The Noblest of Things
October 03, 2024 at 06:33PMFor The Threepenny Review, novice beekeeper David Fowler recounts his attempts to fill his hive box with wild bee swarms near Penelope, Texas. He learns that when it comes to beekeeping, perseverance is the primary requirement.
The queen lives to lay eggs, the only bee in the hive of say, eighty thousand, who does so. A handful of males, drones, are tolerated long enough to mate with the queen. Come winter, the males are driven out and die in the cold, having become needless expenditures of winter’s precious food stores. Such is the efficient justice within the hive. A bee with no further purpose receives no quarter.
For those bees charged with gathering nectar, life will be a time hard and brief, but oh, what an existence: possessing the ability to fly over field and farm, to look down on the laziness of the hardest-working man and show him his vanity and weakness, to spend dawn to dusk among the flowers man never notices, blooms he calls weeds, among the yellow-flowered mesquite trees, the paler yellow cotton blooms, the clovers white and yellow, rich and sticky.
from Longreads https://longreads.com/2024/10/03/the-noblest-of-things/
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