Learning To Love Bees

I have a complicated relationship with the winged insect known as the bee. It’s a tale that stems from childhood fears and eventually extends through maturating adulthood. 

On the fourth of July when I was young, our deck at home had been cleared of a huge bees nest. I trusted my father when he said it was safe, so I naively thought all the bees were gone. Yet I stepped on one, and it wiggled right in between my toes and stung me.

Childhood glorifies good memories into hazy dreams and depicts the negative memories as much worse than they actually were. Of course, this centered around blaming the bee itself and perhaps villainizing it throughout my life. The more logistical culprit would be blaming my father for telling me the deck was clear. 

Throughout my childhood, if I saw a bee, even if it was the bumble kind, I would run away. And those ones mind their own business. Over time I grew to the gradual conclusion that honeybees are harmless, and wasps are the real villains. After all, honeybees help pollinate and keep our crop growing and the environment healthy. To my understanding wasps do also pollinate plants but not to the level that deems it necessary to the entire environment’s wellbeing.

Flash forward to the present day, and my outlook on the winged insect has changed. The species are particularly annoying at picnics or barbecues, yet have reached a matured appreciation for their place in the natural ecosystem. This image above is not by any means a masterpiece of photography, but it remains thought-provoking. 

So many things that appear fascinating about the species remain rarely common knowledge. Even the fact that honeybees die when they sting someone and only do it in self defense was not something I learned until my hatred of the insect had already grown, and by that time it was difficult to foster any sympathy. 

This particular photo was taken at Mystic Village. The honey vendor had a honeybee nest in a glass case and was able to point out to me and my family which one was the queen out of thousands. I have come full circle from childhood. What was once perceived to be a wrongdoing created a conditioned affect for me to fear the entire species, even though they had done nothing wrong. 

I still feel angry towards wasps, don’t get me wrong as I think hornets and other insects that aren’t honeybees go out of their way to attack other people. In the end it’s just nature and it’s not life or death unless you have an allergy of sorts. In the photo, you can see my reflection in the waning daylight and while this arguably detracts from the quality of the image, it also creates a sense of duality. Bees on one side of the glass, and myself standing on the other side of the divide. 

My knowledge about bees has grown as I have gotten older, and I no longer fear them. If anything, I almost admire them. Pesticides, climate change and habitat loss threaten their existence and our existence as well to keep their species in line so we have effective crops. 

In a way this can be applied to how we interact with other people. As a child, I was riddled with fear of the unknown, the physical bee sting evolving into a psychological phobia. People are often afraid of the unknown because it is what they don’t understand. This is a lesson that once we learn more about something that scares us, we learn that they either aren’t all that bad or that we have things in common.

Now don’t get me wrong. I’m not getting my bachelor's in beekeeping, but I do think it’s tragic that people continue to accept surface level truths, secluding their personal bubble to that of comfort and familiarity. Perhaps learning bees’ place in the world was part of growing up, as the more I learned the more I knew they weren’t inherently evil. 

I guess that’s how I learned to love bees.