She sat there staring at him, her brow wrinkled, her mouth slightly open.
‘You know what this stuff actually costs, Mabel, if you want to buy it? There’s a place in America advertising it for sale at this very moment for something like five hundred dollars a pound jar! Five hundred dollars! That’s more than gold, you know!’
She hadn’t the faintest idea what he was talking about.
‘I’ll prove it,’ he said, and he jumped up and went across to the large bookcase where he kept all his literature about bees. On the top shelf, the back numbers of the American Bee Journal were neatly stacked alongside those of the British Bee Journal, Beecraft, and other magazines. He took down the last issue of the American Bee Journal and turned to a page of small classified advertisements at the back.
‘Here you are,’ he said. ‘Exactly as I told you. “We sell royal jelly – $480 per lb. jar wholesale.” ’
He handed her the magazine so she could read it herself.
‘Now do you believe me? This is an actual shop in New York, Mabel. It says so.’
‘It doesn’t say you can go stirring it into the milk of a practically new-born baby,’ she said. ‘I don’t know what’s come over you, Albert, I really don’t.’
‘It’s curing her, isn’t it?’
‘I’m not so sure about that, now.’
‘Don’t be so damn silly, Mabel. You know it is.’
‘Then why haven’t other people done it with their babies?’
‘I keep telling you,’ he said. ‘It’s too expensive. Practically nobody in the world can afford to buy royal jelly just for eating except maybe one or two multimillionaires. The people who buy it are the big companies that make women’s face creams and things like that. They’re using it as a stunt. They mix a tiny pinch of it into a big jar of face cream and it’s selling like hot cakes for absolutely enormous prices. They claim it takes out the wrinkles.’
‘And does it?’
‘Now how on earth would I know that, Mabel? Anyway,’ he said, returning to his chair, ‘that’s not the point. The point is this. It’s done so much good to our little baby just in the last few hours that I think we ought to go right on giving it to her. Now don’t interrupt, Mabel. Let me finish. I’ve got two hundred and forty hives out there and if I turn over maybe a hundred of them to making royal jelly, we ought to be able to supply her with all she wants.’
‘Albert Taylor,’ the woman said, stretching her eyes wide and staring at him. ‘Have you gone out of your mind?’
‘Just hear me through, will you please?’
‘I forbid it,’ she said, ‘absolutely. You’re not to give my baby another drop of that horrid jelly, you understand?’
‘Now, Mabel…’
‘And quite apart from that, we had a shocking honey crop last year, and if you go fooling around with those hives now, there’s no telling what might not happen.’
‘There’s nothing wrong with my hives, Mabel.’
‘You know very well we had only half the normal crop last year.’
‘Do me a favour, will you?’ he said. ‘Let me explain some of the marvellous things this stuff does.’
‘You haven’t even told me what it is yet.’
‘All right, Mabel. I’ll do that too. Will you listen? Will you give me a chance to explain it?’
She sighed and picked up her knitting once more. ‘I suppose you might as well get if off your chest, Albert. Go on and tell me.’
He paused, a bit uncertain now how to begin. It wasn’t going to be easy to explain something like this to a person with no detailed knowledge of apiculture at all.
‘You know, don’t you,’ he said, ‘that each colony has only one queen?’
‘Yes.’
‘And that this queen lays all the eggs?’
‘Yes, dear. That much I know.’
‘All right. Now the queen can actually lay different kinds of eggs. You didn’t know that, but she can. It’s what we call one of the miracles of the hive. She can lay eggs that produce drones, and she can lay eggs that produce workers. Now if that isn’t a miracle, Mabel, I don’t know what is.’
‘Yes, Albert, all right.’
‘The drones are the males. We don’t have to worry about them. The workers are all females. So is the queen, of course. But the workers are unsexed females, if you see what I mean. Their organs are completely undeveloped, whereas the queen is tremendously sexy. She can actually lay her own weight in eggs in a single day.’
He hesitated, marshalling his thoughts.