The Same Egg

Aunt Priya handed Maya the smoker and told her not to breathe the way she was breathing.

"You're breathing like the bees can hear you," she said. "They can't. Slow down."

Maya slowed down. The frame in her aunt's gloves was heavy with bees, thousands of them, walking over each other like the surface of a river that had learned to think. Priya pointed with one finger at a cluster of hexagons, each one capped with a pale lid.

"Workers," she said. "All sisters. Same mother."

"How many?"

"Forty thousand, maybe. In summer."

Maya looked at forty thousand sisters and started counting the ways they were the same. Same size. Same fuzz. Same brown-and-gold banding. Then Priya lifted the next frame, and at the bottom edge hung something wrong.

It was a cell, but it did not belong. The worker cells were flat, tidy, side by side, like a filled-in crossword. This one bulged out and down, the shape and roughness of a peanut in its shell, pointing at the ground.

"That's a queen cell," Priya said. "They're raising a new queen."

Maya put her face close to the mesh of her veil. "Why is it a different shape?"

"Because a queen's bigger. She needs the room."

That was an answer about the box, not about the bee. Maya kept it on the list in her head, the list of things that had been explained without being explained.

"So the queen egg is a queen egg," Maya said. "And the worker eggs are worker eggs."

Priya was already reaching for the next frame. "Mm. The queen lays them."

"But she lays all of them."

"She lays all of them, yes."

Maya held still. If one mother laid every egg, and all forty thousand workers were sisters, then the egg in the peanut-shaped cell had the same mother too. Same mother meant it could have gone into a flat cell and become one more sister. Nobody decided at the egg. Something decided later.

"Aunt Priya. What's inside the queen cell that's different?"

Priya paused, gloved hand in the air. "Food, mostly. They feed her royal jelly. The workers make it. Comes out of glands in their heads."

"They feed the workers too, though."

"At first. Then they switch the workers to pollen and honey. The queen larva gets royal jelly the whole time. Buckets of it, comparatively."

Maya looked at the flat cells, forty thousand sisters, and then at the one peanut cell hanging apart from all of them.

"So it's the same egg," she said. "You could take a worker egg and put it in that cell and feed it the jelly and it would turn into a queen."

Priya laughed, but it was a real laugh, the kind that meant she was actually thinking. "That's more or less how beekeepers make queens. You move a young larva into a queen cup. If it's young enough, and they feed it, it becomes a queen. Too old, and it's too late."

"Too late for what?"

"Too late to change. There's a window."

Maya went quiet "So the queen isn't born a queen," Maya said slowly. "She's a worker who got fed differently before it was too late."

"You could say that."

"Then what makes her a queen? If it's the same egg. If the instructions are the same."

Priya set the frame down on its edge and pulled off one glove to scratch her nose. "You're asking the right thing and I don't have the whole answer. The instructions are the same, you're right. Same genes. The jelly doesn't add new instructions. It changes which ones get read. Turns some up loud, turns others off. So the queen and the worker are running the same book. They're just reading different pages out loud."

Maya heard the word book and something turned over in her chest.

Same book. Every one of those forty thousand sisters carried the whole book, the queen chapters and the worker chapters, all of it, the whole time. The workers had the queen inside them the entire summer. They had just never been read that part out loud. And they were the ones who decided which larva got the jelly. They were the ones holding the book open.

"Aunt Priya," Maya said. "The workers pick."

"Pick what?"

"Which one becomes the queen. They build the cell. They make the jelly. They feed it. They decide which sister gets read the queen pages."

Priya looked at her over the top of the frame. "I suppose they do."

Maya looked back at the flat cells. Forty thousand bees who each could have been the queen, who each still carried every page of being the queen, walking across the comb, feeding a sister the thing that none of them had been fed. Not one of them was the wrong kind of bee. Not one of them was born less. They had all been the same egg. The difference was a door, and the door had a window, and the window was still open somewhere in that hive right now, over some larva that did not yet know what it was going to be read.

"Can I see it," Maya said. "The larva. In the queen cell. Can we look inside one?"

Priya turned the frame so the peanut cell caught the afternoon light coming through the shed door. The wax at the tip was thin and unfinished, not yet capped. She tilted it until the light went down into the opening.

Maya leaned in until her veil almost touched the wax.

Down at the bottom of the cell, curled in a bed of something white and glistening, so pale it was almost not there, a tiny curved larva lay floating in more royal jelly than it could ever eat, being turned, page by page, into a queen.