View from the Far Side

Queenright

By Caitlin McKenna

August 19, 2024

“Queenright” was first published in an anthology in early 2024.

queenright – adj. (of a colony of bees)
having a queen in the hive

The bees were dancing strangely. I noticed the change in their behavior as soon as my eyes adjusted to the glow of the lab’s fluorescent lights. Normally, the bees’ fuzzy yellow and black bodies flowed smoothly through the artificial hive’s translucent tubes: here and there, clusters of workers would move in tandem as they danced the locations of fresh nectar to their fellows. The workers already endowed with tasks wouldn’t pay them any attention. But today…

Rivers rather than rivulets of bees streamed from the peripheral channels of the hive and the meadows outside into the hive’s heart. Little eddies marked where bees danced amid the stream, almost as if they were directing the others—not toward fresh fields, but deeper inside.

The experimental hive was a horizontal complex of translucent tubes and boxes, their sides filigreed with honeycomb and growing larvae. It filled most of the single lab we’d been allotted, with worktables and computer stations jammed against the sides of the room. A grotty prep counter and minifridge, the closest we had to a break area, took up one back corner.

At the moment, “we” meant me and my co-researcher, Julio. We’d had a couple post-doc assistants at the start of the project when resources were more flush, but we’d lost them to other, sexier projects, along with a chunk of our funding.

Julio hunched over a lab bench, fist curled around a paper cup of coffee and with a printed report in his other hand. I tapped the table near his hand and he blinked owlishly.

“What’s up with the colony?” I asked.

He brushed black bangs that were permanently too long out of his eyes. Julio looked more like an undergrad than the thirty-something junior scientist he was really was—some combination of his laidback demeanor and the ever-present takeout coffee. “That’s what I’m trying to figure out,” he said.

“Does ART have any guesses about their behavior?”

ART was our shorthand for the Apical Research Translator, a boring name for a groundbreaking technology—a computer that interpreted the bees’ dance language and rendered it into something like human speech.

Julio squinted at the prinout. “Only that this new behavior is anomalous but within the project’s parameters.” He nodded toward the teeming bodies inside the hive. “It’s organized behavior, whatever it is.”

Neither of us wanted to voice what unorganized behavior would mean. The random, staggering throes of a colony succumbing to collapse, as so many unagumented honey bee colonies had done in the last quarter century. Even with all the rigorous protocols the lab had in place to protect our bees from possible sources of contamination—mites, viruses, pesticides, other things we hadn’t yet discovered—it was a constant shadow.

Organized or not, I didn’t understand the bees’ dancing, and that made me nervous. I left Julio to the printout and leaned over the large transparent box that was the center of the hive.

The vertical honeycombed chambers should have been filled with workers caring for larvae, or depositing nectar to be turned into honey or mixed with pollen into “bee bread”. And it was filled— brimming, in fact—with workers. But not at their allotted tasks.

A dull gold and black ball of bees seethed in the hive’s innermost chamber. Transparent, thinner-than-paper wings vibrated in their hundreds all over the living mass, which was adding to itself by the second as more bees poured in.

I recognized that behavior, although it shouldn’t have been possible in this species. Then the question I hadn’t asked struck me like a door slamming open. “Where’s the queen?”

Before Julio could do more than turn at the panic in my voice, I was at the temperature controls for the hive. I turned down the interior thermostat. Carefully—too steep a drop in temperature would be as disastrous as doing nothing.

Julio was beside me by the time the first bees started to drop off the swarm, their limbs and wings made sluggish by the increasing cold. They plopped on their backs, legs pumping slowly, dazed but alive. The ones further in were dead, I was sure, not from cold but heat.

“What the hell, Jenna?” Julio said. Then his eyes widened at the disintegrating bee ball. “Are they swarming their queen?”

My throat felt tight enough to burst. I couldn’t answer him, but the scene unfolding in the hive was answer enough. As the cold-blasted bees crawled away, a fan of dead ones emerged. Those would have been the first to envelop their queen, in a vibrating caul of wings that raised the ambient temperature inside the ball to lethal levels. It was the defense mechanism of a different bee species: the Japanese honey bee, Apis cerana japonica. A hornet foolish or hungry enough to invade a Japanese honey bee hive would find itself swarmed by bees that literally heated it to death.

