The discussion topics that follow include but are not limited to: petitions as efficient ways for the F.B.I. to generate target lists; the importance of keeping mum; the importance of speaking out; the weakness and careerism of Democrats; being in the Ukrainian Girl Scouts and getting dropped off in the woods with three other fourteen-year-olds for three days, without food; a nephew who is a television cameraman for a news show.
That a collaborative hive is the essence of bee-ness is a common misconception. Not all species of bees are social. But it’s true that the majesty of honeycomb architecture, the future-oriented labor of transforming nectar into honey, even the decadence of male bees doing nothing much other than lounging about like upper-class Romans at a bathhouse and occasionally interrupting this to lunge at a queen—people like that stuff. They see (with reasonable accuracy) a functioning, harmonious community, a golden reflection of human potential. O.K. But, of the twenty thousand or so species of bees, about eighteen thousand are solitary. None of the solitary bees make honey. Some live underground. Solitary bees also merit interest, study, respect, etc., and it’s not because I’m disconsolate that I mention them.
Bogdan concludes the meeting by extending to me a special thank-you for speaking with the spring intern. I have not spoken with the spring intern, I tell him. Bogdan tells me that this is an advance thank-you and that I will be telling the spring intern that there is no longer a spring internship. Why me? I ask. Bogdan says that he drew my name from a jar containing numerous names.
When I open my laptop after the meeting, a cartwheeling panda crosses the screen, followed by a smiling stick figure wearing a hat. My ten-year-old daughter’s iPad has an on-again, off-again relationship with my laptop. I click and accept and manage and agree, and this process reveals that she has been playing an online game themed around wolves, the base game of which includes eighty-four achievements. In-app purchases can unlock up to a hundred and twenty-three achievements. The goals of the players are to take over territory and raise pups, and if you can get other players to howl all together—it’s a coöperative game—then your stamina increases. There are gems, stars, sidekicks, food caches, a wolf store run by gnomes, and a player named M who does not seem to be ten years old—or am I being paranoid and projecting urban myths about the ubiquity of canny pedophiles? My daughter has achieved a forty-four-day streak, during which she played for a hundred and seventy-one hours. She has Violet Tundra Wolf status, which is eleven tiers below Spirit of Cave Wolf, a Pleistocene-era wolf species now extinct.
So that explains it.
These past five weeks, this daughter—the funny, joyful, resilient one—has been slumping around saying that she needs more time to relax. Before, if you asked her how basketball practice was, she would say it was great, or awesome. If you said it was time to leave for robotics, she would say we should hurry because she didn’t want to be late. She would ask for yarn or tracing paper, she would assemble her figurines into battle scenes, and for my birthday she gave me a drawing of “what you would look like if you were a cat.” Then this turn: spending more time in her room with the door closed, saying she is desperate for peace and quiet; telling me, after she came along to a lab potluck, that I owed her majorly. (We have potlucks on the first Friday of the month. She usually loves them, on account of the reliable presence of homemade iced sugar cookies with silver sprinkles, and also because Bogdan asks her questions about her “studies,” as he calls them.) I interpreted her behavioral shift as an indication of a rise in whatever hormone it is that rises in girls around this time. My aversion to primate biology is strong. A mind must economize. Re the wolf app, however, I am not unfamiliar with the mood- and priority-altering powers of addiction. (...)
When I pick her up from school and ask her about the wolf app, she says she will delete it. She says it right away. She doesn’t argue in favor of keeping the game. She must be relieved by this intervention. I promise, Mom, she says. O.K., I should have remembered that this girl is funny, joyful, and resilient. When she was three, and we were in the gift shop of a small zoo, I told her she could choose one stuffed animal, and she chose a plush largemouth bass. Humans have what are termed K-selected reproductive strategies, which means: our young grow slowly, there are few of them, they are heavily invested in by their parents, and they have long life spans. A queen bee, in contrast, will lay two thousand eggs, but there’s little attention given to any one of her young. We would usually term this an r-selected reproductive strategy—the opposite of a K-selected reproductive strategy—though more than half survive, as the larvae are fed by their older sisters. Compare this with a largemouth bass, who lays tens of thousands of eggs, of which only a small fraction of one per cent become adults. The K and r categories are hazy, imperfect.
Many people are bored by this kind of information, I know. But my ten-year-old, historically, loves such things.
