|
|
|||
|
|
|||
|
|
|
|
|
|
||||
|
|
|||
|
|
|||
|
|
|
|
|
Also this issue: Don¹t Make Me Pull Over Blight Out |
|
|
|
|
 |
|||||||||
April 18-24, 2002
loose canon
True story: In a time when we’re lucky just to get our mail from the post office, I was recently offered a level of service that is long gone, or maybe never was. All it took was ignorance and utter fear. And yet I broke no laws.
Last weekend I got a phone call offering to bring me a package. To my home in rural Delaware, from a post office some 20 miles away. Delivered, on Sunday.
It wasn't an Express Mail parcel. It was sent by ordinary post. Ground transportation from Georgia to Delaware took about a day, which may have been a very long ride for some unwitting postal worker.
On Sunday, my answering machine picked up a message from a woman, her voice shivering with fear.
"Mr. Schimmel, we've got a package for you. It's scheduled for delivery tomorrow, but we'd be glad to bring it to you today.
"It's bees," she whispered, as if not wanting to disturb them.
Three pounds of bees is about 10,000 insects. They, and their queen, were packed in a little crate, framed in wood, a foot long, 8 inches high and 6 inches deep.
"Live Bees" is printed on the top in large red letters -- which is about as informative as a safety sign on a buzz saw. Because 10,000 bees are easily heard 100 feet away.
Even easier, in this case. For not only could you hear these bees, you could see them. All of them. The sides of their cage were covered in screen. The insects crawled so thickly on it that the mesh seemed to disappear -- giving the impression of a roiling, living box of bees. Like something from Hitchcock or Survivor.
Fact is, honey bees are as domesticated as cows, and almost as dependent on us. Away from their hive, they're so docile you can hold them in your fingers and stroke their wings.
You know the Bee Beard trick? The guy with his face covered in insects is holding a queen bee in his lips. With their queen in the middle, these package bees could have been moved without any screen at all.
All bees want is to be near their queen. Her scent is what holds them together, literally keeping them alive. Kind of like the Borg.
The bees that this package replaces had lost their queen. When I opened the hive in late winter, all that was left of a colony of 60,000 was a ball of withered bugs the size of a fist, too small to keep them for freezing. Their queen's sudden demise had destroyed their spirit.
The new queen inside this replacement package was held in a tiny cage, attended by two workers who fed and groomed her. When the package finally arrived from the post office, I plucked out the queen and dropped her into the hive. Ten thousand bees instantly tumbled in after her, home at last. (bruce@citypaper.net)