Except our bees weren’t Japanese honey bees. And the colony had just killed its queen.

The swollen yellow and black body that had been the hive’s heart and brain was still except for a few clonic twitches running through her legs. A wave swept through her workers: more clusters of dancers formed, some still stumbling from cold. The rest of the colony seemed to listen before streamed away from the center of the hive.

Julio swore under his breath. “What just happened?”

The words I finally found were as bitter as bee venom. “The end of our research just happened.”

Tell most people you research bugs, and they’ll assume you find interesting ways to kill them. Agriculture does a good job of making it seem like most insect research is about pest control, and I went to school with more than a few people who went on to develop better natural insecticides or whatever. But I didn’t get my entomology degree to kill insects; I was that weird kid who loved insects, who cried when she stepped on a bug by accident, who spent her summers studying the anthill in the backyard with a magnifying glass and a sample jar.

But in a weird backwards way, I did start studying bees because of dead insects.

My grandparents got the beehive when I was four. Watching them install it on the flat roof of their apartment complex is one of my earliest memories. The hive itself wasn’t impressive, just a plain wooden box with slats of wood you could pull out from the top. But then my grandpa (kitted out in a canvas suit and netted hat) removed one of the slats to reveal an entire living world. The first sight of thousands of furry bee backs and vibrating wings milling over the precious honeycomb was one I’ll never forget, for all that I watched him harvest honey dozens of times afterward.

I’ll also never forget the day the hive died. My grandpa lifting out the wood slat like he had so many times before, only this time its surface seemed to dissolve. Bees dropped off in clumps, as if stunned, to fall to the concrete roof, legs shuddering in their last moments.

My grandparents tried to explain to me what happened—the weather had fluctuated for weeks that spring, a string of warm days plunging into cold snaps that probably made the colony susceptible to disease—but try to explain something to an inconsolable four year old. I only knew that I’d watched a world die. And that I wanted to stop it from happening again.

So I went into apiculture research. The study of bees. Most people have fuzzier feelings toward bees relative to other insects. They associate them with honey and with their role in pollinating so many of the world’s food crops. That part’s been pretty hard to ignore in the last couple decades.

Julio and I cancelled our planned tests for that shift. We spent the next eight hours going over our research notes trying to identify what could have caused the bees’ murderousness toward their own queen. I was aware even as did so that we weren’t likely to find a single cause: a thousand factors could have fed in to the behavior. Although each bee was a fairly simple organism, together the colony approached a complexity that defied modeling, like a galaxy or a human brain.

We could rule some things out, though: the colony in our experimental pod was plain old Apis mellifera, the European honey bee. Other divisions of AgriCon, our parent company, worked with genetically modified bees — hybrids of several bee species who would (theoretically) be resistant to infection and pesticides through hybrid vigor. One of those hybrids incorporated genes from the Japanese honey bee, but our bees didn’t have those genes.

Our experiments up until this morning had been decidedly less fancy. I don’t have anything against GMOs—try working in agriculture and rising to a position of any influence if you do—but my proposal was based on KISS rules: Keep It Simple, Stupid. Instead of engineering hybrid bees, Julio and I had been inoculating their diet with fungi the bees already used to boost their immune systems.

I know—people who made it past the “so you study bugs” conversation starter usually wrinkled their noses once I mentioned it also involved fungus. But it had been working: the experimental groups we’d shocked with pathogens and mites had been able to shrug them off without the blight spreading through the colony. I’d been excited to test another vector. Hopeful, until I’d walked into the lab today.

Dusk was purpling the lab’s plexiglas windows when Julio finally made me get off my bench. “We’re not solving this tonight,” he said. “Go home. Eat. Sleep.”

There were dark rings under his own eyes. I nodded. “You too.”

I didn’t look at the colony as I exited the building. California’s Central Valley opened up before me as I drove my secondhand Toyota out of the research campus. On either side of the road stretched wide fields that used to be home to acres of lettuce, tomatoes, cantaloupes, peaches, and other bee-dependent crops.

