A bees' life

What is it with bees? They are small, fluffy and soft close up. They do a great job of flitting back and forth, pollinating as they go. They produce a life giving nectar that can sustain, repair and heal. Some people call it liquid gold. Yet, they can bring a 6’5” man to his knees and stoke fear in the hearts of any and all ages. One tiny bee is a great warrior, wielding a sharp, stinging dagger at will. How complex.

While they maintain (and demand) a high level of respect in the insect world as well as man’s, they can also sadly be brought down easily by bacteria, insecticides and fly-swatters. Their importance many times goes unheeded, ignored or worse. In reality, the life of bees and their importance can be intricately woven with our own.

A young girl suddenly runs away from home, away from her father, without a plan. She just knows she must leave home in the book, “The Secret Life of Bees.” She discovers that seeing within a life can be as challenging as seeing inside a busy beehive. It’s dangerous and care must be given every step, in order to release secrets within. Fourteen-year-old Lily finds a place to land, a place to rest, to be safe. She also finds a home and caring people who open the doors inside her and help her face her inner terrors and the tragedy that thrust her on the difficult path of inner awareness. Understanding the secret lives of bees helped her to understand the child she was and the woman she is to be.

Did you know Emily Dickinson wrote over 1,700 poems about nature, gardens, flowers, the countryside? I challenge readers to find her poem that starts, “The murmur of a bee, a witchcraft yieldeth me” and tell me what secret message she has hidden in those words!

The book, “Murmur of Bees” written by Sofia Segovia, translated from Spanish to English by Simon Bruni, ponders the mysteries of life and the mysterious life of bees. A baby is born and discarded because of a severe malformation of its mouth and chin, left wrapped in a blanket under a bridge in early 1900 central Mexico.

The villagers are superstitious and fear anomalies of nature. But the nearby landowners have good hearts. Though both baby and blanket are covered by thousands of bees, they reach for the child and raise him as their own.

However, it is recognized from the start that this is no normal child or ordinary bees. They share an unexplained bond that leads both bees and boy onto paths of both joy and horror, in and out of dangers, with a wisdom neither age nor experience grows.

This story is intriguing, anguishing and definitely heartfelt. I suspect that for some readers, it opens up long buried memories and actions that helped mold them.

The characters in the story face their humanness and in doing so, show the reader how to face their own. Love, sacrifice and growing within an ever changing world challenges us all.

Of course, for Winnie the Pooh, life is simply friends and good honey. Or “huny” as Pooh would spell it. Pooh accepts bees as natural and needful in life. Then there is my favorite line in the Cinderella story “Ever After.” The oldest step sister is reveling in her good fortune of having tea with the queen, when she finds out her cinder dirty stepsister has been fraternizing with the very prince she has chosen for herself. In her upset, she jumps up from the table set outside in the queen’s garden, and has a stomping yelling fit. Realizing her faux pas, she turns and explains simply, “‘twas a bee.” But that ‘twas a lie.

Good books.

Good reading.

*Midge Lyn’dee is a fictional character used for the purpose of entertainment though the reviews are real and sincere.