The Umbrella Man and Other Stories Read online

  “I might have guessed that.”

  “And it’s so precious that practically no one can afford to take it. When they do, it’s only one little drop at a time.”

  “And how much did you give to our baby, might I ask?”

  “Ah,” he said, “that’s the whole point. That’s where the difference lies. I reckon that our baby, just in the last four feeds, has already swallowed about fifty times as much royal jelly as anyone else in the world has ever swallowed before. How about that?”

  “Albert, stop pulling my leg.”

  “I swear it,” he said proudly.

  She sat there staring at him, her brow wrinkled, her mouth slightly open.

  “You know what this stuff actually costs, Mabel, if you want to buy it? There’s a place in America advertising it for sale at this very moment for something like five hundred dollars a pound jar! Five hundred dollars! That’s more than gold, you know!”

  She hadn’t the faintest idea what he was talking about.

  “I’ll prove it,” he said, and he jumped up and went across to the large bookcase where he kept all his literature about bees. On the top shelf, the back numbers of the American Bee Journal were neatly stacked alongside those of the British Bee Journal, Beecraft, and other magazines. He took down the last issue of the American Bee Journal and turned to a page of small classified advertisements at the back.

  “Here you are,” he said. “Exactly as I told you. ‘We sell royal jelly—$480 per lb. jar wholesale.’”

  He handed her the magazine so she could read it herself.

  “Now do you believe me? This is an actual shop in New York, Mabel. It says so.”

  “It doesn’t say you can go stirring it into the milk of a newborn baby,” she said. “I don’t know what’s come over you, Albert, I really don’t.”

  “It’s curing her, isn’t it?”

  “I’m not so sure about that, now.”

  “Don’t be so damn silly, Mabel. You know it is.”

  “Then why haven’t other people done it with their babies?”

  “I keep telling you,” he said. “It’s too expensive. Practically nobody in the world can afford to buy royal jelly just for eating except maybe one or two multimillionaires. The people who buy it are the big companies that make women’s face creams and things like that. They’re using it as a stunt. They mix a tiny pinch of it into a big jar of face cream and it’s selling like hot cakes for absolutely enormous prices. They claim it takes 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 it 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 two 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 waterygrey 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 honey-bee 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 story,” he said. “There’s more to come. The really amazing thing about royal jelly, I haven’t told you yet. I’m going to show you now how it can transform a plain dull-looking little worker bee with practically no sex organs at all into a great big beautiful fertile queen.”

  “Are you saying our baby is dull-looking and plain?” she asked sharply.

  “Now don’t go putting words into my mouth, Mabel, please. Just listen to this. Did you know that the queen bee and the worker bee, although they are completely different when they grow up, are both hatched out of exactly the same kind of egg?”

  “I don’t believe that,” she said.

  “It’s as true as I’m sitting here, Mabel, honest it is. Any time the bees want a queen to hatch out of the egg instead of a worker, they can do it.”

  “How?”

  “Ah,” he said, shaking a thick forefinger in her direction. “That’s just what I