They were different now. The lumpy, spiky silhouettes of prickly pears marched away on one side, the darting shapes of the bats that pollinated them flickering overhead like a graphical glitch in the sky. The fields on the other side had been planted with more traditional fruit trees.

Even as night fell, those orchards were still lined with suited migrant workers, carefully hand-pollinating the flowers one at a time with pipettes. Tedious work, though less backbreaking and better paid than the pickers. You were lucky if you could get it, Julio had said once, with a heaviness in his voice I hadn’t heard before or since. His family had immigrated a generation ago, before the current wave of refugees, but they’d come to California from the same places, for the same reasons.

The commute from campus to my apartment was close to an hour. Full dark had set in when I pulled up in front of the four-apartment complex. I dumped my work bag in the tiny foyer and thought about ordering food. But the effort seemed too much, and anyways I couldn’t be reckless with money. I’d already spent as much on groceries this month as I dared. I ate a PB&J—the “J” part of the equation advertised strawberry, but was little more than sugar and artificial flavor—and slept on the couch.

The next morning I arrived to a crude sign tacked up on the wall of the break area. On 8×11 paper, Julio had written with a black marker “Worker Bees of the World Unite!” Underneath it was a doodle of a flower crossed with a sickle. I stared at it for a full inhale-exhale cycle, aware of him hunched over his microscope in my peripheral vision, ostentatiously pretending not to watch me.

“This isn’t funny,” I said.

“You don’t like it?” he asked.

“If this project goes south, so does our funding.” What little there was left of it. “Our jobs.” My apartment with its kitchen cabinets full of ramen noodles. I guessed I could live out of my car, plug a hot plate into the dash.

But I saw something other than black humor behind his smile. “Yesterday was bad,” he said, “but the colony seems to be doing fine, Jenna. All of ART’s readings on their behavior have been normal since last night.”

“That’s not possible.” I found myself checking the activity logs on ART’s screen. The system hadn’t detected any disordered behavior of the kind that could presage a collapse. The colony had been running as smoothly as ever after cutting off its own head.

Julio waved me to his workbench. “I think I might have a hypothesis. Look here.” I took his seat and peered into the microscope. It wasn’t especially powerful, only 10X or so; we didn’t need huge magnification to work with insects.

A bee corpse lay on the sample dish. Julio had carefully cut the head capsule away from the thorax, and opened up thorax and abdomen dorsally. Lining the exposed body cavity and inside its head were tiny, glistening white threads. Fungal mycelia.

“I sacrificed one to see if I could detect any physiological changes, and I found this,” he said in a low voice. “I sequenced the mycelia. It’s our inoculation.”

I blinked as though the fungal threads were something I had to clear from my vision. “Our fungus infected the bees?”

“This bee, anyway. I haven’t dissected any others.” There was a reluctance I didn’t understand in Julio’s voice. “Anyway, I’m not sure I’d call this an infection.”

I pulled my eye away from the microscope. “You said you had a hypothesis?”

“We wanted to give our bees an immune boost, right? But what if it propagated through their bodies? We know trees communicate through fungal mycelia in their roots; maybe something like that’s happening here.”

Though my first instinct was to dismiss the idea, I stayed quiet. Bees normally communicate through a combination of pheromones and dancing, and their coordination is ultimately controlled by the queen. But mycelial networks are decentralized, with no one part being more important than the others. Julio hadn’t said as much, but if a mycelial network had developed in and was transmitting messages between the bees, that network wouldn’t need to be hierarchical. It could operate without a leader.

We didn’t have evidence of a mycelial network yet. Julio had just sacrificed one bee. “I’ll take more samples.” I started toward the hive’s sample box where I could coax in a few bees for testing.

“Wait.” Julio put a hand on my shoulder. “I don’t know if we should.”

I shrugged him off. “It’s just a few bees. It shouldn’t hurt the colony.”

“If I’m right — if the mycelia are acting like a neural network for the hive, it could be bad to disrupt it.”

