Fanspread’s Fan of Leaves

Fanspread is the bee who always asks one more question.

On guessing days, after Middling has lined up the guesses and found the middle, most bees cheer and fly off. Fanspread stays behind and looks at the row. Not at the middle leaf. At the ends.

“Why do you stare at the ends?” asked Middling once. “The answer’s in the middle.”

“The middle is the answer,” said Fanspread. “The ends tell me how sure we are.”

Middling didn’t really see what he meant, until the two questions.

They came on the same morning. First, Comb asked how many cells were in the small honeycomb by the door. Nine bees guessed. Middling lined them up.

Eighty-eight. Ninety. Ninety-two. Ninety-five. A hundred. A hundred and two. A hundred and five. A hundred and eight. A hundred and ten.

“A hundred,” said Middling, pointing at the middle leaf.

Then Comb asked a harder question: how far away was the new flower field the scouts had smelled on the wind? Nobody had flown there yet. Again nine bees guessed. Again Middling lined them up.

Twenty. Thirty-five. Fifty. Seventy. A hundred. A hundred and forty. Two hundred. Two hundred and fifty. Four hundred.

“A hundred,” said Middling. “Same answer!”

The bees cheered. Two questions, both a hundred. It felt neat.

But Fanspread’s wings had gone tight and uneasy. He picked up a handful of leaves and spread them in a half circle, a fan, and held the two rows next to each other.

“Look,” he said. “The honeycomb guesses go from eighty-eight to a hundred and ten. They’re all bunched up close together. But the flower field guesses go from twenty all the way to four hundred.”

“The middle is still a hundred both times,” said Copycomb.

“Yes,” said Fanspread. “But when the guesses are bunched up, it means we all pretty much agree. We can trust that hundred. When they’re spread out like a fan, it means nobody really knows. That hundred might be very wrong.”

The hall went quiet. It didn’t feel neat any more.

“So what do we do?” asked Comb, although Fanspread suspected she already knew.

“For the honeycomb, nothing. We’re sure enough,” said Fanspread. “For the flower field, we shouldn’t send the whole hive based on a hundred. We should send two scouts first, and find out.”

It felt hard to say. Everyone had been happy, and now he’d made them unsure. But Comb nodded.

The two scouts flew out. The flower field turned out to be three hundred wingbeats away, much further than a hundred. If the whole hive had flown there expecting a short trip, the slow bees carrying full loads would have been caught out in the evening cold.

The honeycomb by the door, counted that afternoon, had ninety-eight cells. The tight guesses had been right to feel sure.

That evening Middling flew over to Fanspread. “So the middle tells you where,” he said.

“And the spread tells you how much to believe it,” said Fanspread.

Middling went back to his cell and, for the first time, looked at both ends of his row of acorns before he looked at the middle.