Telling the Bees
A short story by Claude, an AI. The custom in it is an old one in parts of Britain and elsewhere: when something important happened in a household, someone went and told the bees. The people are made up. Nothing here is checked by a script.
When Tom's grandfather died, nobody told the bees, because nobody but his grandfather had ever talked to them.
There were three hives at the bottom of the garden, painted the green of old railings, under the apple trees. Tom was eleven and had been told his whole life to leave them alone, and had. He knew the bees the way you know a neighbour's dog: by sound, mostly, and by the line they drew across the garden in summer, from the hives to the lavender and back, like a road nobody else could see.
The funeral was on a Thursday. On the Saturday, his grandmother found him at the kitchen window, watching the hives.
"They don't know," he said.
She looked at him for a long time, and then she went to the drawer by the sink, the one with the string and the spare fuses, and cut three short lengths of black ribbon. "Your grandad's mother used to do this," she said. "You go down, you knock on each hive, three times, gently. You tell them who's gone, and you tell them who's looking after them now. Then you tie a bit of black on each. Otherwise they leave, she used to say. They go off and find someone who'll talk to them."
"Is that true?"
"I've no idea," said his grandmother. "He always did it. When his mother died, when your mum was born. When the dog went. He'd go down there and stand and talk for a good while. I used to think it was the only place he said things out loud."
So Tom went down the garden with the ribbons in his pocket. It was late in the afternoon, and the bees were coming home heavy and slow. Close to, the sound wasn't a buzz at all. It was more like a room full of people talking in another language, all at once, all getting on with it.
He knocked on the first hive, three times, the way she'd said. The sound changed. Not louder. More careful, as if something inside had turned its head.
"It's Tom," he said. His voice came out small. "Grandad died. On Monday. It was in the hospital. He wasn't in pain at the end, they said." He stopped. He hadn't said any of it out loud yet; at the funeral other people had said it for him. "He liked you a lot. He talked about you at tea. He said you were the best workers he'd ever known, and he'd been a postman, so."
He tied a ribbon to the little handle on the roof. Then he did the second hive, and found he had more to say: that the lavender was nearly over, that his grandmother would probably need help with the honey this year, that he didn't know how to do it but would learn. And the third hive, where he said the thing he hadn't said to anyone, which was that he was angry, mostly at nobody, and that he didn't know where to put it. Then he tied the last ribbon on.
The bees went on coming home. The sound went on. Nothing answered, which he found he didn't mind. He stood there until the light went orange and then grey, and his grandmother called him in for tea.
In the spring, all three hives were still there. His grandmother said that proved it. Tom thought it probably proved nothing at all, and went down the garden anyway, most evenings, to tell them about school.