A few weeks ago, as summer shone its last, I walked past a dying bee. Or rather I walked past it, stopped, realised it was a dying bee, and walked back to take a look. It was a big one, or had been. It looked like he’d been there for quite a while. Had he felt a bit tired in mid-flight and managed to land, but found he couldn’t take off? Or worse, found he couldn’t even walk? Or had he passed out at altitude and dropped like a small stone, only to come round on the hard concrete in this sorry, sorry state, dizzy, confused, disorientated? Or had he stung himself? It must happen.
So there I was, and there was he, the bee. Me, all human and big and towering and threatening, and it, all insecty, weak and bottomly dangerous, but not doing very much either, as if to represent the death throes of an entire species. Its legs were twitching, I noticed, but slowly though, tired, heavy and without co-ordination. Useless in the gaining of purchase. There was none. It was going nowhere. His movement, such as it was, said that it wanted to be anywhere but here, though it couldn’t crawl much at all, which must be a bit disappointing, not to mention humiliating if you’re an insect. If there’s one thing an insect ought to be able to do, even when close to death, is crawl. Even the tiniest and most primitive can do it, but not bees, I suppose, and certainly not this one. In fact, maybe this paralysis was the final insult to one whose gift of flight has always made a bee, quite literally, look down on lesser things who only ever looked up with wonder at their black and yellow dominance and crawl, only a pitiful crawl, wishing they, too, could fly in swarms and heat to kiss a flower and kiss again, and know that they are at the very heart of a certain reproduction. Stealers of the nectar. Keepers of the honey. Creators of life.
But bees don’t crawl unless they’re in trouble, and this one was in such considerable turmoil that the pain and sadness was overwhelming. This was without a doubt an end. Gone were his (or her? who could tell?) days of buzzing, whizzing, droning round on summer days of petal honey, dreaming bee dreams of times when he might chance upon a blossom and know a new bee mate, fall in bee love and settle bee down in a hive of their own, looking forward to the tiny flap of urgent bee wings.
I took a closer look. It was a sad bee-death sight to see indeed, and I brushed him gently to the grass by the pavement with the side of my shoe, as if for him, I thought, dying slowly in the grassy verge might be more preferable to being squashed by the next passer-by or eaten by a dog. Or both.
“I’m sorry,” I said. And I was. Sorry for him, and sorry for the whole bee race whose sudden demise has been as rapid as it is surprising. But sorry most of all for those days as a child when I captured dozens, maybe hundreds of them in jam jars in my grandmother’s garden.
It was all my brother’s idea.
I was simply following him.
But I was good at it and I enjoyed it. Shame upon shame.
Nannie, as we called my mother’s mother, kept empty jars for her home-made jam in an out-house by the garage and one day, my brother and I started gently and oh-so easily capturing bees or all sizes in them. It’s awful, it’s childish and it’s cruel, but whilst the bees went about their beeziness (sorry) in the safe haven of the flower cups, a jar and its lid would come together placing the unsuspecting creature in a tiny glass prison to sit on the lawn and watch his friends and relatives meet a similar fate. Over an hour or so (where did my grandmother get all those jars from? I blame her!) one can only wonder at a rather unsettling yet impressive collection of bees and hornets set out on display.
There was some humming and buzzing, but not as much as you’d think. More of a resignation to fate. Some struggling at first, some panic even. But soon the resting. Later, we’d let them go, but some would have been in their jars for a bit too long, the glass steamed up, the bee flying out (or crawling – oh dear…) relieved if not a little puzzled, but with a brain the size of, well, an insect, they’d surely have forgotten all about it before they’d even reached the next garden. It was hard to tell over the months and summers if the same ones ever came back (forgetting – doh! - the jarboys were there), but I often used to wonder, as a 7-year old might, if they would go away and tell all their mates, then group together by their thousands or tens of thousands to plan a vengeance and fly from miles around to launch an attack on my brother and I, stings at the ready, bottom-first, zumming in from the right and from the left, in my hair, and down my shirt, up my sleeve and in my pants.
I had never really thought much about my guilty childhood bee-keeping until I saw the bee that day, and wondered if he'd known from generations of stories passed down, to bee-ware the nasty kids who snatch you from behind and look at you through glass. Of course not, though the irony was not lost on me that I was tempted for a moment to run back to my house, barely five minutes away, and get a jar to collect him up, take him home and nurse him back to health.
But I didn’t. Because it was too late. Too late for him, and too late for all his kind.
And so what are we and all the flowers, and all the jam jars, going to do without them?
