Notes from Swan House by Gary Michael Dault
Notes From Swan House #84: Dried Bee
(posted 8/9/2010)
“Would you like to have a dried bee in your study?” Malgorzata shouts up at me from the sunroom at the back of Swan House. “Sure, I guess,” I shout back down. For a moment I felt like some fervent Victorian amateur naturalist—like the young cleric in the novella, Morpho Eugenia, in A.S.Byatt’s Angels and Insects (1992). I felt, for a moment, as if I were presiding over some brilliant cabinet of curiosities I’d been nurturing for years (with fossils, bones, shells, bird skeletons, chunks of minerals and semi-precious stones in their natural state, flies in amber, sharks’ teeth) sitting right beside the computer. A dried bee? If I were John Ruskin, I’d have to set about making delicate drawings of it.
She said she’d been tidying up and had found the creature on the floor, a fallen Bumblebee, along with some desiccated leaves and a few wan lengths of old cobweb. She brought the defunct bee up to me in a shot glass. It sits on the desk beside my computer.
It’s a beautiful thing, though troubling, of course, in its dried, life-leaked rigidity. The bee, my object-bee, is all inspectability now: it’s colouration is exquisite (its shawl-like, sweater-like cowl of golden furriness); its structure, noble (its now-lank, now broken proboscis, the intricate engineering of its articulated landing gear).
Every time I look at it, I hear Walter Brennan, Humphrey Bogart’s sidekick, Eddie, in the Howard Hawks’ Hemingway-derived film, To Have and Have Not (1944), asking everybody he sees “Was you ever bit by a dead bee?”
Gazing at my bumblebee in its shot-glass coffin, I get thinking about how little we all know about anything—or at least how little I know about anything. I had to query the Google Oracle, for example, to find out if Bumblebees made honey or not (they do, but because it is really a confluence of nectars, it isn’t as thick or dense as honeybee honey). Do they live in hives? No, but they build nests. Do they possess and honour a Queen? Yup, they do.
No doubt you remember the jokey speculation about how, given their hefty design features, bumblebees really shouldn’t be able to fly (but then neither should 747s, Airbuses and other “heavy” airliners). Here is what Google has to say about that—an item written, as Google-texts go, with an almost unaccountable grace and wit: “Human engineers with big brains said it was impossible for bumblebees to fly. But bumblebees with small brains didn't know this so continued to fly on in blissful ignorance.” It then suggests the reader follow a number of useful links, in order to learn more about “this story of our ignorance and arrogance.”
There is, of course, a vast and weighty library of books about bees and apiculture. For me, the most delightful one is The Life of the Bee (1901) by Belgian playwright and poet, Maurice Maeterlinck (Maurice Polydore Marie Bernard, Count Maeterlinck). Maeterlinck writes such utterly delicious prose, I cannot but quote some of it here:
Bees, writes Maeterlinck, “are the soul of the summer, the clock whose dial records the moments of plenty; they are the untiring wing on which delicate perfumes float; the guide of the quivering light ray, the song of the slumberous, languid air; and their flight is the token, the sure and melodious note, of all the myriad fragile joys that are born in the heat and dwell in the sunshine….” (New York: Blue Ribbon Books, 1901, p. 72).
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