Last Lessons in Beekeeping

Abstract

I HAD NO FATHER-like the drone, Apis mellifera, who through a genetic contortion, a strange and devastating logic, has no father. Parthe nogenesis: reproduction without intervention, as explicitly documented in Dadant's The Hive and the Honeybee. The queen lays either fertilized or unfertilized eggs, pleasure, her choice: the fertilized egg, the worker, emerges from her cell to begin a succession of roles: nurse, attendant, guard, forager; the drone emanates from an unfertilized egg, and from the moment he eats through the capping, lives contentedly off the ample output of his ambitious, neurotic sisters until the end of the season when, his mating skills redundant, the stores of honey now a limited commodity, he has his wings ripped off and is dumped at the front of the hive to die. I kept a hive in our back yard and had witnessed the grisly event. By spring, the handful of husks had softened into the spaded ground. The father I did not have lived a mile away from us near Girard on Lead Avenue, a three-lane one-way thoroughfare?this was in Albuquerque, 1969?in an efficiency apartment with a stall shower and a two-step back porch: no yard. My mother had asked him to move out the September before, just after my sister, thirteen, and I, soon twelve, started school. She explained that he wasn't a bad father, in the sense that bad fathers beat their wives and kids, came home falling-down drunk, lied, embezzled, caroused. She wanted to make this clear. He wasn't a bad father: he was no father: he had to move out. What made him no father was that he drank?as I have