Tales of the Unexpected

recognition of his truly great contribution to humanity in the discovery of insulin, Dr Frederick A. Banting became curious about royal jelly. He requested his staff to do a basic fractional analysis…” ’
    He paused.
    ‘Well, there’s no need to read it all, but here’s what happened. Dr Banting and his people took some royal jelly from queen cells that contained two-day-old larvae, and then they started analysing it. And what d’you think they found?
    ‘They found,’ he said, ‘that royal jelly contained phenols, sterols, glycerils, dextrose,
and
– now here it comes – and eighty to eighty-five per cent
unidentified
acids!’
    He stood beside the bookcase with the magazine in his hand, smiling a funny little furtive smile of triumph, and his wife watched him, bewildered.
    He was not a tall man; he had a thick plump pulpy-looking body that was built close to the ground on abbreviated legs. The legs were slightly bowed. The head was huge and round, covered with bristly short-cut hair, and the greater part of the face – now that he had given up shaving altogether – was hidden by a brownish yellow fuzz about an inch long. In one way and another, he was rather grotesque to look at, there was no denying that.
    ‘Eighty to eighty-five per cent,’ he said, ‘unidentified acids. Isn’t that fantastic?’ He turned back to the bookshelf and began hunting through the other magazines.
    ‘What does it mean, unidentified acids?’
    ‘That’s the whole point! No one knows! Not even Banting could find out. You’ve heard of Banting?’
    ‘No.’
    ‘He just happens to be about the most famous living doctor in the world today, that’s all.’
    Looking at him now as he buzzed around in front of the bookcase with his bristly head and his hairy face and his plump pulpy body, she couldn’t help thinking that somehow, in some curious way, there was a touch of the bee about this man. She had often seen women grow to look like the horses that they rode, and she had noticed that people who bred birds or bull terriers or pomeranians frequently resembled in some small but startling manner the creature of their choice. But up until now it had never occurred to her that her husband might look like a bee. It shocked her a bit.
    ‘And did Banting ever try to eat it,’ she asked, ‘this royal jelly?’
    ‘Of course he didn’t eat it, Mabel. He didn’t have enough for that. It’s too precious.’
    ‘You know something?’ she said, staring at him but smiling a little all the same. ‘You’re getting to look just a teeny bit like a bee yourself, did you know that?’
    He turned and looked at her.
    ‘I suppose it’s the beard mostly,’ she said. ‘I do wish you’d stop wearing it. Even the colour is sort of bee-ish, don’t you think?’
    ‘What the hell are you talking about, Mabel?’
    ‘Albert,’ she said. ‘Your language.’
    ‘Do you want to hear any more of this or don’t you?’
    ‘Yes, dear, I’m sorry. I was only joking. Do go on.’
    He turned away again and pulled another magazine out of the bookcase and began leafing through the pages. ‘Now just listen to this, Mabel. “In 1939, Heyl experimented with twenty-one-day-old rats, injecting them with royal jelly in varying amounts. As a result, he found a precocious follicular development of the ovaries directly in proportion to the quantity of royal jelly injected.” ’
    ‘There!’ she cried. ‘I knew it!’
    ‘Knew what?’
    ‘I knew something terrible would happen.’
    ‘Nonsense. There’s nothing wrong with that. Now here’s another, Mabel. “Still and Burdett found that a male rat which hitherto had been unable to breed, upon receiving a minute daily dose of royal jelly, became a father many times over.” ’
    ‘Albert,’ she cried, ‘this stuff is
much
too strong to give to a baby! I don’t like it at all.’
    ‘Nonsense, Mabel.’
    ‘Then why do they only try it out on rats, tell me that? Why don’t some of these famous scientists take it themselves? They’re too clever, that’s why. Do you think Dr Banting is going to risk finishing up with precious ovaries? Not him.’
    ‘But they
have
given it to people, Mabel. Here’s a whole article about it. Listen.’ He turned the page and again began reading from the magazine. ‘ “In Mexico, in 1953, a group of enlightened physicians began prescribing minute doses of royal jelly for such things as cerebral neuritis, arthritis, diabetes, autointoxication from