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| Photo in the Public Domain from The Dodo.com |
Part Two of a Four-Part Post
A couple of years back, late
summer, Southern California in unending drought:
The bees searched my
shriveling yard day after day for fresh blossoms. Not speaking bee, I couldn't explain this dearth to
them. Finally, one-overheated morning, and with an undeniably overheated heart,
I fed them―from shallow pans laid out across the patio. Each container was dribbled
with thin tides of sweet-water brew, dotted and criss-crossed with small rocks
and gnarly twigs for landing.
They came, these sleekly shaggy
little refugees. A few, and more. And more. Day after day they met me at the
back door, waiting. Learning me, knowing.
They circled me in a halo, walked my skin, tangled in my hair, sometimes
nibbled me―a slight tickle, perhaps to see if I were made of sugar. They never
"bit the hand that fed them." And around the rims of each pan they
clustered and waited. Waited for life.
For more than a few days, it
was like this―calm enough, and almost routine. Something of a fairy tale, a
small and intimate cross-species undertaking-understanding. One bee hovered on
the tip of my finger, and I whispered to it, consoled it, watched its tiny mandibles twitch, as if wringing its hands in
telling of its hunger.
Somehow, strangely, I was
mama, and these, my diminutive family. And a shared grief.
But then the newbie's suddenly
showed up. The word had spread. Wave after wave of bees, several varieties. It
was bedlam. Oh, what was wrong with them?
They fought, climbed savagely over each other, drowned in the sparse quarter-inch
of brew, a tide of floating bodies―or jerked through the air and dropped to the
pavement in a witless frenzy . . .spinning,
twitching until their lifeless little selves were spent.
They came to me in extremis. Beyond feeding. As suddenly
as it began, it ended. It had to. I gathered up my pans and my pain.
Strangely, a year later,
bees returned―as if their clan had been told the story. A few, at first,
scoping the scene, I guess. Never many, and not for long, but they greeted me once
more beyond the door, circled me . . . with hope and hunger. I stood in
silence. And left, and left them hungry. A day or two of dwindling and it was
over.
The ache in my guts and soul
have never dimmed. I had become, in my well-meant ignorance, a part of their
death-dance. Their plaint still echoes through me like a buzz-saw in an emptied
room, describing absence.
And so I have a hive―oh, a
wealth of flourishing hives!―back here behind my eyes, anchored in field after
field of clover.
to be continued....
to be continued....
