Saving the Bee

A bee got stuck in my bedroom. It’s a mystery how he got in the house. When I went in this morning to check my email, there he was, banging against the window—“Bzzzzzz bzzzzz!” I stepped back. “The bee is not afraid of me,” as Dickinson said.

He was a big sucker, a bumblebee about three inches long, with spiny black legs and a fuzzy yellow back. How in the world did he get in here? I wondered. The windows had been shut all night.

I thought he must have somehow flown in from the serviceberry tree under my window; I’ve been watching bees gorge on the flowers there all week long. In the early spring in New York, the streets of the East Village are wild with blossoms, the white serviceberries, pink choke cherries. The bees had been going crazy on them, and little birds too, singing joyfully and fighting over the harvest.

But how did this bee get into my apartment?, I wondered. He certainly couldn’t have flown through the glass—unless he was a magic bee of some kind, maybe an apparition. “Bzzzzz, bzzzzzzzzzz,” he moaned on, ramming stolidly against the window. It was so strange and sad.

I started to wonder if he really were a kind of sign. I’ve been thinking a lot about bees lately—I’ve been worried about them, actually, reading all the stories about the “colony collapse” that's happening all over the world (see Rosebud #85 below). It’s a mystery, too, why the bees are disappearing. Who knew how important they were to our very survival, how much we depend on them for the pollination of crops. Is it chemicals, radiation, cell phones, that’s exterminating them? Nobody knows, yet, but it ain't good...

I felt I had to save this bee. I’m not much of an outdoorswoman, and I assure you this bee was gigantic; but I summoned up all of my courage and went over to the window and opened it for him to get out. But then I realized oh no, my screen doesn’t open; so the furry fellow was still trapped. He immediately got excited at the smell of the outdoors in the wafting warm air, the tantalizing closeness of the serviceberry. He began crawling over. I found my way out of the room before he found his way over to the screen, and nearer to me.

I decided I would trap him in a cup and take him outside. I went and got a cup with a wide mouth and a piece of cardboard—all in a panic, like I was saving a relative. Maybe I was. I’d already begun to envision how thrilling it would be to release him into the tree, to feel the glow of having saved a living being, the hope of the possibility of saving the world.

But when I went back in the bedroom, something awful had happened. The bee had made his way to the screen, all right—clever bee, I knew he would—but then he had crawled into the space between the screen and the window (probably looking for a way out). Now he was trapped worse than before, in that half-inch space; and I couldn’t reach him. He wasn’t moving anymore, not buzzing, just clinging to the screen. His delicate wings looked brown. He retracted his hind legs. It looked like he was turning black.

“Crawl back over here,” I told him. “I’ll put you in the cup and then I’ll take you outside.” But he just sat there. I wondered if he were dying, maybe dead already. My heart sank. Oh well, I tried, I thought. I tried, didn’t I? I went outside to walk my dog.

I wandered around for about fifteen minutes feeling horrible. Did the death of the bee mean the death of the world? Did I believe in signs? Was there something more I could have done?, I asked myself. I guess I could have cut the screen…

That was it! I’d cut the screen!, I thought. Oh, maybe it was a little extravagant, but how much could a screen cost? And anyway, who cared? I ran back inside. And now something wondrous had occurred. The bee had crawled out from under the window pane and was sitting on the screen, like a plump yellow blossom waiting to be plucked.

I ran over with my cup and cardboard and scooped him up as easily as if I’d practicing the move all my life. His increased confinement seemed to alarm him, and he instantly became more bee-like, jumping and buzzing inside the glass. “Just calm down, I’m taking you back outside!” I told him. Riding in the elevator with him I summoned up my courage again and took a good look at him. Remarkable fellow! A prince.

I took him to the serviceberry tree, placed the cup against a bough of blossoms, removed the cardboard—and watched him as he alighted and crawled round and round a flower, touching, hugging, humping in an ecstasy of bee love, intoxicated.

And that was it, I thought, that was the wake-up call of the bees: Make love, not war, and there will be life, not death.