Photo 114518513 © Petro Perutskyy | Dreamstime.com
Republished from original May 2021
This is not the bee that died. There was nothing much left of her.
It’s been six weeks since the sugaring season ended and I’m still thinking about the bee.
The day had turned warmish—up into the sixties, enough that some insects were beginning to stir even though there wasn’t a great deal for them to eat.
I was almost finished with the last batch of sap and was frankly trying to hurry the process along a little by stoking the fire in the boiler while watching carefully to make sure that the liquid didn’t explode out the top of the pot.
As the sugar solution gets more concentrated, a sweet caramel smell of maple begins to float around everywhere—and of course, it attracts insects.
I was struggling with something on the boiler—can’t even remember what—when I saw a newly minted bee person floating above me, riding on the thermal gusts that were coming off the hot sides. She was all shiny and fresh looking, and clearly attracted by the yummy sweet smell. She wasn’t a honey bee specifically, but one of the smaller varieties that live in nests underground.
At first I just glanced at her and then realized that she was in danger if she got too close to the boiler. I quickly thought about trying to catch her or driving her away—but before I could even do anything it happened.
She swooped a little too close and one of the thermal currents caught her and drove her right into the side of the boiler. The heat was so intense that she instantly burst into flame, a tiny flash of light that was extinguished, as what was left of her, a black, curled crumb, fell to the earth.
I was mortified and burst into tears. She had come for a smell and taste of something sweet, something she could bring back to her sisters in their nest after months of hibernating and living on winter rations, and the lumbering machinery of a large animal had killed her instantly, without a thought.
There was nothing I could do of course, so I completed the first boiling and took the concentrate inside to do the filtering and finishing. But I felt heavy inside the rest of the day and have thought about her almost daily ever since.
I don’t know how hives or nests of insects register the loss of their members because often they will lose so many, and probable population attrition is clearly a factor in the evolutionary processes that produced the group “consciousness” that exists in social insects.
While there’s no evidence of “mourning” in bee communities I’ve ever heard of (especially since drones are often driven off and in honey bees the first emerging queen will attempt to kill off all her still larval stage rivals—death is part of the gig), it’s also true that each individual bee is unique in some way (they are generally not clones of each other), and there are reports of bees reacting to dead comrades, i.e. they appear to recognize them (probably by smell or some other sense); there are even a class of workers in honey bee hives who act as “undertakers.”
In a smaller community, such as the nest my bee probably came from, her absence would be more obvious because one less worker returned from prospecting. One less mouth to feed, yet still another larva must be grown to maturity to replace her with one less set of resources returned from the wild. There’s no thinking about it; the economics of life just go on.
Yet, life was there in that tiny bee person: desire, risk, curiosity, courage, a task to perform for her family, the ability to communicate her findings to others. Genetic perhaps, nobody “taught” her—we say ‘instinctive’ as a way to diminish the amazing reach of her very small, compact brain.
In the intervening weeks I’ve learned a bit more about how various pre-modern cultures talked about and understood their relationships to bee people. The Mayan and Aztec peoples domesticated a stingless honey bee long before European colonization. The bees were (still are) treasured and there were penalties for deliberately harming even a single individual. They were said to be descended from the god Ah-Muzan-Kab.
Interestingly, in this species, each individual larva somehow “self-determines” what its role (worker, queen, drone) is going to be (in other words, the workers in the hive don’t do that—as is the case with European honey bees) and this creates interesting “caste conflicts.”
If any bees were/are injured when honey is collected (and the collection of honey is, itself, a huge festival undertaking), each individual is wrapped in tree leaves and ceremonially buried. This species of bee has been threatened by the introduction of larger European varieties, but lately has been making a comeback. Don’t they just sound fabulous?!
It was apparently common among traditional European beekeepers to talk to their hives, telling them all their personal secrets, and even the gossip of the day. It was thought that bees helped to share important information with the spirit world and might even transmit sincere prayers to God himself, so it was only polite to tell them what was going on, especially if big changes were afoot. In fact, it was believed that if you didn’t talk to your bees, they would abandon you or refuse to reproduce and die.
Every continent has some kind of honey bee, and many other varieties as well and in each place, bees were, at least traditionally, respected and often revered for their gifts of honey, pollination and simple beauty.
I’m fortunate to live in a household where insects and other arthropod persons are not automatically killed. Sometimes we have to herd the ants to a different place, cover a dish of food, or take a person outside who should be there anyway, but it is not uncommon to hear one of us greeting the next interesting bug person who has shown up on the wall or the desk. The immediate task stops, the field guide comes out and it’s time to learn about another neighbor--maybe make a friend.
I don’t specifically feel guilty about the bee’s death, but I don’t want to avoid the fact that I helped create the conditions that killed her. Too many of her kind are dying right now because humans don’t pay attention. I want to pay attention. I don’t want to forget her.