Authors: Naomi Shihab Nye
Honeybee
Honeybee
Poems & Short Prose
In memory of Aziz Shihab
1927-2007
our beloved father
and
Elizabeth Nye Sorrell
1909-2007
She loved poetry all of her days.
“In place of going to heaven at last,
I've been going there all along.”
Let the bees go honey-hunting
with yellow blur of wings
in the dome of my head,
in the rumbling, singing arch of my skull.
â Carl Sandburg
From “In Tall Grass”
L
ast night I dreamedâblessed illusionâ
that I had a beehive here
in my heart
and that the golden bees were making
white combs and sweet honey
from my old failures.
â Antonio Machado
Translated by Robert Bly
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Dipping into the flower zone
Honey stomach plump with nectar
Soaking up directions
Finding our ways in the dark
Fat little pollen baskets
Plumping our legs
You had no idea, did you?
You kept talking about
That wheelbarrow
And chicken
Round dance
Waggle dance
Only 5 species of honeybee
Among 20,000 different bee species
Out there in the far field
Something has changed but
You don't know what it is yet
And everything depends
On us
One of my favorite classes in college was a linguistics course called “The Nature of Language,” in which students studied the language of animals. A few students not in the class made fun of us, mooing when they saw our notebooks. I selected bees as my focus for the semester, and our wonderful professor, Dr. Bates Hoffer, said this was a good choice, since bees are fabulous communicators. Bees can tell each other where the good flowers areâhow far away, which direction to fly. They do jazzy dances. They can find their ways back to their own hives even if you try to block or trick them. Bees have memory and specific on-the-job task assignments and 900,000-neuron brains. I buzzed about the campus for a happy semester, researching in farm journals and encyclopedias, writing strange, dramatic papers, hoping to be stung.
What I do
not
recall studying was the growing industry of migratory beekeeping, in which beekeepers transport their hives long distances for pollination purposes. Maybe it wasn't happening much yet. The huge almond crop in California, for example, has in recent years been highly dependent on hired bees.
You now can read about industrious beekeepers who travel (it's not easy) the interstates with hundreds of hives in giant trucks. Good thing those bees can communicate. Maybe they're saying, “Where are we now? When's my time off?”
I also don't recall learning much about bee
problems
, though bees certainly had experienced struggles in their communities already and could be victimized by everything from funguses to viruses to mites.
During the spring of 2007, bee woes made continual headline news in the United States. Many reports said at least one third of the honeybees in the United States had mysteriously vanished. A grieving South Texas beekeeper was shown slumping sadly in his field of empty hives. Florida and Oklahoma recorded their sorrows. Anderson Cooper did a late-night special on CNN. Honey prices rose. There was lots of speculation about what was happening to bees, but no single answer or remedy.
I collected theories. Were pesticides, or nasty varroa mites, which had swept the bee nation, most responsible? Could it be changing weather conditions or cell phone beams? Obviously the current atmosphere sizzles with
more electronic signals than any world of the pastâ¦I was ready to pitch my cell phone out. Something called “colony collapse disorder” was often cited as a possibility. Seemed like a parallel for human beings in times of war. War is no blossom.
The ongoing Bee Tragedy Stories remain inconclusive. I called Dr. Hoffer after decades and he agreed it's a troubling topic. Some people say “no big deal”âthis fits into the cyclic pattern of natureâother insects or species of bees will pollinate where the honeybees leave off. But Dr. May Berenbaum, head of the department of entomology at the University of Illinois, says, “Though economists differ in calculating the exact dollar value of honeybee pollination, virtually all estimates (of losses to crops, etc.) range in the billions of dollars.” That can't be good.
So, I've been obsessed. This is what happens in life. Something takes over your mind for a while and you see other things through a new filter, in a changed light. I call my friends “honeybee” now, which I don't recall doing before. If I see a lone bee hovering in a flower, I wish it well.
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As for the “busy bee” thing, the word “busy” fell out of my vocabulary more than ten years ago. I haven't missed it at all. “Busy” is not a word that helps us. It just makes us feel worse as we are doing all we have to do.
Anyway, why are we rushing around so much? The common phrase “I can't wait” has always troubled me. Does it mean you want your life to pass more swiftly? This or that future moment will surely be better than the current moment, right? The moment we are living in may be lovely, but if we “can't wait” for some other time, do we miss it? We are honeybees in our own lives. But we forget.
