bee
We need to feed our planet, of course. But we also need the teeny creatures that drive all life on earth. There’s something strange about a farm that intentionally creates a biological desert to produce food for one species: us. It’s efficient, yes. But it’s so efficient that the ants are missing, the bees are missing, and even the birds stay away. Something’s not right here. Our cornfields are too quiet.
“Cornstalks Everywhere but Nothing Else, Not Even a Bee,” NPR, November 30, 2012.
All things, once seen, they didn’t just die, that couldn’t be. It must be then that somewhere, searching the world, perhaps in the dripping multiboxed honeycombs where light was an amber sap stored by pollen-fired bees, or in the thirty thousand lenses of the noon dragonfly’s gemmed skull you might find all the colors and sights of the world in any one year. Or pour one single drop of this dandelion wine beneath a microscope and perhaps the entire world of July Fourth would firework out in Vesuvius showers.
Dandelion Wine (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1978), 160.
Bees do have a smell, you know, and if they don’t they should, for their feet are dusted with spices from a million flowers.
Dandelion Wine (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1978), viii.