When I was younger (so much younger) than today, I was really afraid of bees. I was painfully stung a couple of times when I was a kid (I think those Northern bees were kind of aggressive, like the New Yorkers I grew up around) and I became truly phobic about them.
Living here in North Carolina later in life, though, in a very wooded neighborhood and with extensive gardens on my property (my wife’s passion), bees are everywhere, and I’ve gotten used to them. Actually, the more I’ve learned about them, the fonder I’ve become of them, and we intentionally try to attract a good variety with all our flowering plants – and we all coexist just fine.
In fact, there is a nest of carpenter bees in the soffit over the front door of my office, fussing in and out of their perfectly symmetrical holes in my wood. These guys like to act aggressive, mostly because they cannot sting and are defenseless, so they overcompensate by being bullies. They are very large and will fly right up in your face. Well, I got tired of that because it is my office, and I quickly learned that if I made even the slightest hostile move towards one of them, they would scatter and fly off – and then wait until I had gone inside before coming back. I had already tried a variety of non-lethal ways of getting rid of them, but they have come back every year now for over a decade despite all efforts.
So instead of trying to get rid of them, I was just aggressive right back to them and claimed my door space as my own, literally getting back in their faces, and over time we achieved a kind of détente. They come and go, I come and go, and we leave each other alone.
Honestly, I had never really thought much about this dynamic until I was touched – literally – by a recent encounter with a lone bumblebee who also chose my office as a refuge. I found it sitting motionless on the exterior wall of my office just to the side of the door a few days ago. It was alive, I could tell that because it would move to slightly different spots on the wall. But mostly it just stood there.
I was curious to see it up close and the bee did not move away when I got very near it to look at its markings.
I casually talked to it and asked why it was there. In fact, I found myself greeting it all that day on my way in and out of the office. The next day it had moved down to the step in front of my door, and it would have been very easy to step on it accidentally. I even told it this a couple of times – “hey, buddy, this is a really bad place to hang out”. But there it remained, and I decided very spontaneously to try to move it. I got down close and tried to pick it up between my two index fingers. It didn’t fly away or try to avoid me, but I couldn’t get a safe grip on it.
Then the most remarkable thing happened. As I crouched there in front of this bee, which was facing me directly, it reached out its right front leg – the one closest to me – in my direction, and kept it held out towards me. I placed my finger next to the bee’s extended leg and it immediately put its leg on me. I felt a strong, electric vibration through the bee’s leg, and it pulled itself up onto my finger and grasped with all of its legs.
As I moved it the short distance over to where there was soil and greenery, I suddenly remembered how I was once afraid of bees, while the bee itself was just humming with tension. I put it down quickly and set it back upright in the greenery, and it immediately walked away.
It was an unusual moment of connection, between the bee and me, in that instant. Though a bee is obviously not possessed of the kind of linguistic reasoning humans use, it is nevertheless clearly the case that the bee made a decision to trust me – and I it. It climbed on my finger of its own volition.
I was really touched by this somehow. It brought to mind an old story by the great Dr. Seuss (What Was I Scared Of?), the one about the boy who (on his way to get some Grin-itch spinach) meets a pair of empty green pants with nobody inside them, and is absolutely terrified of them until he realizes that the pants are just as scared of him as he is of them. That’s how it felt with the bee and me.
The broader topic of animal and insect sentience is not only of great interest, but also to some extent reflects that human bias that has, over the millennia, continuously left us amazed that humans are not the only ones that think and feel on this planet, and that perhaps this planet isn’t even the only one in the universe with life on it.
Many people who have spent time with animals, and I don’t mean just dogs and cats, will readily confirm those animals’ ability to communicate, reason and to have emotions – in their own ways. There’s growing evidence that this extends to the insect world too. In one study, for example, bees have been found to choose to play with a small wooden ball just for fun.
Here in Chapel Hill, I can only say that the bees and I used to be afraid of each other. Somehow, by mechanisms not yet understood, but which are nevertheless in my experience very real, we’ve come to understand one another. And I do appreciate them being around.
Cover Image: North Carolina Bumblebee, Photo by Zachary-Chaz McMurdie on Unsplash
L’articolo The Bee and Me proviene da ytali..
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