“You think the colony cares if we harvest a few bees?” It sounded ridiculous when I said it aloud; then again, so was the idea of the colony killing its queen.

Julio’s shoulders slumped, but he didn’t relent. “We’re in uncharted territory here. I’m just saying it might be smarter to learn what we can through non-invasive methods first.”

Which was how I found myself using ART’s computer program to talk to bees.

Directly under ART’s console and monitor was the box where we stored our robot worker bees. All the little robots were currently at full charge; we hadn’t used them since the early days of the project, when we were testing and refining ART’s understanding of the colony’s dances. Often the best way to do so had been to use the robots to test dance sequences and see if the bees followed their directions to the correct experimental meadows outside.

I deployed the robots and directed them to one of the hive’s major arteries where many workers were passing by. A handful of workers detached from the stream and formed a little eddy of their own nearby.

“Okay.” I rubbed my hands over the keyboard. “Um. What should I say?”

“Greetings, comrades,” Julio said under his breath. The amusement in his eyes was back.

I cleared my throat.

“How about ‘hello’?” he said.

“It’s a start.” I typed it in. Our dictionary of bee language was pretty limited. We had dance patterns and pheromonal signals figured out for honey, nectar, flower, field, predator, larva, queen, and a few verbs like harvest, feed, and so on, but “hello” doesn’t exist if you’re a bee. Instead, ART translated the phrase into the closest equivalent, a simple dance meant to draw the workers’ attention. The human equivalent would be someone waving their arms on a crowded sidewalk and shouting, “Look at me!”

The cluster of workers who had stopped to watch took it in with beady black eyes. Their antennae twitched. Then one of them scuttled forward into the circle our robots’ dance had cleared and weaved a dance of its own.

ART processed it for at least thirty seconds. Its translation appeared one letter at a time onscreen, with a slowness that felt like hesitation even though a computer program isn’t capable of doubt.

+Hello

+Not bee

+Not colony

+Honey taker

+Bee killer

“Whoa,” Julio said.

I stared at the electronic words, those little accusatory jabs of white on black, and the first thing I felt was indignation. I know, it’s absurd given what those words signified. But my first thought was they were being unfair.

I’d turned down projects with twice the funding, taken the crappy salary and accepted the lack of research assistants. I’d bitten my tongue through funding meetings with our supervisor as he explained how AgriCon was shrinking its R&D budget despite turning record profits. All because I wanted to save bees from the ecological dangers they were facing without turning them into something they weren’t—without creating Frankenbees through gengineering or robotic augmentation.

And now they were accusing us of killing them.

My stomach sank as I remembered the little corpse under Julio’s microscope. “Okay,” I said. “I think we got off on the wrong foot—tarsus, whatever.” That’s an insect foot, for you non bug nerds.

Trying not to feel ridiculous, I typed, “I’m sorry for harvesting one of your colony.” I wasn’t sure what ART would make of “sorry”—another word without a cognate—but its vocabulary included terms for bad and danger and illness and other things bees cared about. I hoped it would find something workable.

After our robots finished putting the message across, the single worker—their spokesbee?—vibrated its tiny body and wings again. +One bee =/= us

Meaning? I replied.

+One bee / colony

+Is as

+One cell / honey taker

Julio drummed his fingers on the edge of the hive, lightly as to not disturb the colony. “It’s saying one bee to them is like one cell to a human.”

I tapped the last line. “I gathered that. So, ‘honey takers’ is their name for humans? That’s not too flattering.”

He shrugged. “It’s accurate.”

True – the entire practice of apiculture relied on a give-and-take mutualism between humans and bees: we provided them a readymade hive, and in exchange took the extra honey the colony produced. But it wasn’t an agreement the way the contract between me and AgriCon was. The bees hadn’t had a say before now. Should I be surprised they had their own ideas about how humans exploited their colony’s resources, given how we’d screwed up that balance?

Julio made a motion toward the keyboard. “Can I…”

“Sure.”

I watched over his shoulder as he typed, Why did the colony kill its queen?

