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Baker Street Irregular Reproduction . . .

For every member of the Baker Street Irregulars, America’s senior Sherlockian society, there are two opportunities per year to exercise his or her membership privileges. It isn’t much, but it’s all we have, really.

The first is, of course, the Irregulars’ annual dinner in January. Being a member of the B.S.I. means you’re probably going to get an invitation to that dinner, sometime in the late fall of the previous year. You can go or not go, but that, in a nutshell, is privilege one.

Privilege number two comes around every July, as the members of the Baker Street Irregulars are asked by the "Wiggins" to recommend other Sherlockians for dinner invitations or membership.

So it is that like every other life form on the planet, the Baker Street Irregulars have two basic functions that seem to come before all others: We must eat. We must reproduce.

The eating part is simple. No one ever wonders what is involved in the dinner part of the Baker Street Irregulars dinner — banquets are pretty much banquets, and we all know how to eat.

Reproducing, however, is a strange and ritualistic matter that varies from species to species, culture to culture, and the B.S.I. are no different. Although many have attempted to study the way Baker Street Irregulars produce baby Baker Street Irregulars over the years, the basic process continues to remain a mystery to many. And like any mystery, the best way to handle it is to call in Mr. Sherlock Holmes.

How could Sherlock Holmes know anything about the process by which new Irregulars come in to being, you ask? He was an expert in crime, and there’s nothing illegal about the B.S.I. membership process. But if you think back to Holmes’s later years, the answer comes into clearer focus: Sherlock Holmes was also an expert in the field of beekeeping.

Consider the Bee S. I.

The average Sherlockian is like a worker bee in our great, honey-producing hive. A slightly larger version of the worker bee is the drone, who could be seen in this model as the member of the Baker Street Irregulars. The letter that the Wiggins sends out to the members in July is the release of the pheromes that the queen bee uses to signal her drones that it is time to make baby bees. The drones then respond by fertilizing the queen bee with their . . . well, in the case of theWiggins and the Irregulars, it’s letters of suggestion for invitation and investiture.

A period of gestation follows, which is perhaps the most mysterious part of the Irregular reproduction ritual. Common wisdom is that, having taken in the letters of suggestion, the Wiggins internally selects the stronger of the suggestions for invitation and the strongest of the suggestions for investiture (membership) in the society. Like the queen bee, producing worker eggs and drone eggs separately, Wiggins has a two-tier output. In bee culture, however, the cells produced by the queen can be seen to be different from the start. In B.S.I. culture, the cells (invitations) produced by the queen bee (Wiggins) all look alike until that evening in January when the drones (new B.S.I. members) emerge from the crowd of workers and swell up to drone size as their names are announced. (Okay, so maybe they don't swell up, so much as puff up just a little with pride.)

Life in the bee world is a lot harder on the drones, though, than life in B.S.I. culture. With bees the drones are cast out of the hive when winter comes, but in the B.S.I., the drones get invited to return to the hive year after year.

Spooky, isn’t it?

It’s almost like that old Star Trek episode, in which a young society took a book on Chicago gangs of the Roaring Twenties and based their entire society upon it — one has to wonder if a rare copy of Holmes’s magnum opus, A Practical Handbook of Bee Culture, with Some Observations upon the Segregation of the Queen, hasn’t been passed down from one head of the society to the next over the years.

Or not . . .

Bee reproduction was not entirely fathomed by humans until 1845, and it may be an equally long time before we fully understand B.S.I. reproduction. Having sent off my letter of suggestion less than twenty-four hours before coming up with this column, I have to admit that this bee idea is not the best metaphor I’ve ever come up with, by a long shot . . . but there it is. If I buzz outside and keel over in the next day or two, you'll know why. My function as a drone has, for this year, been completed.

Your humble correspondent,
Brad Keefauver