Asakiyume mita

Today “The Bee Wife” is available! You can get it from all the usual suspects (Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Apple, etc.) for 99 cents, or if you’d prefer to get it directly from me, drop me a message here or by email.

It’s the story of Florian, a beekeeper whose wife (Joy) has just died, and the swarm of bees that attempts to comfort him. Here’s what they do (this is what I read at the Mythic Delirium 25-plus-one-year anniversary reading):

( Death is a law that cannot be broken )

Out my window, thickly.

The windows were often covered with hoar-frost; then they would warm coppers on the stove and stick them on the frozen panes, where they made lovely peep-holes, as round as possible. Then a bright eye would peep through these holes, one from each window. The little boy's name was Kay, and the little girl's Gerda ...

'Look! the white bees are swarming,' said the old grandmother.

'Have they a queen bee, too?' asked the little boy, for he knew that there was a queen among the real bees.

'Yes, indeed they have,' said the grandmother. 'She flies where the swarm is thickest. She is biggest of them all, and she never remains on the ground. She always flies up again to the sky. Many a winter's night she flies through the streets and peeps in at the windows, and then the ice freezes on the panes into wonderful patterns like flowers.'

'Oh yes, we have seen that,' said both children, and then they knew it was true.

'Can the Snow Queen come in here?' asked the little girl.

'Just let her come,' said the boy, 'and I will put her on the stove, where she will melt.'

The Snow Queen, via Project Gutenberg

I've never pressed a hot coin to a frosty window, but I've melted circles by breathing on them--and then that freezes, but freezes clear.

How about that Kay! Bold and dangerous speech!

Two days ago was World Bee Day. One day ago, in the evening, my neighbor up the street reported on FB that he had a swarm of bees in the branches of one of his oak trees.

A swarm of bees! I've never been so lucky as to see a swarm of bees. A swarm of bees is like a fairy hunt, a wild racing, everyone together, the queen at the lead. HOW COOL.

Today, a woman who raises goats and has two beehives came to relocate the swarm. I got to see her work. I can't begin to convey how magical it was to be within this globe of whirling bees, the intense buzzing, as she worked to get at the crook in the branch where--she presumed--the queen was. She worked with cheerful calm and grace. Here are some photos:

Most of the time she was atop her minivan



At one point her son or grandson got up and helped.



Here she's carefully putting the key piece of branch into the box where she's collecting the bees.



A box of bees!



The goddess of bees--if you click through to Flickr and click "magnify" twice, you will see a bee perched on her eyebrow.



Once the branch was in the box, you could feel the bees calming down, the whirl of energy beginning to settle.

The side is open so those few bees who are still on the outside can climb in:



To top off the wonder of it all, the wife in the family whose house all this happened in told us a story about her husband. What you have to know about him is that he's always been very lawn-proud, always putting herbicides on to keep it pure grass. But....

"He started getting interested in honeybees and what was happening to them, the declines. The other day I saw him bowed over, looking at a dandelion in the grass. 'There's a bee on it,' he said triumphantly. He said, 'I'm so sorry I spent so much time trying to get rid of dandelions, not knowing how important they were for the bees.'"

I felt in that moment like the whole world had been saved.

Here's a beautiful instrumental track, "cerca de abelhas" (close to bees) to go along with this bee story.

abelha

"bee"

One word of Portuguese, buzzing in my head

In the cold Northeast soon the snow-bees will be buzzing

while somewhere in Amazonas,

little abelha-cachorro, dog-bee

is pollinating brilliant blooms

epiphytes, bromiliads,

orchids

and passion flowers

Last night I got an email asking me to sign a petition (if you sign one petition, you will forever be sent these emails asking you to sign others) This one had the subject line "biggest petition for bees EVER," and my mind went in an odd direction:

Many are petitioning for bees, but our petition is surely the biggest. We really, really, really want some bees. We've petitioned three times before unsuccessfully, but this time, we collected signatures all winter. There is no one in a 50 mile radius who hasn't signed our petition. Even babies have signed. Even the newly deceased. We will be delivering our petition to the keeper of the bees tomorrow. It is our sincerest hope that this time, at last, we will be granted bees.


source

On September 9, Em imagines sea hummingbirds for her sister Tammy:

Maybe you can start a whole new genealogy. The sea hummingbirds, who have scales instead of feathers, and both lungs and gills

Here is a sea hummingbird:



And--unrelated to this day in Pen Pal-- some time ago I also promised a picture of a bee shark for Benjanun Sriduangkaew, @bees_ja on Twitter:

... actually, milkweed garden

with honeybees buzzing around, though you don't see them in these pictures.

I definitely, definitely want to start raising honeybees.