The Same Egg

The hive had gone strange. That was how Gran put it, standing in the shed doorway with her veil pushed back and a smear of wax on her chin.

"Strange how?" Maya asked.

"Lost their queen. So they're building a new one." Gran set the frame down on the workbench between them. "Look at the cell hanging off the bottom. The big peanut-shaped one. That's a queen cup. They're growing themselves a mother."

Then the phone in her pocket rang, and she wandered out toward the truck, saying something about a delivery, leaving the two of them alone with the frame.

Soren leaned in close. The peanut cell was fat and lumpy and pointed down, nothing like the flat honeycomb around it. Inside the ordinary cells he could see the workers, curled and pale.

"So the eggs in the queen cell are special," he said. "Fancier eggs."

"No," Maya said. She was already frowning. "That doesn't feel right."

"Why not?"

"Because how would the bees know which egg is the queen egg before they've made the queen?" She tapped the frame. "They lost their queen a week ago. There's no queen laying special eggs. So where'd the special egg come from?"

Soren went quiet. He looked at the fat cell, then at the flat ones. "Okay. So maybe it isn't a special egg."

"Maybe it's a normal one."

"Maybe it's the same egg," he said slowly. "As all the others."

Maya's eyes came up. "Then what makes it a queen?"

Gran's beekeeping book was propped on the shelf, swollen from years of shed damp. Soren pulled it down and thumbed to the pages about queen rearing. He read with one finger moving along the line, the way he did when he wanted to be sure he wasn't inventing anything.

"It says the workers pick a few normal larvae," he read. "Ones that would've been workers. And they feed them different."

"Feed them what?"

"Royal jelly. This white stuff the nurse bees make." He looked up. "The queen larva gets fed royal jelly the whole time. The worker larvae get switched to something else after a few days."

"That's it? Different food?"

"That's it."

Maya sat down on the upturned bucket. She was chewing on it. "So two eggs. Exactly the same. Same instructions inside. You could swap them and nobody'd know."

"Right."

"And one gets fed the white stuff and turns into a queen. Big. Lives for years. Lays every egg in the hive." She held up her other hand. "And the other one gets the regular food and turns into a worker. Small. Lives a few weeks. Never lays anything."

"Right."

"From the same egg." She said it again, quieter. "Same egg."

Soren was still reading. "There's a word here. Epigenetic." He sounded it out. "It doesn't change the instructions. The instructions are all still there in both of them. The food changes which instructions get read. Like the queen instructions are in the worker too. Just switched off."

Maya stood back up. She couldn't stay on the bucket. "Switched off," she repeated. "So every single worker down there, all those thousands of little ones, they've all got the whole queen inside them. The whole thing. And nobody ever gave them the white stuff, so it never turned on."

"That's what it says."

She walked to the shed door and looked out at the hives in the long grass, the workers streaming in and out in the afternoon light, thousands of them, every one carrying a queen she would never be.

"That's the part I can't hold," she said. "It's not that the queen is more. It's that the worker was never less. She just never got fed the thing that would've told her."

Soren wrote something down. His pencil moved fast for a moment, then stopped.

"Read me the peanut cell part again," Maya said. "The one on the bottom of the frame."

He found it. "When a hive loses its queen, the workers choose larvae that are already a couple of days old. Already partway to being workers. And they flood them with royal jelly anyway." He paused. "To rush a new queen."

"Wait." Maya turned around. "Already partway? So the switch works even after it's started going the other way?"

"That's what it says. If they catch it early enough."

She came back to the workbench and put both hands flat on either side of the frame, staring at the fat cell.

"So the one in there," she said. "A week ago it was on its way to being a worker. Same as all the rest. Small life. Few weeks. And then the hive lost their mother, and they poured the white stuff on this one, and now it's turning into a queen instead. Right now. While we're looking at it."

"Turning," Soren said. "Yeah."

They both bent over the cell. It was sealed and silent. Inside it something was rewriting itself out of the exact same book every bee on the frame was written from, reading pages the others would never open, growing longer, growing an egg-laying body, growing years of life where a few weeks had been planned.

"You can't see it happening," Maya said.

"No."

"But it's happening."

"Yeah."

She was quiet a second. "Soren. We've got the whole thing in us too. Everybody. Every cell in your arm has the instructions for your whole self. Your eyes, your teeth, all of it. And most of it's switched off in most places, or your arm would be growing teeth."

Soren stopped writing.

"That's not in the book," he said.

"No. But it has to be true. Same idea. Same egg to start with, then things get switched on and off depending on what the cell gets told." She looked at him. "Somebody's fed us stuff too. Our whole lives. We just don't know which switches."

Gran's boots crunched on the gravel outside, coming back.

Maya didn't move from the frame. She leaned right down until her nose was almost against the sealed peanut cell, close enough to fog the wax, watching a thing she could not possibly see, a worker becoming a queen inside a book that never changed a single word.