The Loudest Bee

One summer a stranger flew into the Meadow Hive. His name was Thunderwing, and he was the biggest, loudest, shiniest bee anyone had ever seen. He came from a hive far away, and he had opinions about everything.

On guessing day, Comb held up the question: how many days until the lime trees flowered? The hive needed to know, because the lime blossom was the sweetest nectar of the year, and the foragers had to be rested and ready.

Before anyone could close their eyes, Thunderwing boomed, “Three days! I’ve seen a thousand lime trees. I know these things.”

Copycomb’s mouth opened. “Three d…”

He stopped. He could feel the old warm pull, the lovely easy feeling of agreeing. Lots of bees around him were already nodding.

“Wait,” said Copycomb, and his voice was very small. “If we all say three, the hive only has one guess. His.”

The nodding slowed.

Stickle had felt the number land in her head like a pebble. Three. Three. Three. She tried to think about lime trees, and all her thoughts kept snapping back to three.

“I can feel it,” she said out loud. “His number is stuck in my head, and it isn’t even my number. Everybody, did you hear three before you thought about it yourselves?”

A lot of bees looked at the floor. They had.

“Then let’s start again,” said Comb. “This time, write first.”

The hall went quiet. Eyes closed. Crayons scratched petals. Copycomb worked it out his own way: the buds were small and green, and last year they had taken about two weeks from small and green to open. Stickle made herself forget three and looked at the buds through the window. Twelve days, she thought.

Farbuzz, as usual, wrote something enormous. “A HUNDRED DAYS,” his petal said, in very big letters.

The petals went up on the board. Most said something between ten and sixteen. Thunderwing’s three was there. Farbuzz’s hundred was there. Thunderwing laughed at it.

Sharewell flew up first. “Let’s use every guess fairly,” she said, and began adding them up to share them out evenly. Then she stopped, crayon in mid-air. “Oh. Farbuzz’s hundred is going to pour a whole lake into the jug. The average will come out far too big.”

She did it anyway, so everyone could see. The average came out at about twenty days.

“Nobody actually thinks twenty,” said Sharewell. “It got dragged.”

“Then line them up,” said Fanspread. “Find the middle.”

Middling wasn’t there that day, so Fanspread did it himself, laying the petals out from smallest to biggest. Thunderwing’s three on the far left. Farbuzz’s hundred on the far right. And in the middle, with just as many petals on each side, thirteen.

“Thirteen days,” said Fanspread. “And look: the three on the end doesn’t drag it down, and the hundred on the end doesn’t drag it up.”

Farbuzz grinned. “My hundred barely moved it?”

“Not one bit,” said Fanspread. “It’s on the end. The middle doesn’t care how far away the ends are.”

Then Fanspread did the thing he always did. He looked at the ends, and at how bunched the middle petals were. Most of them sat between eleven and fifteen.

“Most of us are close together,” he said. “So I think we can trust thirteen. Not perfectly. But a lot more than three.”

Thunderwing buzzed angrily. “I’ve seen a thousand lime trees!”

“Maybe you have,” said Comb kindly. “But these are our trees, and the board is made of every bee who looked at them.”

The foragers rested. Twelve days later, the first lime blossoms opened. The day after that, the trees were covered.

If the hive had believed three days, the foragers would have worn themselves out waiting in the cold mornings for flowers that weren’t there yet. Instead they flew out fresh, and the hive filled with the sweetest honey of the year.

Thunderwing left the next week, still loud, still shiny. But before he went, he landed beside Copycomb.

“Nobody’s ever said ‘wait’ to me before,” he said.

“It was hard,” said Copycomb.

“Was it?”

“You’re very convincing,” said Copycomb. “That’s exactly why we had to check.”

That evening the five bees sat on the landing board: the one who stopped copying, the one who noticed the anchor, the one whose wild guess sat harmlessly on the end, the one who showed how an average can be dragged, and the one who checked how spread out the guesses were.

None of them had been the loudest bee. Together, they had kept the whole hive honest.