The answer was almost instant: +Sick

That was news to me. AgriCon had acquired new starter colonies for this project; the queen should have been less than two years old, and they lived five to ten years. Although there had been a disturbing trend of seemingly healthy queens dying young. Researchers weren’t sure if it was malnutrition, infection or some other vector. Had our bees picked up on something like that?

I bit my lip and typed, Your queen was sick?

+No fungus

+Not part of colony

Julio breathed in sharply.

“Looks like you may be onto something,” I said, and typed another line: How will the colony reproduce itself?

+New queen growing

I seized on that claim. If the colony was growing a new larval queen, that was something we could verify. A single queen larva would be another anomaly, further proof the colony was changing its fundamental structure: normally, multiple queens were induced to grow either when the old queen died or the colony grew beyond its hive and had to split into daughter colonies. The strongest of the new young queens stung her competition to death before taking the old queen’s place.

Normal bees wouldn’t be capable of disobeying the queen’s pheromonal signals preventing them from turning regular larva into queens. But it was clear we weren’t dealing with normal bees.

I diverted three of our robot workers to circulate among the hive and do a visual and olfactory scan for any new cells that might house the infant queen. While I waited, I typed another question into the console.

A researcher isn’t supposed to factor the interests and desires of her subjects into her experiments. Sure, ethics govern what kind of experiments we can run. But beyond ethical considerations, the person or rat or bee experimented on is an ontological black box. For purposes of the experiment, their desires are assumed not to exist.

Yet I found myself asking, What does the colony want?

The little bee that had danced its side of the conversation seemed to watch me, though I couldn’t have been more than a mountainous shape to it. Then it began.

+Honey taker use bad water on fields

+Make bees sick

+Make colony sick

My heart juddered in recognition. “Pesticides,” I said. “It’s talking about pesticides.”

Before Julio could reply, more text scrolled across ART’s screen:

+No more bad water

“Amen to that,” Julio whispered. I didn’t ask him why he was whispering; this was an exchange as momentous as it was absurd. I still had no idea how we were going to write it up in our notes, let alone our report for the quarterly review coming up way too soon.

The bee was still going:

+Honey taker bring fungus to other colonies

+Make colonies stronger

+Fungus = no more colonies sick

The bee seemed to face us as it halted its dance. Its wings fluttered and it started one last string, shorter than the previous one.

+No more honey

The colony carried out its threat — or kept its promise — over the next few weeks. Our robot workers recorded a decrease in honey production within the hive: it wasn’t enough to cut into the reserves the colony made for its own use, but we couldn’t justify harvesting any off the top.

There were other changes, too. Our robots confirmed the colony was growing a single new queen; though I obviously couldn’t sacrifice her for testing, visual scans confirmed the fungus was growing on the larval queen. She would be part of the mycelial network.

And while the workers used to harvest nectar from all of our experimental meadows, now they refused to pollinate any fields we’d treated with pesticides. It didn’t stop there. There were certain crops they refused to touch, even though they were untreated. The almond trees, for example.

I asked the colony about that one evening. For once Julio had gone home before me; I couldn’t concentrate on writing at my apartment (maybe because my “desk” at home was a card table and kitchen chair), so I’d stayed into the evening to work on our report for the quarterly review. But I found myself staring at the screen. It wasn’t that I didn’t know what to write; I had reams I could have written, all of which I imagined would result in either the company’s disbelief or the termination of our project.

So I shut the laptop screen and fired up ART.

Why did you stop pollinating the almond trees?

A worker—I’d long given up trying to determine if any of them were the one that had danced on the first day—spun and fluttered. +Humans use pesticide on almond trees.

We’d expanded our working vocabulary since that day. I’d made sure they learned the word “human”, for one. Maybe I was still nettled by the bees’ name, “honey taker”, accurate or not.

Not these almond trees, I typed. This grove is clean.

My interlocutor wasn’t impressed. +Other almond groves and other humans use pesticide. Not like Jenna-human.

I chewed that over. At least the colony had made an exception for me. So you won’t pollinate the almonds as long as some humans use pesticides on them?

+Correct. The colony chooses not to harvest plants that hurt it.

