Tag: bumblebee

Where You Go, I Will Go: A Place of Retreat

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… Maybe they have
no place to return or are lost,
having gone too far from the nest.

Female bees will also burrow
deep inside the shade of a squash
flower: the closer to the source
of nectar, the warmer and more
quilt-like the air. In the cool
hours of morning, look closely
for the slight but tell-tale
trembling in each flower cup:
there, a body dropped mid-flight,
mid-thought. How we all retreat
behind some folded screen as work
or the world presses in too
soon, too close, too much.
~Luisa Igloria from “Ode to Tired Bumblebees Who Fall Asleep Inside Flowers With Pollen on Their Butts”

How can I love this spring
when it’s pulling me
through my life faster
than any time before it?
When five separate dooms
are promised this decade
and here I am, just trying
to watch a bumblebee cling
to its first purple flower.
I cannot save this world.
But look how it’s trying,
once again, to save me.
~James Pearson “This Spring”

It isn’t unusual to find a bumblebee clinging to a spring blossom, all covered in morning dew, having overstayed its welcome as the evening chill hit the night before.

The bumble is too cold to fly, or think, or navigate. Instead it just clings through the night until the sun rises and the air once again warms its wings.

Maybe it got lost.
Maybe it is simply weary from flying with such tiny wings.
Maybe it has no home to retreat to in the darkness.
Maybe it only wants to cling tight to beauty in a dangerous world.

I’ve known what this feels like, dear plump fluffy bumble.
I think I know how you feel,
patiently waiting for the descent of Love to revive my spirit
and warm my wings…

This year’s Lenten theme:

…where you go I will go…
Ruth 1:16

AI image created for this post

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Saved, Once Again

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How can I love this spring
when it’s pulling me
through my life faster
than any time before it?
When five separate dooms
are promised this decade
and here I am, just trying
to watch a bumblebee cling
to its first purple flower.
I cannot save this world.
But look how it’s trying,
once again, to save me.
~James Pearson “This Spring”

My first close encounter with a bumblebee was when I was five.
I was wearing my swimsuit, playing in the sprinkler in our backyard.
After running and leaping in the spray, I sat down on our porch step for a moment, unaware that is precisely where a wet bumblebee chose to dry off in the sun.

Both the bumblebee and my bum had a bit of a rumble.

I jumped up, tumbled off the step crying hard, while the bumblebee buzzed off, miffed.

I mumbled and grumbled sore for several days, my feelings about bees jumbled and my confidence crumbled.

Even now, decades later, whenever I see a bumblebee, I wonder if it is a distant descendant of my bumbling stumble. I am reminded of the consequences of not paying enough attention to what I say, where I stand, and particularly where I sit in this world that is easily offended and stings hard when squished and mad.

Some painful things are best never forgotten. I’m humbled by the memory of an indignant bumblebee, who, in a teachable moment over and over, saves my fumbling bum once again.

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Earth’s Secrets

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I

A shaded lamp and a waving blind,
And the beat of a clock from a distant floor:
On this scene enter—winged, horned, and spined—
A longlegs, a moth, and a dumbledore;
While 'mid my page there idly stands
A sleepy fly, that rubs its hands...

II

Thus meet we five, in this still place,
At this point of time, at this point in space.
—My guests besmear my new-penned line,
Or bang at the lamp and fall supine.
"God's humblest, they!" I muse. Yet why?
They know Earth-secrets that know not I.
~Thomas Hardy "An August Midnight"

There are so many more of them than us.  Yes, insects appear where we don’t expect them, they sting and bite and crawl and fly in our mouths and are generally annoying.  But without God’s humblest knowing the secrets of the inner workings of the soil, the pollinator and the blossom, we’d have no fruit, no seeds, no earth as we know it.

Even more humble are our microscopic live-in neighbors — the biome of our skin and gut affecting, managing and raising havoc with our internal chemistry and physiology in ways we are only beginning to understand.

God created us all, each and every one, from the turning and cycles of smallest of atoms and microbes to the expanding swirl of galaxies far beyond us.

Perhaps the humblest of all, found smack-dab in the middle of this astounding creation, would be us: the intended Imago Dei.

Two legs not six or eight, two eyes not many, no wings with which we might fly away, no antennae, no stinger.

Just us with our one fragile and loving heart.

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Buttercups and Velvet Bums

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A week ago I had a fire
To warm my feet, my hands and face;
Cold winds, that never make a friend,
Crept in and out of every place.

Today the fields are rich in grass,
And buttercups in thousands grow;
I’ll show the world where I have been–
With gold-dust seen on either shoe.

Till to my garden back I come,
Where bumble-bees for hours and hours
Sit on their soft, fat, velvet bums,
To wriggle out of hollow flowers.
~William Henry Davies “All in June”

This has been the coldest wettest June in decades here in the Pacific Northwest: we have the stove lit for warmth, the fields are too wet to till, the gardens lie idle because planted seeds will rot. Despite the chill, the buzzing pollinators have been out doing their important work in fields of buttercups where the Haflinger horses graze, sometimes getting too soppy in the rain to return to their hives. It is hard work to move those chunky bodies with those little tiny wings – but they manage.

The Haflingers and bumblebees have something in common — pudgy generous backsides. There is nothing quite as deceptive as a bumblebee bum – fat, soft, velvety….yet with a sting in the middle. I know this from personal experience: I sat down on one as a kid wearing a bathing suit and never forgot it.

But all is forgiven. I now appreciate bumblebee bums. They make me feel less self-conscious about my fluffy horses’ hind ends …
and my own.

photo by Andrea Nipges (Z’s Happy Bees)

Some things that fly there be,—             
Birds, hours, the bumble-bee:  
Of these no elegy.
~Emily Dickinson from “XIV”

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