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!
