Lost Bees

Warm weather brings the bees. I mean, into my house. They come through or down one of the chimneys, and wind up dead on the floor in the room where I watch the TV. I usually just sweep their bodies out, not thinking too much about it, but the happenings of yesterday changed that. I now think about the bees . . . and other misplaced persons.

Yes, the bees have become persons to me. The transformation from insect to human happened to the bees when one of the wanderers happened to light on my pants leg. The bee was so tired (I thought) of banging its head against the window trying to get out it could hardly crawl. That was my standard explanation for why the bees died. The theory worked for me, but there had always been a flaw in it. I almost never saw a bee flying in the TV room. I only saw them on the floor, either dead or nearly so. I had no good explanation for that anomaly. Maybe once or twice over the years the thought crossed my mind that the bees had flown around in the chimney, and had worn themselves out in that prison before falling.

But then came the bee on my pants leg.

I walked out onto the porch, and using a small slip of paper, brushed the bee off. Lethargic as ever it landed on the porch floor, hardly able even to crawl. But it did crawl a little. What got my attention at first was the direction the bee took in its struggle. It headed straight for the outdoors, in this case, a small plot of garden where a few nondescript flowers grew. Being a romantic of sorts, I imagined that the bee was somehow magically drawn toward its natural home, choosing to die there rather than on the boards of an unnatural building.

But then came a miracle. The bee had limply crawled no more than a foot when suddenly it took off, flying as hard and as fast as ever, out into the open air. This was the same bee that a minute before had found itself unable to fly, letting itself be "walked" out of the house while clinging to my pants leg . . . the same bee, near to death in one moment, flying in the next as if nothing had happened to it.

I went back into the house and gathered three more bees onto the slip of paper, corralling them with my fingers. They offered little resistance, behavior you might expect from an organism teetering on the edge of death. I carried them onto the porch. They made no effort to escape. They were too near death.

I watched these three more carefully than I had the first. They too crawled toward the free air, and the flowers . . . and they too, took off like rockets, resurrected, I mused, by the clean air of their natural home.

I went back in and searched around under the furniture for more bees. I found four, but these seemed irretrievably dead, their little bodies curled lifelessly into themselves.

I rolled them onto the paper, taking care not to harm them any more than they had already been harmed. They did not move. Too far gone, I thought. Dead.

It was still daylight so I made a mental note of the place on the porch where I deposited the dead dead bees, deciding to leave them overnight. I checked them this morning. Perhaps it was the wind that took them away. I'll never know. I just know they were gone.

Last evening, when the first bee "incident" occurred, I had been watching the HBO movie, "Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee." And when I walked inside from watching the three bees fly away, I found myself humming the haunting theme song from the movie "Exodus." The coincidences did not elude the romantic mind of the Mendacious Mouse.