Bumble

Gleann na gCaorach keeps its wool in a long stone shed at the top of the lane, and the shed keeps a bee. The valley calls her Bumbóg, which is the Irish for what she is, and the record renders that as Bumble, the way it renders everything else said in the valley. It is a name for one bee: the queen at the heart of the nest in the sweepings under the sorting bench, where fleece-ends and floor-moss have been brushed into the same corner for longer than anyone has kept the shed. Nobody in Gleann na gCaorach has ever needed the name to mean more than that.

What the valley has never needed to know is that this season's Bumbóg is not last season's. A bumblebee queen founds one nest in her life. She comes out of the cold alone, builds a first cup of wax in the sweepings, warms the first eggs with her own body, and the nest she raises sends out, at its end, the daughters who will sleep through the cold and each found a nest of her own. In the shed, most seasons, one of them founds it in the same corner. So there has been one Bumble in the wool-shed for as long as there has been a wool-shed, and there have been a great many, and the valley, which counts its sheep to the last lamb, has never once counted these. That is not carelessness. It is the right number of names for the thing.

Why There Are Bees on Drithane

Drithane is cold, dry and high, with air thin enough that a settler takes weeks to get used to it, and its farming runs under glass. A honeybee never gets used to any of it: below about ten degrees a honeybee colony draws into a cluster and stays there, and it forages in earnest only in the kind of weather Drithane's valleys see for a few weeks at a time. A bumblebee is built differently. Before she flies she works her flight muscles without moving her wings until her thorax is as warm as a summer afternoon, whatever the air is doing, and then she flies — in air near freezing, and in air thinner than the top of Earth's highest mountain. On Earth, bumblebees were the pollinators of the high passes and the Arctic long before they were anyone's glasshouse stock.

The founders brought them for the reason settlers of another cold country once shipped bumblebees across an ocean, in 1885 CE (2085 UCSD): red clover sets no seed without a long-tongued bee, and a sheep valley runs on clover. The valley's glasshouses run bumblebee colonies the way glasshouses have since the twentieth century CE — boxed, counted, replaced on a schedule — and every one of them is on the valley's books. The wool-shed nest is on none of them and never has been. The Survey Corps team that came for the crossing asked whether the shed's bee was stock or wild, and Sorcha Nic Dhiarmada's answer was that a thing which has kept itself in her shed for longer than the ledger has been kept is not the ledger's business. The team wrote it down.

What She Reads

A bumblebee reads a flower in ways the valley cannot. She sees colours past the violet end of a human eye. She reads scent. She feels, through the hairs of her body and before she lands, the small electric charge a flower carries against her own. And she reads whether another bee has been there first: a bee leaves a footprint of scent on every flower she works, a bee coming after reads it as taken — come back later, and does, and the mark fades at about the rate the flower refills. It is the only filing system in Gleann na gCaorach kept on the thing itself, read by anyone who lands, and true for exactly as long as it needs to be. Eden's detective bureau, which runs on forms read months late by a committee, has nothing to set beside it.

What she does not read is a face. A bumblebee has no apparatus for a person: a hand is a warm mass moving at a rate, a voice is weather, a smile is nothing at all. She cannot be coaxed and she cannot be talked out of the flower she is on. Where a valley reads its guests for a living, the shed's bee does not take part, and has no idea that she is failing to.

The Crossing

On crossing nights the valley goes dark, and its working animals go quiet with the settlements. The nest does not. A bumblebee nest hums through every night, the workers fanning and warming the brood, and it hummed through the instrumented crossing of spring 2827 UCSD exactly as it hums through any other. One of the Survey's ground sensors had been set on the shed floor, for the floor's sake rather than the nest's, and its trace for the crossing hour carries the hum. Nobody had a trace of the nest from a night that was not a crossing to set it against, because nobody had thought to record a bee before, so the reading says nothing about whether the shed's bees feel what the sky does to the ground — a question the survey record already holds open for every animal in the valley. The trace is kept, and marked as saying nothing, which is what the record does with a reading it cannot yet compare.

Character Notes

Bumble is not a Smart Pet and could never have been a candidate. A certified harness is a collar, and the assessment measures what a candidate's own cognition does with an asymmetry before anyone decides whether to build on it. Nobody has ever put an asymmetry to a bee. Nobody would know how.

Some bumblebees comb fibre over the nest — dry grass, moss, whatever is lying about — and the shed's line has always done it with the sweepings, so the brood lies under a felt of fleece-ends it has carded itself. The valley has never asked which sort of bumblebee she is, and the record files the behaviour rather than the name, on the principle that a bee who has carded wool in a wool valley for longer than the ledger has earned her place there on the work alone.

Bubochka spent a crossing week in the house's wool basket by the stove and never met the shed's other resident. Her one-page report lists what she was sent to watch, and a bee was not on it; no report anyone has filed on Gleann na gCaorach mentions the shed's bee at all, which is about what a valley expects of a form. The valley's own file on the visitor of the second supply drop — the thing Sorcha refused at the ramp — does not say whether it ever came near the shed. The shed keeps no file, and a bee has no face to read one with.

See also: Drithane, Sorcha Nic Dhiarmada, The Dark-Down (S02E03C01), The Undersong of the Drithle (S02E04C01), Bubochka, Smart Pet.