Comb and the Day of the Ox

Comb is the oldest bee in the Meadow Hive. Her fuzz has gone soft and grey, she wears tiny round spectacles, and she keeps the guessing board: a wall of wax cells where the hive’s guesses go up, all together, on guessing days.

The young bees sometimes ask her why she doesn’t just tell them the answers. She’s old. She must know.

That’s when she tells them about the day of the ox.

When Comb was young, she was the best guesser in the hive, and she knew it. She guessed fast and she guessed well. If anyone disagreed with her, she buzzed them down.

One autumn a farmer led a great brown ox into the meadow, and the bees from three hives gathered on the fence to look at it. An old bee from another hive asked a question: “How many of us would it take, sitting on its back, to cover the ox from horns to tail?”

Young Comb answered first, and loudly. “Two thousand. Easily.”

Some bees agreed with her straight away, because she was Comb. Others went quiet. A small bee from the far hive said, “I think more. Maybe ten thousand?” Comb laughed at her.

The old bee did something Comb had never seen before. She asked every bee on the fence to whisper a number into a crack in the wood, one at a time, without listening to anyone else. There were dozens of bees. Some said tiny numbers. Some said huge ones. Comb said two thousand again, just to be sure.

Then the old bee lined up all the numbers and found the middle one. Seven thousand.

That evening, thousands of bees really did settle on the warm ox as it dozed in the sun, and the old bee counted them in groups of a hundred as they landed. It took seven thousand two hundred bees to cover it.

Young Comb’s guess had been miles off. The small bee’s guess had been off too, in the other direction. But the middle of everyone’s quiet guesses had been almost exactly right.

“I felt awful,” old Comb tells the young bees. “I had been so sure. And all the bees who agreed with me because I was loud, I’d pulled them wrong too.”

“What did you do?”

“I asked the old bee how she did it. She said, ‘I don’t know the answer better than you. I just know how to ask.’”

That’s why, on guessing days now, Comb has rules. Everyone guesses quietly first, eyes closed if they like, before anyone speaks. Every guess goes up on the board, even the strange ones. Then the hive lines them up and looks for the middle, and looks at how spread out they are.

“So you don’t know the answers?” asks Copycomb.

“Sometimes I have a good guess,” says Comb, polishing her spectacles. “But my guess is just one cell on the board. The board is wiser than me.”

The young bees look up at the wall of wax, with all its little numbers. It doesn’t look like much. Just a crowd of guesses, some too high, some too low.

But Comb has learned what it can do, when it’s asked the right way. And she’d much rather teach them how to ask than tell them what to think.