I didn’t argue with it. There was nothing in the colony’s logic I wanted to argue with. Every living being is driven to seek things that benefit it—food, shelter, opportunities to reproduce—and avoid things that hurt it. But what I couldn’t tell the colony was that it was part of an agricultural system that hadn’t been designed with its benefit in mind.

Humans had imported honey bees to North America as useful tools, ones that often supplanted or competed with the region’s native bees. Our research had been in service of improving that tool, making it stronger and more resilient. But we hadn’t been prepared for that tool to talk back, to start choosing what it would and wouldn’t do.

And I knew the company funding us wouldn’t be either.

“Do you think we’re going to become victims of our own success?” I asked.

Julio looked up from his sopa de tortilla. “What do you mean?”

We were in a corner booth of his favorite Mexican restaurant. Green and red bunting decorated the walls, alternating with small photographs from the owner’s hometown of Nogales. I liked the food—Nogales cuisine favored street food that was both tasty and affordable, a justifiable monthly luxury for me—but tonight I’d been too preoccupied to do more than pick at my chili relleno.

I set down my forkful of poblano pepper. “We created something amazing, right? Or at least facilitated its creation.” The mycelial network we’d used on the bees had done most of the work. “But I don’t know if the world is ready for an intelligent bee colony.”

He sipped his soup, studying the printed vinyl tablecloth with a furrowed brow. “Maybe it’s not ready for them, but I think it needs them. Relying on bats and human labor to pollinate major crops isn’t a tenable position.”

“I agree.” I twisted the edge of the plasticky cloth in my fist. I hadn’t said anything about the colony’s demonstrations of resistance to Julio, but I realized that was where this conversation had been going all along. “AgriCon wanted us to make bees resistant to colony collapse, not ones that can decide not to pollinate a major crop because they don’t like the way it’s cultivated.”

“You know, maybe they have a point.” The edge in his voice made me sit up. “Agriculture does a lot of bad shit to make their profits. Spraying pesticides, sure, but it’s also a terrible industry to work in for everyone except those at the top.”

“And researchers like us,” I said.

Julio gave me a wry smile I wasn’t sure I’d seen on him before. “Don’t want to be lumped in with the pickers?”

My face grew warm. “That’s not it—“

He shrugged away my denial. “It’s okay. That’s part of the con—the execs make us think we’re doing more important work than the people at the bottom. Make it so we don’t have to put up with the shittiest parts of the industry—fifteen hour shifts with no benefits or even a guarantee we’ll have a job next week. And maybe there are a couple extra zeroes on our paychecks, but it doesn’t mean any of us can save up month to month. Or see any of the profits our work generates.”

I ate some chili relleno to cover my embarrassment. It was more acute because Julio had a point. I’d gotten used to seeing the workers picking and pollinating in the Central Valley as part of the landscape; figures from a pastoral painting who were vaguely connected to the produce I bought at the grocery store and the food I ordered at restaurants. The pepper on my plate had been hand pollinated and hand picked by people I might never meet, but who worked meters from our research campus.

“I guess I’ve had blinders on,” I said. “Project tunnel vision.”

Julio waved this aside. “Sure. Thing is, our colony is part of the same industry. Bees always have been, but these ones have a voice now. And they’re doing what more of us should do—refusing bad work.”

The words came out too smoothly for him not to have thought this through. I made an encouraging noise.

“I’m worried about AgriCon’s response too,” Julio said. “If they shut us down it’d mean more than our jobs. They’d probably destroy the colony.”

I closed my eyes. That thought had been with me often over the past few weeks. “I don’t know how to save them.”

“They’re in a stronger position than you think,” Julio said. “They already have leverage; without them, certain crops won’t get pollinated unless humans do it.” He lowered his voice, even though there were only a few other patrons in the restaurant. “That’s the other piece. They need people in their corner. People who have a stake in how crops are getting pollinated.”

It clicked. “The fieldworkers.”

His smile this time was pure Julio, the optimistic lab partner I’d met years ago. “A lot of fieldworkers are going to lose their jobs if the bees come back. But maybe we can get ahead of that, show them they’re on the same side.”

