Middling and the Row of Acorns

Middling likes things in order. His cell is the tidiest in the Meadow Hive. His pollen is sorted by colour. When he’s nervous, he lines up whatever is nearby, pebbles or seeds or twigs, from smallest to biggest, and it makes his wings stop trembling.

On one guessing day the hall got very loud.

Comb had asked how many ants lived under the big flat stone by the path. The hive needed to know, because the ants had started marching across the landing board, and if there were lots of them, the guards would need help.

Eleven bees guessed. And then they started arguing.

“Mine’s the best guess, I counted their tunnel holes!”

“No, mine, I watched them for ages!”

“Mine was the first one, so it should count most!”

The noise rose and rose. Middling’s wings began to tremble. He flew outside to the acorns under the oak and, without really thinking, started lining them up. Smallest on the left. Biggest on the right.

As he set down the last acorn, he had an idea.

He flew back in. “Can I try something? I need everyone’s guess. Just the number.”

The bees called them out, and Middling wrote each one on a fallen leaf: forty, ninety, sixty, two hundred, seventy, fifty, eighty, sixty-five, five hundred, seventy-five, fifty-five.

Then he laid the leaves on the floor, the way he’d laid the acorns. Smallest on the left, biggest on the right.

Forty. Fifty. Fifty-five. Sixty. Sixty-five. Seventy. Seventy-five. Eighty. Ninety. Two hundred. Five hundred.

“There are eleven leaves,” Middling said. “So the middle one has five on each side.” He counted in from the left. One, two, three, four, five. The sixth leaf. “Seventy.”

The hall had gone quiet. Everyone was looking at the row.

“So whose guess wins?” asked someone.

“Nobody’s,” said Middling. “That’s the point. The middle isn’t one bee being right. It’s the spot where half of us guessed lower and half of us guessed higher. It’s the whole hive’s guess.”

“But what about the five hundred?” asked Copycomb. “That’s way bigger than the others.”

Middling pointed at it. “It’s on the end. It’s still only one leaf. It doesn’t drag the middle anywhere. If it was a thousand, or a million, seventy would still be in the middle.”

The guards went down and watched the stone that evening, counting ants as they went in for the night. They counted sixty-eight.

“Seventy,” said Comb, looking at the row of leaves, which Middling had refused to let anyone tidy away. “Two away from the truth. And no single bee guessed seventy until you lined them up.”

Middling felt his wings go completely still, the way they did after a good long line of acorns. Except this time the line wasn’t just calming him. It had calmed the whole hall.