Queen

She was surprised when she heard they were disappearing.

In her first year of teaching, an unexpected career change in her mid-thirties, she was very busy. She was still taking certification classes on the weekends and she was getting the hang of lesson planning and grading, so between being a first-year teacher and a mother, she was short on time. She must have missed the news a lot, because she did not hear about what was happening until it was already a tired joke that she watched, equally tired, on a late night comedy show.

The bees were disappearing.

It was news to her that bee populations had sharply declined worldwide, and not just because she had not been keeping up with current events. She had noticed no lack of bees in her immediate vicinity. It was springtime and every flowering plant that she walked by, whether during a rare evening walk or on an errand across town, buzzed with honeybees. A carpenter bee still kept company with the Rose of Sharon tree on the driveway side of her house. The kids still periodically came in the house from outdoor play to get away from a bee in the yard. There seemed, to her, to be plenty of bees. As many as ever there had been.

Appearances in her vicinity to the contrary, however, there were not still plenty of bees. According to the reports of scientists and beekeepers around the globe, bee populations were at an all-time, frighteningly decimated low. And the scientists were worried. Bees are a vital part of the food chain, pollinating crops necessary for human survival. Without enough bees, there could not be enough food. There was concern that the bee population decline might be reaching that tipping point. And no one seemed to know why.

Many theories were discussed. Some scientists postulated that weather changes due to global warming were to blame. Pesticide use was widely cited at the gym. The introduction and proliferation of non-native plant species into most areas of the world was discussed over mochas at Starbucks. Cell phone use was suspect at soccer practice. A decline in the variety of plant species favored by bees was widely agreed to be the immediate cause by most scientists but that left plenty of room for chicken-or-egg discussion on porches and at Gymboree about what had caused the decline in plant species. Speculation continued.

She did not speculate. Whatever modern confluence had caused the decline in bees in places where she was not, she certainly knew the decline to be a fixable problem. She had only to shift from her busy, everyday mind and into a quiet, expansive mental state and she could feel the hum of colonies yearning to come forth. Bee thoughts sang in her bloodstream and teased the edges of her woman thoughts. It was relaxing and sweetly energizing to allow herself to touch the song … just ever so lightly. She pulled back to her mother-teacher-wife self before the hum could escape the boundaries of herself and become real. But she knew it could.

She wanted the scientists to solve the problem. She had the kids to think of, first of all. When she, herself, was a kid, some Africanized bees had escaped the place in South America where they were being studied and had began a slow, sexy migration north, breeding with the local honeybees wherever they went. These “killer bees” from South America were an aggressive form of bee that would swarm and chase people who disturbed their hives, usually an accidental offense. Hundreds of bees would sting the interloper, which often resulted in death. As they migrated north and got freaky with the local bees, honeybee populations became more and more aggressive, until all of the hives in the lands where the Africanized bees had traveled needed to be treated as aggressive and dangerous as a precaution.

Long years before the killer bees made it to Texas, her younger sister had nurtured a childhood terror of them. She had tracked their progress on a map and watched news stories about them a bit obsessively. Once they did arrive in Texas, people became accustomed to their occasional terrors, learning to keep an eye out for hives and to call expensive professionals when they found them, so they could be safely eradicated. Bees remained a serious issue, though; a threat.

She had not shared her sister’s interesting form of hysteria, but it certainly kept the threat in mind. No bee had ever stung her, even the two that had gotten caught in her hair as a child. She was cautious about bees, but not really scared of them, in her youth. As a parent of two kids who played in their backyards on a regular basis, she became more cautious – closer to scared – that a hive might be disturbed but it still had never taken up much of her thinking time. Until now.

Now most bees were missing, the aggressive sorts included, and she knew she could easily call them up … no matter the cause or causes of their dwindling. She could let her mind slip deliciously sideways for just the shortest interlude, expand beyond the limits she had placed upon herself, the boundaries that made her, most of the time, so wholly human, and she could taste the sweetness within, touch it, revel. In ten minutes – ten very good minutes – she had no doubt that the bees would return to the world in force, quite overcoming their hardships. Problem solved and humanity saved. A service.

If she performed such a service, she had no doubt that she could quickly return to being the woman she had chosen to be, reining in the honeycombed song that hummed in her cells almost as easily as she would release it. She had enough practice being mundane – it would not be a problem. But, really… how many bees would colonize her environs before that happened? There were normal amounts in her yard now when they had disappeared from the rest of the world and she never let herself touch their little hive minds. If she let go and re-populated the earth with them, surely her own patch of land would become an infestation.

The ones that came to her might be mean, aggressive ones … the song cared little for such things. She cared, though. She had fenced for herself a normal, small life and normal, small dreams for her family. She wanted the children to be able to run in the yard without being attacked by killer bees … reasonable enough she thought. She hoped the scientists would fix things. Maybe the government. She waited.

The scientists and politicians did not find a way to fix the problem, of course. No one else really seemed to, either. She was never really a shirker when it came down to it, so she gradually came to accept that the responsibility had become her own.

One June night, she went alone to the beach and lay down on the sand, feeling the tides run through her blood like the song. Slowly, she expanded into the honeyed feel of the swarm-song, reaching in and oozing out until she felt as big as the sea and sky… I am the queen of every hive, she thought…

And so, just so … the colonies returned.