When we get home, the twenty-one-year-old is lying on the sofa, in the same position she was in this morning—apparently, although I did not diagram it—but there are two seltzer cans on the ground near her and the room smells like coconut-mango smoothie. That’s O.K. Although some worker bees leave the nest seventeen times a day and others only once or twice, the so-called lazy bees ultimately bring in about the same amount of nectar as the others. The thinking is that it’s metabolically expensive to be intelligent, so the more intelligent bees tire quickly, but when they do venture out, they are very good at finding nectar, and after that they lie low for the remainder of the day. That’s one idea, anyhow. It doesn’t cast a flattering light on me. My work ethic is that of the dim bees.
My routine these days is to drop off the ten-year-old at home with the twenty-one-year-old and then return to the lab. You could play Boggle, I suggest, as I leave. I am already thinking about my bees.
I’m teaching a subset of them to overcome a two-step obstacle to obtaining a sugar reward. They might be able to figure out one step on their own, but a sequence of steps—someone has to teach them that, unless they’re geniuses, I suppose. What I want to see is if bees to whom I haven’t taught the two-step trick will be able to learn it by watching their trained peers—whether bees can pass on ideas among themselves, and across generations. Whether they have culture, like crows do. I mean, I myself know that bees have inner lives and personalities and culture. But I’m trying to persuade other people to see them that way. I can cite much supporting evidence, some of it old, some of it generated by our lab’s research. It’s not only that individual bees have distinct foraging habits and varying problem-solving abilities. Bees even have optimism and pessimism (I would argue). If a bee has a bad experience, like being shaken in a jar, that bee is less likely to pursue a treat in situations where there’s a fifty-fifty chance of getting what it wants. Untraumatized bees are more likely to take a chance. This remarkable work came from England, a place with, I think, a no-nonsense ethology culture. Spend enough time with bees and, if you are open-minded—if you are sufficiently possessed of true scientific spirit—you begin to see them as feeling individuals. Bogdan, who researches bee visual processing and bee intelligence, anesthetizes bees before dissection as a matter of protocol, though he is not required to by the Institutional Animal Care and Use Committee. He respects them, as beings.
It is almost seven o’clock by the time I return home. The twenty-one-year-old is talking on the phone, and the ten-year-old is asleep on the sofa, her iPad clutched in her hands, her mouth slightly open. I see that she has played another hundred and twenty-seven minutes. I delete the app. I find a category called Games and Entertainment, and I delete every single game and entertainment, and I activate a timer lock that makes the iPad unusable for anything except reading for twenty-three hours and fifty-nine minutes a day. I am angry and frightened. These are drugs we’re dealing with. I download and print opinion pieces by people who have designed addictive video games and who say they would never, ever let their children use them.
The loudness of the printer gets the twenty-one-year-old off the sofa. She says she doesn’t want to hurt my feelings but she needs to be honest with me, honest about the kind of difficulties I have imposed upon her. For example, I never taught her how to cook or iron or help with dishes after supper, and it is this lack of basic grownup skills that caused her to lose the one person on the planet who understood her, the one person who was like her, who appeared normal but who on the inside was an alien. There are other aliens, but she is not compatible with them, because they look weird and act weird; their weirdness isn’t private, like hers is, and his is. She is also upset with me because when she was in the eighth grade I showed her a video of the bird-of-paradise courting ritual, and that gave her a really distorted understanding of what to expect from love, and what to expect of herself, and it just generally got her started in life on the wrong foot. But it was O.K., I was only human, and she wasn’t going to be one of those people who devote a lifetime to thinking through how their mothers failed them.
Thatta girl, I want to say. I can be clear-sighted and tough, too, even if I’m not a Serb. I would never label one daughter as beautiful and one as kind and one as intelligent, because my culture is not my dad’s. But if I were to hear such a pronouncement about my girls, I would know that my older daughter was the one being categorized as beautiful. This quality has hobbled her; in effect, it has blunted the development of compensatory strengths. In any case, I’m focussed on the ten-year-old. I wake her up.
You go to your room for half an hour, right now, until I tell you when the time is up, I say, like my dad used to. And, while you’re up there, I’d like you to read these. I give her the printouts of the articles about how video games are drugs. If she’s old enough to do drugs, she’s old enough to read about drugs. I’m not punishing you, I tell her. I’m giving you a chance to be alone. Being alone can be restorative. This, too, is something I learned from my dad. (...)
