Ascetical Bees I watched a bee on the playground today, buzzing so busily from clover to clover. My first thought was “Steve needs to cut the grass.” My second thought was a memory of the time a three-year-old boy tried to catch a bee and was stung on the index finger, stinger still in his skin. We called his mother who was worried that he might be allergic but didn’t know since he’d never been stung before. Fortunately, there was no tragic, Thomas J. ending to the day, as his finger didn’t even swell. Lucky bastard. But the memory of the incident sparking my thinking on the bee … What is the purpose of the bee? The queen reproduces, the drones protect the queen, the workers collect and store food as well as protect the young. Everyone in the bee society is busy with his/her own personal duty. And yet, their only form of defense is the stinger. They protect the hive, the queen, food, young, selves – with the stinger. And at what cost? Upon stinging their enemy or threat, they lose their stingers and die shortly after. Seems a cruel hand Nature had dealt them. Seems Nature favored the wasp more. Poor bees – and with such noble self-sacrifice. I know that the bumblebee defies the laws of physics – it’s body is too bulky and heavy in proportion to its wings and yet it continues to fly. A phenomenon, I tell you! Then I started to wonder about defying said laws. What if one of these laws is time? When we see bees, they’re usually flying so fast, so busy, wings moving so rapidly that you can’t even see them. What if to them, they’re moving at a normal, leisurely, andante-esque pace and we just seem like some really large, slow moving animals? Bees have caused me to contemplate time and all I know of it. What if our concept of time is completely wrong? What if the entire universe is on some sort of eternal, cosmic clock that only the truly enlightened comprehend? (Is that why I feel certain things at random times at night and day? Is that the clock that the cicadas live by?) Or what if the universe has no set time at all? What if the universe time is synchronized with that of the bee’s concept? Do bees even conceive time? Makes me wish bees could talk (in known human language) – or that I had bee telepathy. (I smell the start of the new era of superheroes!) I wonder what they’d say. Wish that I could interpret bee dance. I bet bees are highly intelligent creatures and Humans just can’t fathom that because there is no comprehensible form of communication between the two species. The way they interpret each other’s dances is amazing. They have a whole system of communication – not to mention a society with a leader, government/law enforcement rank, as well as a class system. Can it be that bees have achieved civilization? P.S. I'm reposting some entries here from my other online journal that I, sadly, pay more attention to than this one. Spiffcoli