The Queen Signal
OF THE TENS OF THOUSANDS of honeybees in a hive, the queen stands apart. Her body is longer and fuller than the other females’, her wings shorter. The workers and drones cluster and throb around her, their sun.
Usually, the queen lives longest; her lifespan can stretch more than three to five years past the average worker’s. But sometimes she does not. Sometimes the colony finds itself hollow, without its heartbeat.
Around 50,000 bees and one queen have invaded the roof of my childhood home in Uvalde, Texas, making their way through the uppermost eastern corner, humming between wall and cream-colored exterior siding. They’ve been there a while, according to my dad. He says he and Mom noticed them months ago, when they were out in the backyard gardening.
As we wait for the one-man removal crew to show up, we sit outside, eyeing the bees from the far end of the lawn: Dad, my sister, Lindsay, five cousins, and me. We are sprawled in lawn chairs, with koozies wrapped around beer cans and thermoses of Crown and Cokes. Dad wears a ball cap over his salt-and-pepper hair (more salt these days) and the Longhorns sweatshirt he bought when I was in undergrad at the University of Texas. He mentions how, the first time they saw the bees, he swatted at them, and Mom scolded him for it.
We laugh. She didn’t mind creeping things, not the way Lindsay and I do, flailing and squealing dramatically when they enter our orbit. She was the one who crushed scorpions on the kitchen floor with little fanfare, or pretended to pluck wolf spiders from the wall and throw them at us as we shrieked and she cackled. She had strong feet, callused from a lifetime of walking barefoot—on our tiled floor, our stubby grass, and before that the hot, damp gravel of Galveston, and before even that the provinces of Mindoro, the island in the Philippines where she was born.
I don’t know what kind of ground she walked on as a child. I have visited her village on Mindoro only once in all my thirty-one years. It has paved roads now, and convenience stores that sell beer and sodas and candy. But I imagine there were dirt roads in her day, and palm-strewn concrete sidewalks
