Lonehum Turns Her Back

On guessing days in the Meadow Hive, the bees gather in the great hall, and Comb holds up a question. Then everyone buzzes at once. Numbers fly around the room like sparks.

Lonehum always does something strange. As soon as the question is asked, she turns her back on everyone, closes her eyes, and scratches a number onto a petal with a pollen crayon. Only then does she turn round and listen.

“Why do you do that?” asked Stickle one morning. “It looks rude.”

Lonehum’s face went hot. She hadn’t meant it to look rude. “I’m not ignoring anyone,” she said. “I just need my own number first. If I hear yours, I can’t un-hear it.”

Stickle didn’t really understand. But a week later, she did.

The question that day was about the old hollow oak at the edge of the meadow. A new colony might move into it, and the hive wanted to know how tall it was. Comb led everyone out to look at it from the grass.

Before Lonehum could even turn away, Farbuzz shouted, “Two hundred bees tall! At least!”

Lonehum heard it. She couldn’t help hearing it. Two hundred bees tall bounced around her head like a ball that wouldn’t stop.

She turned her back anyway and closed her eyes. She thought about the hive itself, which she knew was about forty bees tall, stacked up. She opened one eye and looked at the oak. It looked about three hives tall. Three times forty. A hundred and twenty.

She scratched 120 onto her petal.

When she turned round, the other bees were saying things like “a hundred and eighty” and “a hundred and ninety” and “about two hundred.”

“Everyone heard Farbuzz first,” Lonehum said quietly to Comb. “Now all the numbers are near two hundred.”

Comb looked thoughtful. “And yours?”

“A hundred and twenty.” Lonehum held up her petal. It felt lonely, being so far from all the others. She almost scratched it out and wrote a hundred and ninety so she’d fit in.

She didn’t.

The next day, two strong bees flew a thread of spider silk from the bottom of the oak to the top and measured it against the hive. The oak was a hundred and thirty bees tall.

The great hall went very quiet.

“Most of you were pulled,” said Comb gently. “Not because you’re bad at guessing. Because the first number you hear is like a magnet. It drags your guess toward it.”

Stickle flew over to Lonehum. “That’s why you turn your back.”

“It’s not because I don’t like you,” said Lonehum. “It’s because the hive needs my real guess. If I just copy the loud number, the hive gets the same guess twice and learns nothing new.”

From then on, Comb made a new rule for guessing days. Before anyone says a word, every bee writes a number on a petal. Then, and only then, they share.

The hall is quieter at the start now. Lots of bees have their eyes closed. And the guesses, when they all go up on the wall together, are much closer to the truth.