Scout over the lake

Fiction. Lake Eola is a real lake. This hive and this scout are made up.

The scout left before the buses.

The hive sat three streets off Rosalind, in a side yard with a lime and a coil of hose that never quite coiled. Dawn in Orlando is a gray that does not last. The air still held last night's rain. The scout crawled the landing board, opened her wings, and took the first lift of the day.

A man stood at the Lynx stop with a paper cup. He was waiting for a machine. He had no interest in insects.

She climbed.

Lake Eola lay a few blocks of air away, a round of water the city keeps for walking. Ducks worked the edge. A cabbage palm on the east walk had already spent its cream. She did not go to the lake for a drink. Foragers take water from puddles, birdbaths, and the wet lip of an air conditioner. A lake is a landmark, not a cup.

She flew the shoreline anyway. Scouts check the obvious places so they can ignore them later.

The fountain threw a white column into the morning. People photograph that column. Bees do not. There is no nectar in a spray of city water. The pump noise is a waste of attention. She cut across it and did not look down.

Inland, the lots got smaller. Thornton Park keeps citrus if it keeps anything. She dropped over a chain-link fence. A dog slept under a truck and did not lift its head. The lime in this yard still held flower. White. Small. A smell that cuts through I-4 heat even in the cool hour.

She landed on a blossom that had opened in the night.

The flower was a shallow cup. She worked it. Nectar thin but present. Pollen pale on her legs. She filled what she could carry and marked the place the way a scout marks a place: sun angle, distance, the pitch of the roof, the lime itself, the hose on the ground like a snake that had given up.

A second tree in the next yard had no bloom left. She did not linger. Scouts do not garden. They report.

On the way home she passed the lake again because the lake is a hard thing to miss. The fountain was still throwing water at the sky. A runner circled the path. The man at the bus stop was gone. A bus sighed at the curb and pulled off toward downtown, diesel and brakes and a hiss of doors.

She hit the landing board hard, the way a full bee hits it. Guards tasted her at the notch and let her through. Inside, the comb was work and dark and the smell of the colony, which is the smell of a thousand small decisions already made.

She danced.

The dance is a map you do with a body. Distance in the length of the run. Direction against the gravity of the comb, which stands in for the sun. Quality in how long you keep doing it, and how many times you start the figure over. She ran it. She buzzed. She offered the lime.

Nobody clapped.

A nurse paused on the comb, then another. Foragers followed the angle of her abdomen. They left the hive in a line that was not a line, just a shared heading. That is the applause. The hive does not keep a stage. It keeps a list of places that pay.

By the time the sun cleared the buildings, the lime was loud with them.

The scout went out again. There is always another lot. Spanish needles in vacant ground. A cabbage palm someone forgot to trim. Saw palmetto scrub behind a fence the county has not yet sold. A dumpster behind a strip mall with a spill of soda and one brave weed in the crack of the asphalt.

She did not think about the fountain. She thought about the next flower that would still be open when the afternoon rain arrived.