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Short Stories
"Royal Jelly"
Information Plot/Description Fun Stuff
Information
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Plot/Description
Personally, I think this is one of Dahl's scariest stories. The description of the baby at the
end... *shudder* I read it aloud to some of college roommates once and they were freaked out.
Spoiler Warning! This is a simple story and concerns the Taylor family: Albert, Mabel, and
their newborn baby daughter. Mabel is frightened because the child won't eat and has been losing
weight since birth. She's desperate and frantic, but the doctors can't do anything. After she goes
to bed, Albert begins to read from one of his many books on beekeeping. He's always had a way with
bees, and now he makes his living by maintaining over 200 hives and selling the honey. This
particular night he is reading about royal jelly, which is a substance that the worker bees produce
and feed to the larvae for the first three days of their lives. It allows the young bees to rapidly
mature and grow in size. Queen bees, however, are continuously fed the stuff throughout their larval
life. It's what actually, physically changes them into queens. Albert gets the idea that this stuff
could help his daughter grow too. When Mabel comes downstairs the next morning, she is astounded to
hear that the baby has drank five ounces of milk throughout the night. She watches as Albert
prepares another bottle and the child ravenously drains the entire contents. She gets curious,
though, when Albert later claims to have cured the baby himself. He finally confesses that he added
large quantities of royal jelly to the baby formula, much to Mabel's shock and dismay. He tries to
convince her with facts and statistics, but she will have none of it. She tells him that even if
it does work, they had a terrible honey crop the previous year and she doesn't want any bees
devoted to making it. She forbids him from feeding anymore of it to the child. At the next feeding,
the baby drinks two bottles and physically seems to be getting fatter. They go to weigh the
child and Mabel is frightened to see that though she's put on weight on her abdomen, her arms and
legs are skinny and her tummy is beginning to sprout "yellowy-brown hairs." Mabel accuses him of
dosing the child with more royal jelly, which Albert admits to. In a last ditch attempt to convince
his wife that it's perfectly healthy, he admits that last year he turned over half his bees to the
production of the jelly, which he consumed himself. He did it in the hopes that it would make him
more fertile, and it obviously worked since he daughter was conceived not long after. Mabel suddenly
realizes that her husband does really resemble a great big bee, and her daughter laying on the table
looks like nothing so much as a gigantic grub. "Why don't you cover her up, Mabel?" he says. "We
don't want our little queen to catch a cold."
Fun Stuff
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Created and maintained by Kristine Howard, © 1996-2008
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