Don’t be fooled by the title of this post. It isn’t about sex, but it is about the facts of life.
As I noted in my previous post, my friend Ken lives way out in the country. And even though I’m a city girl, I love visiting his place, which is a rich source of life lessons that sometimes show up in the most unexpected ways.
In my previous post, I shared a lesson I learned from the birds. Now it's time to take a lesson from...
…the bees!
This story, I’m afraid, doesn’t have such a happy ending as my hummingbird tale. But nature isn't all about happy endings, although I like to believe that in the larger scheme of things, it is about the message that "All is well."
On an exquisite sunny day not long ago, I was visiting Ken, and I went out to his garage to look through his toolbox for something. Ken’s garage, like his house, is large and sunny. There are two big windows so it’s always full of natural light, and on most days Ken keeps the exterior garage door open so he can enjoy the sights and sounds of the horses in the pasture just across the driveway from his house.
As I stepped out into my friend’s light-filled garage, I heard a loud and rather frantic-sounding buzzing. Imagine my surprise when I saw a dozen or so honeybees buzzing around the sill of one of the garage windows. They appeared to be seriously engaged in trying to knock themselves silly against the window, though it was obvious that in fact they were desperately trying to get out into the glorious sunny world beyond the glass. It was, after all, their world: the wildflowers were in bloom all around, and there was much work to be done.
But they just couldn’t get through that glass, though they tried again and again.
What they did not seem to realize was that the way out was just a few feet to the left of the window. The garage door stood wide open, a gateway into the bees’ brilliant world. So close, and yet so far away, as the saying goes…
I should add right now that it is not at all unusual to see honeybees, and a lot of them, around Ken's place. I think there are a couple of hives in the area, and fairly frequently we'll see a few bees in his garage. But they usually buzz right in and out of there. They've never been a problem, and they've never been aggressive; there do not seem to be any of those "Africanized" bees in the area, thank goodness. (Don't get me started on the red wasps that also occasionally show up...those are scary!) I have to admit, though, that it was a little unusual to see that many bees in the garage at once. I had a passing thought that maybe it was part of the overall pattern of weird things going on with bees and other creatures worldwide.
But I felt moved to do something about this situation, and Ken was on the phone with a client so I didn't want to disturb him. While I wasn’t any too certain about the wisdom of trying to herd honeybees, I just couldn’t stand by and let them bash themselves into oblivion. There was no way to open the window; literally, the only way out was through the door, which, as I said, was only a few feet away. I found a small broom and gingerly tried to nudge a couple of the frantic little buzzers towards that open door, but they seemed quite insistent on staying right there at the window and continuing their campaign to get through the glass.
What to do? I sensed that if I could just get one or two bees to exit through the door, the others would soon follow suit. On the other hand, I wasn’t too crazy about the possibility of getting stung, especially since (knock on wood) I never have been stung and don’t know how allergic I might be. In fact, several of the bees came towards me after I began my nudging campaign, and they sounded pretty angry about my intrusion. More than once I had to back off a bit, and I narrowly missed getting stung.
I must have been out there twenty minutes or more, trying without success to liberate the little prisoners, when my cell phone rang. It was a cousin whose call I had been expecting, so I abandoned my mission of mercy, intending to come back to it later should it be necessary. There was always the chance that the bees would find their own way out, after all.
I went back into the house and finished my phone conversation with my cousin, and when I got off the phone, Ken reminded me that we were supposed to meet another friend of ours at a cafe in a nearby town for lunch. So off I went with him, the bees quite forgotten as my friends and I got caught up in our day.
It was only much later that I remembered the honeybees. Ken and I had returned to his place and had finished supper, and the daylight was waning. I ran out to the garage and saw, to my dismay, nine (yes, I counted) little striped bodies in the windowsill of the garage. Sadly, most of the bees never did discover that freedom was so near – not through the windowpane against which they were beating so frantically, but out the door just a few feet away.
But I like to think that at least a couple of them did figure it out. To the ones that didn’t, all I can offer is a whispered thank you for the lesson. It was a timely reminder that (1) sometimes the path to freedom isn’t the most obvious one; and (2) more often than not, help really is available, if we will only stop fighting it.
Yours in Absolute Abundance, utter gratitude and boundless joy,
Kalea Makana
"The Abundance Chick"
* * * * * *
Here are some fun facts about honeybees.
Click here to go to Part 1 of "Lessons from the birds and the bees"
0 comments:
Post a Comment