“Maybe they’re both personal,” he replied.
She thought about it.
“Maybe,” she determined in answer.
“Maybe?”
“Yes, maybe,” she confirmed. “You tell me about bees and maybe I’ll tell you about—” She broke off before saying the heist, nearly shrugging on his interpretation of it. How easily she let other people take ownership of her story, she thought. “About what happened.”
“Okay,” he said, and thought about it. “Some honeybees have stingers incapable of penetrating human skin. So they make all this honey, right?” he said rhetorically, and she nodded. “But obviously people take it from them, and they just keep on making honey anyway.”
This has to be a metaphor, Regan thought.
“That’s not a metaphor,” Aldo said.
“Of course not,” Regan agreed.
“Some hives are more … hostile, I guess. More lethal.” He sipped his wine. “The more they’re able to defend their hive, the less honey they typically produce. Also, queen bees are interesting,” he went on tangentially. “The queen can choose whether or not to fertilize certain eggs.”
“What happens if they don’t get fertilized?”
“They’re drones,” Aldo said. “Male bees.”
She blinked. “I’m sorry, what?”
“Yes,” he said to her general sense of surprise, “and male bees only have one job.”
Regan set her glass down. “Don’t tell me it’s to fuck the queen.”
“It’s to fuck the queen,” Aldo confirmed, taking a sip. He eyed his glass. “Grippy,” he remarked, his concentration wandering back to the wine, and Regan gave his foot a nudge.
“Keep going about bees,” she said. “What happens after the male bee fucks the queen?”
“Well, his penis gets ripped out,” Aldo said.
Regan blinked.
“Yeah, he only has one shot. Bees mate in flight, right?” he said, and she nodded like that meant something to her; as if the mating rituals of bees had ever crossed her mind before. “Right, so, the drone bees have bigger eyes to see the queen coming. They mate one time, and then—”
“He … dies?” Regan cut in.
“He dies,” Aldo confirmed. “His only purpose in life is to reproduce. Not unlike other species.”
“That’s—” She blinked. “So wait, how does the queen become the queen?”
“Well, she’s more developed than the rest of the bees,” Aldo said. “If an egg isn’t fertilized, it becomes a drone. If it is, it becomes a worker bee—female,” he clarified, to which Regan nodded again, “and then they feed it bee proteins, which have a limited supply. Eventually, they transition to feeding the larvae nectar. But if they choose to feed one of the larvae more of the bee proteins, it eventually becomes the queen. It develops more,” he explained, “and can make more worker bees.”
“So who chooses the queen?”
“The hive. The worker bees. They usually do it when the current queen dies, or if she seems to be getting weaker.”
“So they choose the next queen,” Regan said, and then corrected herself. “No—they make her?”
Aldo nodded, taking another sip. “Yes.”
The opposite of divine right, Regan thought; a godless society of women. A true patriarchal nightmare. The thought inflamed her temporarily with a reverential delight.
“But—” She picked up her wine, shaking her head. “But some of the bees,” she said slowly. “You said if they’re more protective of the hive, they make less honey?”
“Yes,” he repeated. “The more time the bee spends defending the hive, the less honey it produces.”
“So, somewhere out there, there’s a hive of lady bees killing people for vengeance instead of doing what they’re supposed to do?”
“Yes,” Aldo confirmed, “probably.”
“That’s—” Encouraging. Invigorating, even. Temporarily mesmerizing. “Interesting.”
He nodded, glancing up at her with half a smile as he brushed a loose curl out of his face.
His haircut was unfortunate, Regan thought again. There was a certain degree of conventional handsomeness to him that went unrecognized beneath a layer of enigmatic fog. Or maybe not, she amended internally, recalling the girl who had been looking at him during her Impressionism tour. Maybe that girl had looked past the undereye shadows and the terrible haircut and the too-thin look of his cheeks and seen something else. He had those eyes, Regan supposed, and that mouth, and for better or worse, he had all the strangeness that fell out of it. Part of Regan irrationally resented the girl for not knowing that Aldo Damiani was closest to handsome when he was talking about bees.