bee line
Common sense imagines a line as the shortest distance between two points. The quickest route to reach a goal or avoid a grave.
“Lining the bee” is a method for finding and pillaging the storehouses of feral bees. To find the bee tree, a bee is captured and released. A hunter sets off in the direction taken by the bee, capturing and releasing bee after bee until arriving at the hive. Honey and wax can be as good as money. Venerable sources for sweetening and fermentation; casting metal, conjuring encaustic paint, the grace of candle illumination and heat.
Calling itself, Beeline dot com, the company promo offers to manage any pesky contingent labor. Still, workers have radical or inclusive options. Flight is not necessarily retreat. Despite common sense and established notions of progress, mathematical logic tells us that lines have no set or final end point.
buzz
Vibration can be life returning from a dormant state. A noun for the tuning of strings, the adrenaline of rumors and emergency sirens, the start of an engine, the hope a cell phone awakens. Or a verb for life glanced by near death. A close call that makes hair stand on end as blood rushes from the skin to the heart and lung and readies for flight or fight. Surviving yet truncated. A coerced hair cut for those recruited and those exiled.
This contradiction between awakening to life and near death is inherent in the state of being buzzed or getting a buzz. An altered yet volatile state is assimilation into the life of the party and equally the alienation of being utterly harrowed, adrift and paralyzed even by ordinary negotiations.
In a bee hive, swarming — that mass migration of a community — begins with energy gathered and saved. Bees by the tens of thousands gorge on honey and sink into stupor. The moment comes to leave the new queen and the old hive and follow the old queen on a long journey to establish a new hive. Small numbers of bees, so-called buzz-runners, race among the zombified workers furiously vibrating their wings. It is time, it is time! Have faith and fly.
drone
On sunny afternoons, male drones wait on the wing and at a distance for an intrepid sexually-mature female. Only the swiftest and most nimble will join with her. Success rudely rips their sexual organs and innards away. The drones die while she returns plumb with sperm to last her lifetime of three to five years.
The new queen’s fertilized eggs will yield generations of sexually-immature females. Hundreds of thousands to replenish the necessary contingent of tireless worker daughters who live a scant six weeks. The queen retains her capacity and choice to lay unfertilized eggs. From these unfertilized eggs, several hundred sexually-active males emerge each spring to hover in warm anticipation. When the season for nectar and pollen ends, the colony shrinks to the scale of its reserves. The remaining virgin drones are frankly pushed out the hive door to starve. Fever’s angels are abandoned.
Myths about the male bee as a laggard in a hive of female ambition has long spurred western ideals of productive activity and more recently the ambivalence towards control and intention that surrounds flying robots.(See Center for the Study of the Drone, csd@bard.edu)
In a more ancient history, the word drone is related to the Greek word for lamentation. In ancient times, when a city lost a battle, people would pour into the streets. Refusing words, the multitude would fill the heavens with the unrelenting sounds of grief. If history is the measure of the distance between a utopic and dystopic moment, then what is the measure between drone as a collective utterance of mourning addressed to the heavens and drone as a killing specter in the sky?
hive
For many, telephone poles and lines are unsightly. The wires are ideally buried and poles removed. Community pride would gladly edit out the very infrastructures that facilitate the flows between us, the hard evidence of our dependency one to another.
This quest for the perfect picture, as any horror film will tell you, ignores the haunting. There are no markers to tell how, in this country in the 20th century, telephone poles were employed as convenient lynching trees.
Yet there is no excuse to forget that we live surrounded by ghost forests. Forests that once sheltered the bee trees of feral hives. For feral bees, a bee tree may be a home for six decades or more. Each year the old queen leaves the old bee tree for a new tree and a young queen is left to tend the old tree. Each year is a cycle of departure and legacy-keeping. While entomologists are finding ever more sophisticated methods of editing bee genes, the homes and resource pools of feral bee populations are being destroyed.
We are all just going home yet, in truth, our familiar paths are chronically edged with strangeness and sorrows.
hum