Aw Honey Honey
There was the constant buzzing, that took some getting used to.
Past that, the secret to life as a bee was pretty simple.
The thing she liked best was getting up at a reasonable hour, dancing around with a few of the other bees for a few hours, and then popping out for a quick sip or two at the old flower beds, and then back to the hive, dance past the queen, hopefully using a few of the new moves she might have seen that morning, maybe get spotted and get one of the reject drones, and then head back home for the evening.
The drones weren't good for much... reproducing machines and that was about all they were good for. But she once, early on, before she knew what a good thing was, got one that would cook for her and occasionally talk politics with her.
Although, that said, it was possibly a blessing most of them didn't talk too much; they weren't called drones for nothing.
And she wasn't called a worker for nothing. Sure, when you're dancing it doesn't feel so much like work, but when you spend all that time jiggin' and jivin' around, really workin' the floor, which is quite a feat when the damn things got all those funny shaped holes in it, and you leave for bed in the evening exhausted, shown up by the Queen, who gets to sit on her fat butt and survey the whole thing while taking her picks of the drones, it can damn well feel like work, all right. The worst nights were when she was on dinner duty for the Queen. Or, even worse, the stupid larvae. No real social interaction, and you're stuck tending a load of brats in the back end of nowhere in the hive. Plus she just felt so bloated after sucking up all that pollen and nectar.
But then she supposed everyone had their up and downs in life, no matter their station or calling. At least she didn't have ankles that would swell up, she would tell herself on the really bad days. This didn't help a tremendous amount, but it made other bees think she really had everything in perspective.
But that wasn't the meat of it, being a bee. No, most of the real dilemmas during the day came up when she was out and about, sipping from this flower or that.
They usually traveled in packs, but, the thing was, bees dropped off all the time. Since they generally only lasted around a month it wasn't always the same crew, and she had to learn to suppress the tiny tremors when she realised someone she normally traveled with was no longer with the pack, out "hunting nectar."
They called it hunting, it was sort of an inside bee joke. Only she knew, by now, she'd gotten quite wise quite fast. She lost a few friends to a kid's Venus Fly Trap, a birthday present that lasted four days, but in the first few it managed to take a couple of good friends. She couldn't remember their names, because, to be honest, bees all looked the same to her. If one of them had escaped with maybe just the loss of a leg or something she could have narrowed down the field, but it was a pretty definitive death for those friends that ate it in the Venus Fly Trap. Well, "ate it" is perhaps a poor choice of words.
Anyway.
The big issue with being a bee?
Listen, here's a secret: the big deal wasn't trying to make her month the best she could possibly ask for in the hopes that she might be reborn as one of those pampered-a** Queens. No, the biggest decision in her bee life came when it came down to it and she either had to step up and sting the hell out of someone or back off and skulk home, stinger almost literally between her legs, so people might think she did sting someone and could feign surprise when it looked like her stinger magically grew back a few hours later for that evening's dance. That someone could be threatening the hive, her livelihood while out collecting nectar, or could just be a person with a nice sandwich eating lunch outside who happened to trigger that pissed off hormone in bees. She didn't know, didn't claim to know what set it off, or why, she just knew when she was so mad she could spit... or, ehm, sting, that it had been set off. Like Spidey Sense. Only, like, for bees.
And so it came down to that, her life flashing before her five eyes, which, coupled with the actual shortness of her life, made it flash by entirely too quickly, and that was going through twice, even. The little kid in the pool below hadn't even had a sandwich, was it even worth it for that?
Her friends swooped by to check her out, saw the missing stinger and knew, she could see it in their eyes, all of which they couldn't manage to avert from her gaze in time. The kid whined and harped on about being stuck, started crying and everything, and his brother started yelping he'd been stung, as well. The last slow motion haze that was beginning to settle over her rippled like a sheet in the wind as she looked around urgently for some other comrade who was sharing the same fate at the very same moment, but the kid was faking it. Damn attention hoggers. She should have stung him, she thought.
And that was her penultimate thought, as she tried to fly up and above the eaves of the house the pool sat nearby, and she settled in down amongst the leaves in the gutter, destined to get soggy and cold before someone finally got around to cleaning them out, probably sometime in the spring, when the water started leaking into the house. Her friends already started the process of moving on. They moved on to another field, a different haunt, this one was ruined for the day.
And her last thought was that she'd gotten out of dinner duty for the larvae that night.
This was not a movie review.
disclaimer:
We hope this doesn't come as a shock to you now.
This is also not affiliated with Sue Monk Kidd's The Secret Life of Bees. Nor have any of the staff here read it yet, so it's not an endorsement, nor is it a condemnation.
It's just this story, about a bee, like.
But there you have it, we made it through two whole film reviews without the janitor's sister, who's in The Industry, as those film wankers call it, making any snide comments. Nice.
26 July 2004