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mountain than the mountain to Muhammad.
    “Please, call me Albert,” I said, extending my hand. I had hoped to put him at ease by dispensing of such formalities as surnames, though, in truth, it was not solely his comfort I sought. For most of my days it had been my father to whom friends and neighbors had referred to as Mr. Honig, while I was known simply as “young Albert.” Even though I myself was in my eighth decade, I confess that I was at that moment still loath to accept my natural inheritance.
    “Albert?” Detective Grayson said. “Not the Bee Man?”
    “No,” I said, “just Albert.”
    “So how come?” the detective prodded, nodding toward the clutch of hives sprinkled throughout my backyard and on into the small orange grove that extended beyond it.
    “I beg your pardon?”
    “I’m just wondering why you have two little old ladies with a few hives in their backyard and everybody calls them the Bee Ladies, but here you are, right next door, and from what I can see you’ve got triple, maybe four times as many, hives and you’re just plain old Albert. How come?”
    “I don’t know,” I replied. I’d never thought to ask myself this question before. How does one acquire a nickname? Having never been called by anything but my given name, I could only speculate.
    “Perhaps because no one knew what else to call them?” I ventured. “They rather liked to keep to themselves.”
    “Fair enough,” the detective said. “So how come you know what to call them?”
    “As I said yesterday, we grew up together. We were friends once.”
    I paused for a moment with my hand on the porch railing as the detective’s eyes scanned the sky above him for imagined hordes of murderous bees. I noticed that the veins in my hand seemed quite blue and pronounced beneath my sun-roughened skin. I was struck by how much my hands reminded me of my father’s, especially late in life. His fingers had been long and tapered like my own. Musician’s hands, my mother used to say, though neither of us could play more than a clumsy note or two on any instrument to speak of. Hopelessly tone-deaf, my mother used to call us.
    “Would you care to join me inside for a cool glass of lemonade?” I asked, certain the detective would take me up on my offer of refuge, if not refreshment.
    “Don’t go to any trouble,” Detective Grayson said with a final nervous glance at the nearest stand of hives as he strode past me onto the porch stairs. He made it clear with only the slightest nod of his head that he was used to taking the lead in any given situation and that it was only out of courtesy that he paused at the screen door to allow me to enter first. This I acknowledged with a nod of my own as I passed.
    Like the Straussmans’ house, my back door opens into a small service porch leading into the kitchen. A stack of unopened mail lay next to the morning paper on my dinette table, and I was most regretfully aware of Detective Grayson’s observational eye lingering over the dirty dishes I had left on the counter.
    “Forgive the mess,” I said, quickly rinsing the dishes and stacking them in the sink as I spoke. “I hurried through my breakfast to get an early start on my daily chores, whereupon I found a band of marauding ants preparing an assault on my number three hive.”
    The detective turned his attention from the clutter in my sink to me.
    “Which means what?” he said. I noticed that in the early-afternoon light his hazel eyes were streaked with silver.
    “One of the greatest problems facing beekeepers here in this region are brown ants. They overrun our hives from time to time, yet the poison many beekeepers use to prevent such invasions presents an even greater hazard to the very hives we seek to protect.
    “It would be a grave mistake to rid the premises of ants entirely because during the greater part of the year, these tiny insects perform a useful service keeping our yards and apiary clean. This is especially true