Granny Weatherwax set about finding out what had been happening around the stones in her own distinctive way.
People underestimate bees.
Granny Weatherwax didn't. She had half a dozen hives of them and knew, for example, there is no such creature as an individual bee. But there is such a creature as a swarm, whose component cells are just a bit more mobile than those of, say, the common whelk. Swarms see everything and sense a lot more, and they can remember things for years, although their memory tends to be external and built out of wax. A honeycomb is a hive's memory - the placement of egg cells, pollen cells, queen cells, honey cells, different types of honey, are all part of the memory array.
And then there are the big fat drones. People think all they do is hang around the hive all year, waiting for those few brief minutes when the queen even notices their existence, but that doesn't explain why they've got more sense organs than the roof of the CIA building.
Granny didn't really keep bees. She took some old wax every year, for candles, and the occasional pound of honey that the hives felt they could spare, but mainly she had them for someone to talk to.
For the first time since she'd returned home, she went to the hives.
And stared.
Bees were boiling out of the entrances. The thrum of wings filled the normally calm little patch behind the raspberry bushes. Brown bodies zipped through the air like horizontal hail.
She wished she knew why.
Bees were her one failure. There wasn't a mind in Lancre she couldn't Borrow. She could even see the world through the eyes of earthworms.[9] But a swarm, a mind made up of thousands of mobile parts, was beyond her. It was the toughest test of all. She'd tried over and over again to ride on one, to see the world through ten thousand pairs of multifaceted eyes all at once, and all she'd ever got was a migraine and an inclination to make love to flowers.
But you could tell a lot from just watching bees. The activity, the direction, the way the guard bees acted. . .
They were acting extremely worried.
So she went for a lie down, as only Granny Weatherwax knew how.
Nanny Ogg tried a different way, which didn't have much to do with witchcraft but did have a lot to do with her general Oggishness.
She sat for a while in her spotless kitchen, drinking rum and smoking her foul pipe and staring at the paintings on the wall. They had been done by her youngest grandchildren in a dozen shades of mud, most of them of blobby stick figures with the word GRAN blobbily blobbed in underneath in muddy blobby letters.
In front of her the cat Greebo, glad to be home again, lay on his back with all four paws in the air, doing his celebrated something-found-in-the-gutter impersonation.
Finally Nanny got up and ambled thoughtfully down to Jason Ogg's smithy.
A smithy always occupied an important position in the villages, doing the duty of town hall, meeting room, and general clearing house for gossip. Several men were lounging around in it now, filling in time between the normal Lancre occupations of poaching and watching the women do the work.
“Jason Ogg, I wants a word with you.”
The smithy emptied like magic. It was probably something in Nanny Ogg's tone of voice. But Nanny reached out and grabbed one man by the arm as he tried to go past at a sort of stumbling crouch.
“I'm glad I've run into you, Mr. Quarney,” she said. “Don't rush off. Store doing all right, is it?”
Lancre's only storekeeper gave her the look a threelegged mouse gives an athletic cat. Nevertheless, he tried.
“Oh, terrible bad, terrible bad business is right now, Mrs. Ogg.”
“Same as normal, eh?”
Mr. Quarney's expression was pleading. He knew he wasn't going to get out without something, he just wanted to know what it was.
“Well, now,” said Nanny, “you know the widow Scrope, lives over in Slice?”
Quarney's mouth opened.
“She's not a widow,” he said. “She-”
“Bet you half a dollar?” said Nanny.
Quarney's mouth stayed open, and around it the rest of his face recomposed itself in an expression of fascinated horror.