Tales of the Unexpected

out the wrinkles.’
    ‘And does it?’
    ‘Now how on earth would I know that, Mabel? Anyway,’ he said, returning to his chair, ‘that’s not the point. The point is this. It’s done so much good to our little baby just in the last few hours that I think we ought to go right on giving it to her. Now don’t interrupt, Mabel. Let me finish. I’ve got two hundred and forty hives out there and if I turn over maybe a hundred of them to making royal jelly, we ought to be able to supply her with all she wants.’
    ‘Albert Taylor,’ the woman said, stretching her eyes wide and staring at him. ‘Have you gone out of your mind?’
    ‘Just hear me through, will you please?’
    ‘I forbid it,’ she said, ‘absolutely. You’re not to give my baby another drop of that horrid jelly, you understand?’
    ‘Now, Mabel…’
    ‘And quite apart from that, we had a shocking honey crop last year, and if you go fooling around with those hives now, there’s no telling what might not happen.’
    ‘There’s nothing wrong with my hives, Mabel.’
    ‘You know very well we had only half the normal crop last year.’
    ‘Do me a favour, will you?’ he said. ‘Let me explain some of the marvellous things this stuff does.’
    ‘You haven’t even told me what it is yet.’
    ‘All right, Mabel. I’ll do that too. Will you listen? Will you give me a chance to explain it?’
    She sighed and picked up her knitting once more. ‘I suppose you might as well get if off your chest, Albert. Go on and tell me.’
    He paused, a bit uncertain now how to begin. It wasn’t going to be easy to explain something like this to a person with no detailed knowledge of apiculture at all.
    ‘You know, don’t you,’ he said, ‘that each colony has only one queen?’
    ‘Yes.’
    ‘And that this queen lays all the eggs?’
    ‘Yes, dear. That much I know.’
    ‘All right. Now the queen can actually lay different kinds of eggs. You didn’t know that, but she can. It’s what we call one of the miracles of the hive. She can lay eggs that produce drones, and she can lay eggs that produce workers. Now if that isn’t a miracle, Mabel, I don’t know what is.’
    ‘Yes, Albert, all right.’
    ‘The drones are the males. We don’t have to worry about them. The workers are all females. So is the queen, of course. But the workers are unsexed females, if you see what I mean. Their organs are completely undeveloped, whereas the queen is tremendously sexy. She can actually lay her own weight in eggs in a single day.’
    He hesitated, marshalling his thoughts.
    ‘Now what happens is this. The queen crawls around on the comb and lays her eggs in what we call cells. You know all those hundreds of little holes you see in a honeycomb? Well, a brood comb is just about the same except the cells don’t have honey in them, they have eggs. She lays one egg to each cell, and in three days each of these eggs hatches out into a tiny grub. We call it a larva.
    ‘Now, as soon as this larva appears, the nurse bees – they’re young workers – all crowd round and start feeding it like mad. And you know what they feed it on?’
    ‘Royal jelly,’ Mabel answered patiently.
    ‘Right!’ he cried. ‘That’s exactly what they do feed it on. They get this stuff out of a gland in their heads and they start pumping it into the cell to feed the larva. And what happens then?’
    He paused dramatically, blinking at her with his small watery-grey eyes. Then he turned slowly in his chair and reached for the magazine that he had been reading the night before.
    ‘You want to know what happens then?’ he asked, wetting his lips.
    ‘I can hardly wait.’
    ‘ “Royal jelly,” ’ he read aloud, ‘ “must be a substance of tremendous nourishing power, for on this diet alone, the honeybee larva increases in weight
fifteen hundred times
in five days!” ’
    ‘How much?’
    ‘
Fifteen hundred times
, Mabel. And you know what that means if you put it in terms of a human being? It means,’ he said, lowering his voice, leaning forward, fixing her with those small pale eyes, ‘it means that in five days a baby weighing seven and a half pounds to start off with would increase in weight to
five tons
!’
    For the second time, Mrs Taylor stopped knitting.
    ‘Now you mustn’t take that too literally, Mabel.’
    ‘Who says I mustn’t?’
    ‘It’s just a scientific way of putting it, that’s all.’
    ‘Very well, Albert. Go on.’
    ‘But that’s only half the