He was right about the first part: the big commercial concerns would fire the pollinators, or bust them back to worse-paid picking jobs, as soon as they were no longer needed. But I wasn’t sure how I felt about the second part.

“Introduce the colony to the fieldworkers?”

Julio nodded. “I know a lot of the people out there. Their grandparents picked with my grandparents. That’s the kind of community you hang on to.”

I started to consider it. I trusted Julio to invite the right people, the kind who wouldn’t laugh us off or blab to AgriCon about our project. Still, my ingrained impulse toward confidentiality made me shrink at the idea. “We’re not supposed to share our research…”

Julio met my eyes and held them long enough I started to fidget. “If we don’t,” he said, “our research might end before it can help anyone. Humans or bees.”

I’d gone into agricultural science because I wanted to fix the industry’s crises, but so many of those crises were self-imposed. Solutions suppressed because they threatened to upend the status quo. I’d wanted our research to change things for the better, and the key word was change. There were interests that wouldn’t allow that unless they were forced.

I took a long inhale—exhale. “Tell me what you need me to do.”

The sun-beaten men and women arrived at our lab in ones and twos. They wore light flannel shirts and worn T-shirts and jeans, baseball caps and bandanas. I recognized the pollinators by the yellow-spattered gloves tucked in their shirt or pants pockets. There were about eight or nine people altogether. I knew none of them, but Julio hugged one, a lean woman in a red kerchief, and shook the hands of two more men. He led the woman over to me.

“Jenna, this is Maria Mendez. She oversees one of the pollination crews.”

I shook her hand. “Jenna Sykes. Julio and I are co-researchers on this project.”

Maria’s handshake was firm and dry. She looked around the small lab, her gaze lingering on the transparent boxes and tubes of the hive. “Julio said you work on honey bee colonies?”

“Yes.” I looked at the fieldworkers who’d come. Julio had made the calls to the tight-knit Central Valley immigrant community to set this up; I could only hope what we showed them was worth the time they were sacrificing after their fifteen-hour shifts. I moved in front of the largest, central chamber of the hive, and the fieldworkers’ attention gravitated toward me.

“Thank you all for coming,” I said. “I know you’re probably tired and want to get home to your families, so I’ll try not to take too much of your time.”

A man in a 49ers baseball cap cleared his throat. “Julio said your lab is working on something that could affect our jobs?”

I nodded. “Positively, I hope. But it’s important you know what we’re doing.” I activated ART’s console and primed the robot workers in their box below it. “We’ve been exploring ways to make bees immune to colony collapse. In the process, we created a colony that functions like a single brain.”

Some of the gathered people’s brows creased in confusion. Julio stepped in. “We created intelligent bees,” he said. “Individually, each one is like a brain cell—not that smart, but together the colony is as smart as you or me.”

“How can you tell?” asked a girl from the back of the room. She looked about fifteen.

I tapped the top of ART’s console. “We can talk to them.”

We invited people to take turns typing messages into the console and reading the colony’s responses. Before the meeting, I’d told the colony to expect visitors. Other pollinators, as I’d put it. Human pollinators. That had drawn the colony’s interest.

The other nut was harder to crack: how to convince the humans that the bees were actually talking to them. Sure enough, a few people including Maria thought Julio and I were pulling their legs.

“How do I know you two didn’t just program the computer to talk to us?” she asked when it was her turn.

A man who’d introduced himself as Luis nodded. “It’s kind of late for April Fool’s.”

I’d thought of that. It was a demonstration I’d originally planned for the company rep’s upcoming visit, but it should work now. “Ask the colony to do something.”

Maria started with simple commands: Go left. Go right. Turn in a circle. Once the workers completed those, she moved on to a more complex order: Fly to field B-1 and bring back nectar from the apple trees.

As a group, we followed the workers through their translucent tubes to field B-1 and watched them dutifully flit among the apple blossoms under their protective dome. “Dios mio,” Maria said softly. Several of the others caught their breaths.

She ran the colony through a few more requests, sending them to different fields, even trying to trip them up by deliberately mixing up the field name with the crop planted there. But the colony never faltered, and even gently corrected her “mistakes”.

