A Eulogy

As I write, there is waxy propolis coating my back molars that my spit can’t penetrate. Perhaps, it will stay there forever.

From the time they arrived in April, I knew those 700 workers and drones (and a queen!) would do great things. They were champs, nursing the hive until it grew to 40,000, pollinating our hydrangeas and basswood trees. No varroa mite or Monsanto monster could stop them.

They were the best hive a naïve little beekeeper could ask for.  

They spoke with each other and they listened, they were protective (William and I have sting marks to prove), and they were good teachers, and good friends.

Through their propolis, their honey, their wax, their pollen, they formed a seal between my brother and me.

They made my neighbor’s crabapple tree blossom.

Their July honey was near white and tasted like lemons. September’s was amber and grassy, earthy.

And even though I gagged at the white pulpy larvae when we cleaned the trays, deep down I loved those baby bees.

Perhaps we took too much.

Perhaps we smoked too much.

Perhaps we touched, removed, examined, hive-tooled, tray-checked, honey-harvested too much.

Perhaps they were destined to collapse, from the time the bee farmer up in Hackensack, Minnesota fertilized their mother.

Seven months is not so long, but it was long enough for awareness, relationships, understanding to form,

for late summer afternoons sweating beneath white cotton armor, for touching tacky wood and tiny furry thoraxes, for forever smelling like smoke and unsticking hair full of honey, for comb caught between teeth, for forging friendships with hive tools and wax.

My 40,000 friends, you cultivated so much more than the environment.