In college, like a lot of students who had exhausted the computer science curriculum, I worked in one of the college computer labs for extra cash, helping out students on the basics, like Logo or Pascal. Not to put too fine a date on it, but the lab I usually helped out in was populated largely with Apple //e computers. People who weren’t actually programming or who did not have files in Appleworks would use the MacIntosh lab, so my room was sparsely populated at best, usually a few students and a lot of empty stations.
After finals, the lab was still open until the end of the quarter, so that anybody who had final work to do or wanted to get an early start on next quarter, or who just wanted to play around could come in and get things done. During this time, the handful of students would be reduced to zero or one for entire lab periods, and I’d pass the time by working on my own projects or reading technical manuals.
It was a big room, with about 40 workstations around the perimeter about ten feet apart, and some tables in the middle. It was on the top floor of an old brick building, with undersized windows, an aging and discolored drop ceiling of accoustic material, and old-style hanging fluorescent lights. Every now and then, the lights would flicker, but not often enough or badly enough to bother calling Maintenance. However, there was a constant buzz from overhead that I’d always found distracting and irritating by varying degrees, and today, it seemed even louder than usual.
Since there was nobody in the lab, I decided I’d rather deal with dimness than with a constant buzzing, so I opened the shades to let in what light there was and turned off the fluorescent lights. I wrote a little sign so that people would know the lab was open despite it being dimly lit, and walked back to my desk in the corner.
After a moment, I noticed that the buzzing had not stopped. Instead of coming from the lights, the sound appeared to be coming from above the drop ceiling. I walked around the room, trying to locate the source of the sound, but it seemed to be coming from no specific point, and would get louder and softer and seem to shift around.
Imagining some weird infrastructure running above the ceiling, and curious as to what it could be, I picked one of the least-stained tiles, stood up on a table, and poked my head through. My eyes had adjusted enough to the dim light where I could see well enough, I just couldn’t believe what I was seeing.
The area above the drop ceiling had become a giant beehive.
I was torn between the urgent desire to get the hell out of there and fascination at having my head, essentially, inside a giant beehive. The bulk of the hive, including visible honeycombs, was along the far corner of the wall, where the ceiling was most discolored. The thick yellow stuff that seemed to ooze out from the tiles along the wall that I had mistaken for some kind of insulation was actually honey. (I tasted it later to be sure.) In retrospect, both the wet-grey looking stains on the tiles and the dark yellow ooze on the walls had grown steadily, almost imperceptibly, since I had been working there. Almost every day, a handful of bees would fly through the room, but would usually disappear before they became bothersome to anybody but the most fearful or allergic. I hadn’t thought much of it.
Now, hundreds of bees flew busily past my head as I stood there, frozen, a ceiling tile balanced on my head, afraid to move. Tens or perhaps hundreds of thousands massed in the corner that I found difficult to stop staring at. They bumped into my head and face at a steady rate on their way by.
I gradually lowered my head, gently settling the ceiling tile back into its metal rails. I grabbed my chair and spent the rest of the quarter watching the empty computer lab from the hallway.
