The Same Egg

The bees were building wrong, and Aunt Reza could not stop talking about it.

"Queen cups," she said, holding the frame up to the light. "Look. Big peanut-shaped cells, hanging down. They only build those when they want a new queen." She was happy in the way she got when something went sideways. She liked problems more than honey.

Maya leaned in close to the netting of her veil. The queen cups did look like peanuts, fat and bumpy, pointing at the ground while every other cell pointed sideways.

"But you said the hive already has a queen," Maya said.

"It does. She's down here somewhere, marked with a blue dot."

"So why make another one?"

Reza shrugged. "Maybe she's getting old. Maybe they just feel like it. Bees don't explain themselves to me."

Soren was looking at one of the queen cups that was already capped and sealed. Next to it sat an open worker cell with a tiny curled larva inside, pale as a grain of rice.

"Those two," he said. "The one that's going to be a queen and the one that's going to be a worker. How different are they?"

"Totally different," Reza said. "Queen lives for years. Lays two thousand eggs a day. The workers live six weeks and never lay anything. Different size, different body, different everything."

Soren nodded slowly. He was already writing it down, the pencil moving under his glove.

"So they hatched from different kinds of eggs," he said.

Reza paused. The frame tilted in her hands.

"No," she said. "That's the thing. They didn't."

Maya looked up.

"Same egg," Reza said. "Any fertilized egg can become a queen. The workers choose. They pick an ordinary larva, one that would have been a regular worker, and they raise it differently."

"Differently how?" Maya asked.

"They feed it royal jelly. The whole time. The workers get a little bit and then switch to bee bread. The future queen swims in royal jelly. That's the only difference."

Maya went quiet. Soren saw it happen, the way she went quiet right before she found the part that didn't fit.

"That can't be it," Maya said.

"It is, though."

"No. Listen." Maya's hands were moving now. "If they're the same egg, they have the same instructions. The same genes. You can't grow a totally different animal from the same instructions just by feeding it differently. The instructions are the instructions."

"And yet," Reza said, and held the frame closer.

Soren stopped writing.

"Wait," he said. "Maya. Say that again. The same instructions."

"The same DNA," Maya said. "Identical. So how do you get two completely different bodies out of identical DNA?"

"You don't read all of it," Soren said.

Maya turned to look at him.

"That's what a book is," Soren said, slower now, feeling for it. "The whole book is there. Every page. But you only read some of the pages. If you read different pages, you get a different story out of the same book."

Maya's eyes went wide behind the veil.

"The jelly turns pages," she said.

"The jelly turns pages," Soren repeated. "It doesn't change the words. It changes which words get read."

Reza was looking at the two of them now instead of the frame.

"That's actually right," she said, a little surprised. "There's a word for it. The genes are the same. Something switches them on or off. Same letters, different which ones are running."

Maya pressed her face nearly to the netting, staring at the rice-pale larva in the open cell.

"So that one," she said. "That worker. Right now. It could still be a queen."

"If it's young enough, yes," Reza said. "For the first few days, any of them could go either way. After that the door closes. The pages get stuck."

Maya didn't say anything. She was looking at the larva like it was a door that hadn't shut yet.

Soren felt the back of his neck go cold under the heat of the afternoon. He looked from the capped queen cup to the open worker cell. The same egg. The same book in both of them, every page identical, down to the last letter. And one of them was being read into a creature that would fly out and start a whole new colony, and one of them was being read into a worker who would carry water and die in six weeks, and the only difference between those two whole lives was which pages the others had decided to read aloud.

"It's not just bees," Maya said suddenly.

Reza tilted her head.

"It can't be just bees," Maya said. "If the same instructions can be read different ways. That has to be everything. That has to be us."

"It is us," Reza said quietly. "Every cell in your body has the same DNA. The one in your eye and the one in your bone. Same book. They just read different pages. That's how one set of instructions builds a whole person with all different parts." "So which pages," Maya said. "Who decides which pages."

"For the bee, the workers decide. With the jelly."

"For us?"

Reza was quiet for a second too long.

"Some of it's set," she said. "And some of it isn't. What you eat. What happens to you. We're still figuring out how much of the book stays open."

Soren wrote that down. How much of the book stays open. Then he stopped, because his hand wasn't keeping up with the size of it.

Maya stood and took the frame from her aunt, careful, both hands. She held it up to the sun. The royal jelly inside the queen cup caught the light and glowed, white and thick, more of it than any one larva could ever eat. An ocean of it, for a creature the size of a comma.

"It's swimming in turned pages," Maya said softly.

A single nurse bee crawled across the comb, stopped at the open worker cell, dipped her head down to the pale curled larva, and fed it.