“You’re kidding!” I said. “Another surprise. I thought you two were long-time buddies.” “Nope. Never met him until last night.”


I wondered at the loose communities we humans could create. Join up with some strangers who share a common interest, go out and wrangle some bees. So unlike the structured bee communities, where each stayed in their specialized tasks for a lifetime. The bees worked with the flow of nature, we seemed intent on making nature work with our flow.


Tony told me he got into beekeeping when his daughter was in junior high and they decided it would be a good science project. She soon went on to other things, namely horses, and he kept with the bees. He showed me the barrel-like, three-foot-tall, stainless-steel honey extractor in one corner of the garage that he’d bought used for five hundred dollars, explaining that even with this state-of-the-art piece of equipment it was a time-consuming project every fall, extracting and bottling his bees’ work, which he gave away as gifts to his friends and neighbors. We took a quick tour of his orderly backyard where I admired his vegetable garden with pvc bean trellises, a pond with a spouting carp fountain (Tony said the bees liked to drink from it) and, in the furthest corner, two white hives, wood boxes on stands about two feet off the ground. The hives looked so non-threatening, a working part of his garden and a positive addition to the surrounding ecosystem. As we walked up, Tony pointed out the half-dozen or so bees crawling on the landing boards near the hive entrances and said, “You see, Marsha, it’s still too cool, there’s very little activity right now. Later on it’ll warm up and they’ll start flying.” We’d been “busy bees” that morning, but in fact humans aren’t anything like bees. Sure, we had cities like bees, and drove our cars and flew our planes along pre-ordained paths, much like the flight patterns of bees from their hives out to forage, but that’s about where the similarities end. I wondered what type of flying insect we might best compare to. If there were a species of unusually self-centered insects, ones that believed in community but were pretty much loose and free, doing whatever the heck they wanted—well, then, we’d have our mascot. I thanked Tony for the experience, got his phone number in case I had any more questions, and we parted. And I never told him my name wasn’t Marsha.


Flower & Garden 46 Winter/Spring 2012 greenwomanmagazine.com


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