Beehave

The problem with realizing we’re all deluded is that it leaves you with nothing much left to believe in…

After a bizarre morning reflection at work today I found myself having to wait half an hour for a car to be repaired. I’ve been feeling absolutely aimless and lost lately, desperate to escape, or hide or do something completely radical.

Tempted to just wander off into the scrub I compromised and went and sat against a tree on a city street curb. That odd loneliness, a fog. 

So I spotted this tree and I just wandered across the road and plonked myself down on the ground at it’s base. I recognized the foliage it was an Allosyncarpia ternate.

I sat a while, completely submerged in my narcissistic shrine of misery… Then gazing through the mist of reminiscent longing for youth and freedom and the wide open road, outward to the blandness of Daly Street, I noticed a couple of minute black stingless bees clinging to my shirt. Immediately I felt the warmth of being connected to something, a reprieve from the emptiness. Not just bugs… these were Bees! 

Allosyncarpia ternate

What makes Bees so special? Well that’s a long story. I have happy memories of watching a cousin tending his hives when I was a kid. I was fascinated by the way he was able to handle the hives without incurring a major attack. I remember him spinning the racks and the vat of hot melted honey filling large tins with beautiful golden nectar. In those days he could place the hives in woodlands dominated by particular species of trees and each tree species would deliver it’s own unique flavour. From year to year the flavour and consistency of the harvest was slightly different depending on flowering times, rain, and proximity of the hive to flowering crops. There was a kind of symbiosis between the bees, the plant life and the apiarist. To me it seemed a beautiful, magical place where gold was spun.

Since that time I’ve had various encounters with European honey bees, although I’ve never kept them myself, I have visited their hives, ridden my bike (accidentally through a swarm of bees), been stung a few times by accident and have managed to touch them, pat them. I don’t know why but throughout my life I’ve had a fascination bordering on affinity with the bee.

Somehow, possibly by coincidence (As if there is such a thing) I was named after the Yiritja bee (not stingless yet I still haven’t met this family).

As I sit against that tree with my friends the bees humming around me I laughed out loud at the ironic absurdity of feeling alone.