But the drones,” I caught myself and clamped my tongue down. Too late.

Gran’s face washed with red, and if she could’ve taken a strap to me right then and there, she would have.

“I didn’t mean,” she cut off what would have been a stumbling attempt at an excuse, the heat in her head no longer able to be contained –

“You never had the privilege of growing up in a world that was better, sweeter than this one, so I take that into account, but mind me when I say that those metal things swarming over our fields have no home, no place here. I see you tinkering with your gadgets, screwing and unscrewing things on those metal boards, and that’s good for a hobby, Caroline, but you mustn’t -- you shouldn’t misunderstand.”

Her words fell off, and she left me to riddle out what I mustn’t, shouldn’t misunderstand. It was no great riddle, though. I could pretty well grasp her meaning, having known what the honeybees had meant to her and her blueberry fields. They were her partners, her sisters of springs. When they left, it was like a friend had gone, and what had started as the ache of missing a loved one had grown into a deep depression.

She gently picked up the case, walked to her room, and shut herself inside.

A vibration of my phone offered refuge from stewing on the scientific miracle gran reveled in. One of my metal bees had returned to the shed without being called in.

I picked up the box of circuits I had been tinkering with, pushed the screen door open with a kick of my foot, and returned to the shed, to my sanctuary.

The rogue metal bee hovered in a corner of the shed. I knew this girl well. She had a defect in her wiring that jammed her timing system – an alert on my tablet flashed “BeeX1: 7561 Error 15.” My tablet may have known her as 7561, but I called her Zelda, a nod to a cartoon that was on during my childhood. Zelda was an android whose faulty communication system got her into all kinds of trouble.

"Oh, Zelda.” I walked over to her and pressed a small red button on her underside. She settled in my hand, and I returned to my workbench. She hummed, her internal fan cooling the circuitry, sending a pleasant vibration through my palm. I had been working to fix Zelda’s glitch for a few weeks and was near a solution. I placed her gently under a magnifying lens and switched on a desk lamp. I grabbed a screwdriver from the drawer, cleaning the dust from it with a swipe of my shirt. I twisted out the small screws from the panel on Zelda’s underside. Once inside, I held a pair of tweezers steady and pulled out a copper wire. I held the wire up to the magnifying glass—its ends frayed ever so slightly at the tip.

Gotcha.

I plucked up a replacement wire and secured it in Zelda’s belly. Pressing the red button once more, I brought Zelda back to life. She hovered for a moment before darting through the open door to return to the blueberry fields.

* * *

Gran wasn’t at supper that evening, and mama, exhausted from the day and uninterested in asking questions that may delay a nap, was none the wiser as to why. The night was muggy and the air heavy. I could see the fireflies outside the kitchen window dancing above the blueberry bushes. Muck and two of his buddies had been dumped unceremoniously on the back porch by mama, who’d asked me to fix the “damn metal junk” before the week was out. A firefly flitted around the robots and perched on Muck’s head. I was washing the dishes, my hair frizzing from the steam of the water, when I saw the door to gran’s room open out of the corner of my eye.

“Caroline,” Gran walked toward me, “I’m sorry about earlier.”

“Me too,” I shut the water off with a creak and thunk of the pipe.

“Will you help me?”

I nodded.

“I spoke with Teresa this afternoon, gave her a call.”

I nodded again.

“The honeybees will grow quick, and we’ll need to release them sooner than I thought. Now, Teresa says that they ought to be released in the purple coneflower fields so they can get strong fast.

The nearest purple coneflower field is a hike up to near Belinda’s Point. I can’t do it.” She pushed at her knees as though wishing that she could cure the pain and weakness in her joints with a forceful jolt of her hand. “You’ll do it, then.”

I nodded.

“Come up to the house tomorrow morning early, so you get up to Belinda’s Point and back before the day’s work begins.”

She smiled weakly before returning to her room. Gran wasn’t used to asking for help, and her feeble smile was a strained attempt at gratitude.

The night was long. Whereas I usually felt the heat of summer as a friend slumping a thick arm across my shoulder, the warmth was irritating that night. I tossed and turned, tossed and turned until the black night sky began steadily evaporating into a deep indigo.

Gran was waiting for me. She took one more peek into the case before handing it to me without a word.

I made my way slowly down the dirt road that led to our house. I opened the gate at the end of the lane and turned right toward Belinda's Point. The street lamps shone brightly, not yet ready to yield to the light of dawn.

Gran was right – the honeybees were growing quickly. What had been barely recognizable as a living thing the day before were now fully fledged bees, buzzing and bumping into the case’s sides as the brightening sky signaled it was time to wake up.

Their buzzing became an annoyance, pushing against my eardrums with an unpleasant pressure.

A fleet of hundreds of metal bees passed overhead, our neighbor's bees always released at the slightest sign of dawn. I stopped and watched them pass above me. The case weighed heavily in my hand.

I turned with a jerk and hurried back down the road away from Belinda's Point, away from the purple coneflower fields, away from the spring of gran's youth.

The sun was on the horizon when I reached McAvoy’s pond. I shuffled down the steep, rocky slope leading to the algae-coated water. The smell of stagnation hung in the air; mosquitos swarmed in the warm breath of the pond's surface. I knelt down on the bank and pushed the case below the water's surface. The algae encircled my elbow, and its slime streaked down my arm as I pulled my hand from the water.

I sat on the slope for a long while until a beep from my phone stood me up. My bees were ready to be released for their morning rounds.