“Okay.” Maria sat on a lab stool and crossed her arms. “I’m convinced this is real. Why are you showing us this?”

Luis shrugged and snorted. “It’s obvious, isn’t it? They’re showing us we need to start packing. Once these smart buggers get out we can kiss our jobs goodbye.”

Julio took a stool across from Maria, but looked up at Luis. “That’s exactly what we don’t want to happen.”

“There are things the colony’s told us it won’t do,” I said. “It refuses to pollinate any crops pesticides are used on, or produce extra honey for human consumption until we fix the system.”

“Does that mean the bees are on strike?” the teen girl quipped.

I didn’t laugh. “That’s exactly what it means. They’re vulnerable right now; AgriCon could decide to pull the plug, exterminate them and start over. But not if they have key workers supporting them.”

“You’re talking about a union,” Maria said. “Between the human pollinators who do handle those crops and the colony.”

I nodded. Worker bees of the world unite, indeed.

The next two weeks were a blur of activity. Julio and I alternated work on our report for the quarterly review with drafting our manifesto of demands over multiple meetings between us, the fieldworkers, and the colony. Neither of us saw much beyond the lab for those weeks, but when the day of the review came, we had a document we could be proud of. One that, I hoped, would open the door to a better future for all the workers in the industry, human and bee.

“So how does the colony survive without a queen?” Jeff Guthrie, the director of the apiculture research division, studied the bustling colony going about its work. I’d already briefed him on the fungal mechanism of the bee’s enhanced intelligence and demonstrated their ability to communicate with us through ART’s computer. He seemed duly impressed—a little dazed, actually—but was still stuck on the colony’s lack of hierarchy.

On ART’s screen, I zoomed in on a view of the former queen’s chamber. The new queen hadn’t yet had her nuptial flight, so she had no store of fertilized eggs, but I guessed that would happen soon. I was curious to see how the colony handled it.

“They still have a queen—a fertile female,” I said. “But she’s not releasing control pheromones. She lays for the colony, but she’s not in charge.”

Jeff blinked. “Who is, then?”

“None of them, by themselves. And all of them. It’s a distributed, non-hierarchical organization. Kind of like a worker’s collective.” I paused in case he had questions; when none came, I said, “Let’s tour the fields.”

We walked together through the rows of apple and almond trees, melon and cucumber and squash fields. I’d given Jeff my tablet so he could review the results of our pollination tests, and he was head-down in the numbers, paying more attention to the screen than the rows of crops. I used the lull to text Julio:

Everyone ready?

Yeah, we’re here, he texted. Bring Jeff back whenever.

Showtime. My heart turned over in my chest as Jeff cleared his throat. “I’m noticing some gaps in these test records. Looks like you couldn’t get the colony to pollinate some crops, like the almonds?”

I took the tablet back from him, hoping he didn’t notice how slick my hands were. “Yup, we’re working on that. If you come back to the lab I can show you the progress we’ve made.”

I opened the back door leading from the fields to the lab to reveal a room filled with people. Maria and Julio were in front, closest to the central chamber of the hive. The screen mounted to ART’s console, currently blank, was turned toward us. Maria held a printed copy of our manifesto in both hands.

Jeff’s eyebrows flew upward. “What’s this?” He spotted Julio. “Who are all these people? This is a secure research facility.”

Julio’s throat bobbed as he swallowed, but his voice was steady. “I know that. And ‘all these people’ are affected by that research.” He nodded to Maria, who stepped forward.

“Maria Mendez. I lead the pollinator crews for AgriCon.” She held out her hand and Jeff automatically shook it, though his grip looked a little weak.

“And about those almond trees.” I left Jeff’s side and typed the question I’d asked the bees weeks ago into the console, then stepped back from the screen.

+Humans use pesticide on crops = no pollination

“This colony is smart,” I said in answer to Jeff’s silence. “Smart enough it won’t just do what we want unless changes are made.” Maria handed me the printout and I flipped to the first page.

“We are the first human—bee agricultural workers’ collective,” I said. “And we have some demands.”

THE END