Thirsty Honeybees in the Flowerless Land

 

Take your eyes off the booming big events. Cup your ears for delicate notes. They won’t turn you deaf and still pass on the most significant messages as cannot be given even by the thundering notes of cataclysmic day. Quantum physicists will vouch for this truth. The tiniest of subatomic particles contain as much substance of the ultimate reality as do mammoth galaxies.

Much as you ogle starry eyed at the mammoth lusty games of the higher species, where the game of procreation shoots off with multiple tragedies, take a pause and look at smaller plays on the stage of creation. Give a cute, little look to the tiny winged tools of cosmic love-making. Insects! These trees, flowers, crops, plants, grass, you, me, all these and more would die loveless if not for these little buzzing shots of cupid. Nature hums its procreating love songs through their buzzing darts from flower to flower, leaf to leaf, and branch to branch.

Humans, let them live! They are Mother Nature’s love-making means to self-sustaining procreation through pollination. They share the love story between two flowers eager to meet, love, create more flower and fruits. These little winged Adam and Eves are the Angels of creation. Their buzzing carries the song of love and procreation. Their flights symbolize the dancing of two flowers eager to brush against each other, pining to pollinate and procreate. Look deeply into nature. This is the same energy following countless pathways, and love and procreation hums deeply at all frequencies in the cosmos.

In a human-dominated and manipulated earth, all the lesser species appear to have surrendered their natural rights. A water bucket is placed as an act of charity. Of course, we carry guilty conscious. We know what havoc we have wreaked. We may not acknowledge it openly though. The very same age-old human malady, ego! Around the bucket, left as penance for individual and collective sins, beggarly specks are buzzing around: poor honeybees and decimated yellow wasps, unnecessarily ill-famed for giving bulbous swollen noses and lips to we humans.

If you don't mean to be an intruder they are unmindful of your presence, like mine just a couple of feet away. Even the angriest of them always follows the rules of the game, never attack till attacked. So even if an angry one happens to perch on your nose, it won't bite unless you get panicked, and transfer your fear to the tiny helicopter on your nose by taking a swipe at it. Then it becomes a matter of flight versus fight scenario. Even in forests, animals basically attack only after our panic gets hurled at them through our scared eyes and gestures. It lets loose a tiny chaotic storm in the tea cup, which may result in swollen lips, bloody screeches on skin or even an end to dear life.

Coming back to the bucket business and the honeybees. It’s scorching heat. The spring has died. The real spring has of course died long back, yet it survives metaphorically at least on calendar. But here it has met its end even on the calendar. The summers are ripe to the core. The flowers are withered, burnt to pieces in fact. However, life has to continue till flowers bloom once again. With temperature over 40 degrees and flowers gone, these honeybees look like desert travelers busy around an oasis. The surroundings are almost on fire.

The water level in the vessel was low, so many of them slipped down the edges while attempting to take tiny swigs of water. I feel like a savior who turned out to be a murderer. Anyway, one can use love, care and help in any corner of the world. It polishes the aesthetics of humanity. One must never miss a little practice to be more humane. Goodness is qualitative in nature. It doesn't need quantity to get certified as a good deed. The main thing is one's emotion. So here I take my quantum jump in evolution by continuously filling the bucket to the brim so that these little thirsty visitors safely perch on the upper edge and drink water without risking their lives. The heat is so much that grandpa sun soaks more water than the entire beehive, so I have to replenish it almost every hour to save the water from going too deep in the well. They get water, I become more aware of the godliness in me. Profit both ways, vow. Bah, what a fruitful day!

In the beehive, thirsty neighbors beg for a sip of water. The temperature in shade is 46 degree Celsius. Everything is on fire. It's a matter of fight or perish for the honeybee hive in the Marua (Marjoram) and wild rose thicket by the compound wall.

As it happens everywhere, the bravest take up the challenge and volunteer to keep the chances alive by collecting water. So the “water collector” bees scout for some water source. In this case, it happens to be the bucket left around our tap and faucet in the yard corner. I keep this bucket of water all day to help them in this struggle for survival. But then as I told earlier, quite a lot are drowning in their extra effort to retrieve water. So I try my level best to keep the water full to the brim so that they perch on the edges and take sips. Even this isn’t helping much though, so now I have put a cloth on the bucket. They sip on the moisture and there is less risk of drowning. So as of now they seem to like the water source and give a happy, excited buzz to slurp up as much as possible. Just imagine the scale of the fight to survive. These water couriers fly back to the scorched hive and regurgitate water so that the bees there suck it up. The latter in turn spit it out over the hive. All this is to cool it down and save larvae from dying.

As per the intangible laws of the existential forces, the water collector bees come to know and detect the problem when the colony is under the threat of scorching, killing heat. Water collectors are the itinerant types, the gutsy adventurers. They are extroverts and don't lie lazily when the brood-nest is under the threat of excessive heat. They are just on the look-out for water deficit symptoms and straightaway start collecting water to maintain the hive's temperature.

This seems to be a lesser sacrifice as the bees are even known to commit suicide to save the colony from dangerous mites. Imagine we humans love to weave endless tales of our sacrifice and struggles to raise kids and meet our duties. The endless spools of our stories of struggles are meant to earn biggest trophies of praise and certification in the eyes of society. Little do we realize that the very same thing, in fact hundreds of times bigger on the scale of selfless love and care, is taking place unsung, unknown at each and every step around us. Observing these makes us far more humble and obliged for our privileges and tones downs our ego born of the so called duties and deeds.

The researchers have found that when it becomes unbearable under extreme heat, the worker bees start soliciting by “walking up to the face of another bee, contacting the bee's antennae with her own and then extending her tongue between the mouthparts of the other bee.”

This distressed water seeking puts the water collectors into action. So they scout for a suitable water source and get busy in water-retrieval efforts to manage the hive’s temperature. All this of course is done to maintain their survival as honeybees collectively, not as individuals. They lessen the temperature below the deadly threshold that can dehydrate the bee larvae thus killing them. Hundreds perish in the water-fetching operation of course. But they don’t bother. They exist in the form of their dear beehive.

The researchers say that the effort to survive is never enough for them. Apart from the water, which gets spread over the hive, some extra cautious and wise honeybees stockpile additional moisture in the brood comb. And to take it further on the scale of management, some of them store water in their bellies as well. Their life and living is at the collective level unlike us.

Hope next time when you see a honeybee, you will look at it with more respect and plant more trees and flowers to make this a sweet, honeyed world. Lot of bitterness going around, eh!