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Antonio Machado, the brilliant poet from Spain, dreamed a beehive in his heart could turn even flaws into something tasty. This interests me a lot. One thing becoming another, in the tradition of alchemyâ¦
We are trained to work for success, but failures, mistakes, or disasters may lead us in intriguing new directions. As a young man, Rudolf Staffel forgot to sign up early for a painting course in Mexico and was stuck taking the pottery course. His whole life swerved. He became one of the great ceramic artists of the twentieth century.
Tim Duncan, the star of the San Antonio Spurs basketball team, was a swimmer when he was growing up. He practiced all the time. But a hurricane devastated the pool on his home island of St. Croix. It wasn't his
own
failure but the pool's demise which helped lead him to huge success in a different sport.
Are the honeybees cooking something up behind the scenes? How many writers or artists have said they stumbled into their favorite works when something else they were trying to create didn't succeed?
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In Holyoke, Massachusetts, a vintage restaurant called Nick's Nest has been serving hot dogs, baked beans, potato salad, and popcorn since 1921. The slogan of the restaurant is “The Nest of Delicious.” When my friend and I saw it one day, as we sped by in the rain on our way to eat in another town, I shouted, “Stop! I have to see that place! Look, it's totally old-fashioned!”
She said, “I thought we wanted Indian food.”
We stared at the menu on the wall. My friend said, “See, they serve mostly hot dogs and you're a vegetarianâ¦. I don't see any tofu pups on the menu.” She was right. There was no entrée to suit me. We were
in a vegetable curry mood. But my eyes drank in the countertop, the funny signs, the little booths with old jukeboxes still attached to the tables, and I knew, even though we didn't eat there, I would remember Nick's Nest forever. (Luckily another friend has now sent me a Nick's Nest T-shirt, so I can belong to it in spirit anyway.)
Drinking it in
. That's when we really live. Dipping and diving down into the nectar of scenes. Tasting, savoring, collecting sweetnessâ¦if you're in Holyoke, would you please go eat there for me?
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My niece in Australia told me that the students in her university class were required to read the blog of an Iraqi citizen and write about it before they could graduate. She chose a girl who is now fifteen writing under the pseudonym Sunshine. I began reading Sunshine's blog too. I love the way she writes about details of her lifeâher friends, the books she is reading, her activities and memories. Life is so difficult since the war started, but still she ends her entries with lines like, “Try not to lose hope.” She wishes she could live the way kids in other countries live, without so much constant violence surrounding them.
Sunshine has become my personal hero, drinking deeply out of the moments she is given, even when she wishes they were different moments. So much is passing so fastâ¦.
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My husband's cousin's husband, a man named Dee, who lives in Houston, recently sent out an e-mail survey asking people where and when was the last time they had seen a lightning bug. He remembered sitting on his Texas front porch as a boy, seeing hundreds of lightning bugs blinking around him. I had wondered about the lost lightning bugs over the years myself, and blamed their disappearance on pesticides. Many young people in the United States have never seen one and don't know what they do. (Why aren't the mosquitoes disappearing, by the way? Are they so much heartier than lightning bugs and honeybees?)
Dee's correspondents in far-flung little towns like Rosebud and Rockdale, Texas, replied that they were lucky still to have lightning bugs, but people in cities were all missing them. They remembered droves and crowds of them, the great American sport of capturing
lightning bugs in jars with holes punctured in the lids and letting them go again. I wrote that the first time our son saw a lightning bug, when he was about six, in the Texas hill country, he insisted it was carrying a small kerosene lantern.
Here's a hope that we don't lose any more of the small things that blink in our darkness. Albert Einstein allegedly said, “If all the honeybees disappear, human beings have four years left on earth.” We'd better increase our levels of attention.
Facts about insects and animals feel refreshing these days, when human beings are deeply in need of simple words like “kindness” and “communicate” and “bridge.” Turtle organs do not deteriorate as a turtle ages. A shrimp's heart is in its head. Our cat just said, “Outside” and meant it, as a squirrel, swinging upside down from the bird feeder beyond the window, announced he is really a bird in disguise.