Floor 419: The Apiary

Floor 419: The Apiary is a production floor situated between Floor 371 and a landing whose number has been struck from the directory, provisionally recorded as Floor 773 pending reclassification. It is the Tower's sole licensed source of beeswax, and all appendix thread used in the binding and repair of official holdings is dressed with wax drawn from its hives. The floor is administered jointly by the Order of the Comb and the Bureau of Binding Materials, an arrangement that has produced three formal disputes and one permanent grievance.

Layout and Husbandry

The Apiary occupies a single storey of standard height, roofed in the lattice vaulting common to floors above Floor 4001. Its hives are arranged in eleven tiers of forty-one, mounted on iron rails so that any tier may be drawn forward for inspection without disturbing the one above. The keepers wear the pale sleeve of the Order and carry a smoker of pressed catalogue dust, which burns slowly and smells of old paper — a detail noted approvingly in the Bureau's survey of 4,102.

Bees are not counted. They are assessed, by listening. A hive whose hum falls below the pitch recorded in the Ledger of Hum is reported to the floor clerk and left undisturbed for a fortnight. The technique has never been improved upon, and the Order of the Comb resists all proposals to replace it.

Visitors are asked not to lean on the rails. The rails are original.

The Wax Quota and the Winter of 4,088

Output is governed by the Third Concordance, Annex 9, which fixes the annual draw at one hundred and forty wax-pans, each pan weighing the same as a standard octavo binding board. Annex 9 further provides that no hive may be drawn in consecutive years, a restriction intended to protect the stock and which has never once been observed.

In the winter of 4,088 the Apiary returned a shortfall of thirty-one pans. The Bureau of Binding Materials attributed the loss to the cold and issued a provisional requisition against Floor 188, where surplus materials are sometimes held. The Order of the Comb replied that no cold had been recorded on the floor that season, and that the Bureau's thermometers were kept in a drawer and had not been issued fresh mercury since the previous century. The matter was referred to the Seventh Concordance, which found for the Bureau on procedural grounds without addressing the mercury. A clerk of the Order, Marta Vell, appended a dissent of nine pages; it remains bound into the Bureau's copy and is the most consulted document on the floor.

"The wax did not fail. The count failed, and the count is not the wax."

— Marta Vell, dissent appended to the Bureau's copy of the Seventh Concordance

Dispute over Provenance

The chief scholarly disagreement concerning Floor 419 is whether its wax is properly described as Apiary wax or merely as wax held at the Apiary. The Bureau of Binding Materials maintains the latter, citing Eleventh Concordance, Annex 2, which assigns provenance to the point of first stable storage rather than the point of production. On that reading, wax is produced wherever the bees happen to be and becomes Apiary wax only upon entering the floor's stores.

The Order of the Comb rejects this entirely, holding that provenance follows the hive and that the Annex in question was drafted to settle a quarrel about salt and has no business being applied to bees. The Order's position is set out in its Memorial on Provenance, circulated to all floors above Floor 113 and largely unread. A third view, advanced by the archivist Oren Sabb and taken seriously by almost no one, is that the distinction is meaningless because the bees cross the floor boundary at will and have never been asked to declare their origin.

Relation to Other Floors

The Apiary supplies wax to the Scriptorium of the Ninth Landing and to the sewing rooms of Floor 300, which in turn serve the reclassification work carried out on Floor 371. The dependency is acknowledged in the Fifth Concordance and resented on both sides. A proposal to establish a secondary apiary on Floor 140 was refused in 4,140 on the grounds that the calibration floor's air is too dry and its keepers too opinionated.

Wax is also sent, in small quantities and without explanation, to Floor 22.J. The Bureau of Binding Materials has asked why on four occasions; the Order of the Comb has replied each time that the matter is settled and refers the Bureau to its own correspondence.

Incidents

In 3,977 a hive was found empty and its comb intact. The floor was sealed for eleven days while the Order of the Comb searched the stairwells; the bees were eventually located in a disused reading room on Floor 87, where they had built in the shelving and showed no inclination to return. They were smoked out and carried back in the approved baskets. The reading room was afterwards reclassified as an annexe of the Apiary, a status it retains despite being four hundred floors away.

A fire in 4,113 destroyed two tiers of hives and a quantity of stored thread. The subsequent inquiry found that the smoker had been set down on a wax-pan and left there. The Bureau of Binding Materials recommended the introduction of a formal rule against this; the rule was adopted, numbered, and posted at the door, where it is still legible.