Bees

Bees are part of the working world around Boaz Brandstetter’s home, but their brief appearance in the narrative turns them into more than background creatures. When Alexander Gideon prods their hive and they do not sting him, the failed encounter opens onto competing ideas of healing, faith, and humanity’s impulse to pursue salvation rather than sustain life.

The Hive and the Healing Story

Boaz Brandstetter tells Alexander that one of the women staying there had once served water to an old guru in Wisconsin. According to her account, the guru could heal malignant diseases through bee stings. The anecdote introduces the hive as a possible instrument of cure just as Alexander is living with advanced cancer. Its promise, however, comes secondhand: the woman claims the treatment works, but the narrative does not establish that it does.

Alexander tests the story by thrusting a stick into the hive. The bees circle him but do not sting. The expected encounter with a painful remedy never occurs, and no cure follows. Alexander speculates that his approaching death might repel them, or that they may refuse to cure someone with little faith. These possibilities are his conjectures, not explanations confirmed by the narrative.

From Failed Remedy to Theological Question

The bees’ refusal prompts Alexander to recognize a familiar habit in himself: turning an incidental creature into a theological problem, attacking the question, and producing another question from the answer. The episode therefore shifts from a story about an alleged medical remedy to a self-portrait of his intellectual reflexes. Even the hive’s silence becomes material for argument.

Alexander connects this pattern to his long effort to understand why human beings destroy themselves. He rejects the idea that selfishness or cruelty alone explains that destruction; instead, he blames the pursuit of higher causes and redemption. In his argument, the longing to be saved can become a disease when it treats some imagined future good as worth more than actual life. The bees do not supply a doctrine, but their ordinary presence briefly interrupts his search for one.

Narrative Significance

The episode contrasts the bees’ non-aggression with the violence Alexander associates with human ideals of salvation. He considers whether they are peace-loving, while acknowledging that he cannot know why they fail to sting. Their nonresponse leaves the healing claim untested and his theological interpretations unsettled; neither faith nor a supposed healing power is demonstrated.

The scene also places Alexander’s failing body beside a living hive without making the bees into a cure or a simple emblem. His encounter gives him a concrete occasion to notice how readily he converts life into an abstract question. In that sense, the bees matter less as agents of healing than as a check on his habitual impulse to make every living thing answer to a theory.