After half an hour has passed, I tell the ten-year-old she can leave her room. She does so without comment.
The next morning, she opens her purged iPad while eating a raspberry Popsicle for breakfast. She glances up at me. She sees what I’ve wrought, the virtual scorched earth, but she won’t acknowledge it. There was nothing else to eat in the house, she says of her Popsicle. When I mention that there are oranges, she tells me that I picked the wrong oranges, the ones that aren’t sweet, and that I am always buying her the wrong size shoes, too, they are never comfortable, and she hadn’t wanted to say anything before but now she needs to tell me, and also do I remember the time with her ingrown toenail that I said would heal itself and it didn’t heal itself, it got worse and worse, and do I remember when I had her come out to the field when bee swarms were happening, to learn, and it was awful, and also that time I told her to hurry across the street and there was a bus coming and she could have been killed?
It is wrong to think of bees as lacking inner lives, dreams, fears, anger. I am thinking primarily of the worker bees, which is to say the female bees, because they are the ones who set out every day. When one meets a bee out in the world, as opposed to in the hive, it’s almost always a female. For this reason, most of what we know about bees is about female bees, because they are easier to see, easier to study. Male bees likely have inner lives as well—they may also be dim or bright, optimistic or pessimistic—but we have so little observational data about them. Some researchers have held on to the idea that they are simple layabouts who exist only to fertilize a queen. Myself, I agree with those who say that’s a metabolically very expensive approach to maintaining a cache of genetic variance. After mating season, male bees’ sisters no longer provide them much nectar; they let their brothers waste away, and at a certain point escort them to the hive’s entrance and toss them out like old loaves. Something is missing in our understanding of the males. That seems clearer to me than ever. And yet the abundance of our knowledge about the females has only increased their ineffability. (...)
When the class ends, someone in a cantaloupe hoodie is waiting for me outside the seminar room. It’s my twenty-one-year-old’s former boyfriend, the alien. He shakes my hand and says he isn’t angry with me. But, at the same time, I am angry, he adds. He says he is not freaked out but also is freaked out, and that he isn’t saying I’m responsible but also, if someone is responsible, it would be me.
You’re not a quantitative thinker, are you? I want to say to him. As I walk him over to my office, I am thinking that why anyone finds anyone else attractive is more mysterious than is usually acknowledged. My beautiful daughter! The cantaloupe alien sits down on the sofa, and I sit behind my desk. He says that he ran into my daughter at the taco place, and that seemed normal, and he cares for her as a person. And then he saw her at the all-night ninepin-bowling place, and he still thought, Well, maybe that happens. And then he saw her on a bench outside his cousin’s apartment. That’s when he searched his backpack. It was like one of those Swedish thriller-horror films, he says. He reaches into his pocket and unwraps from aluminum foil a very small coppery coil attached to a plastic rectangle.
That’s curious, I say. It’s a small radio tracker. I had lunch a few years back with the man who designed this particular model. He had French onion soup and didn’t use a napkin. I have superglued thousands of his trackers onto the backs of chilled, sleepy bees before sending them back out into their world. This must be a mistake or confusion, I say. There are so many of these lying around the house, I say. The coil might have caught on his hoodie. Or his shoelace. Or was packed into his bag by accident along with a book, or a sock, or a decorative charm.
Yeah, I don’t think so, he says.
He’s chewing on the aglet of his hoodie’s drawstring like a preschooler. He closes his hand over the tracker. I’m thinking, Has my daughter tracked that he’s right here right now? She will be so angry with me if so.
The alien is saying that he was raised not to get police involved in stuff like this but rather to work things out person to person, through communication, compassion, and understanding.
Yes, I say to him, it’s very commendable that he has come to see me. And it is! Meanwhile, he is looking at the three-monkeys figurine on my desk. You like the monkeys, I remark, deliberately not calling them what they really are, which is chimpanzees. He tells me that he’s seen monkeys playing poker, but not this.
O.K., I say, getting up. Thank you so much for coming by. Let me see if I can get to the bottom of this. I take the tracker—the evidence—from him.
by Rivka Galchen, New Yorker | Read more:
Image: Stephen Doyle
