Bees

In honor of Easter, something a little springy, something with fresh air and sunlight.

On Thursday, I was in Topanga State Park with a camera crew. We were doing camera tests for the next Lightwheel project, a feature that Marc wrote and is directing called Making Love. We had to figure out whether to shoot the movie in 35 mm or hi-def, and the big question with hi-def is how well it performs out of doors. Since a huge portion of the movie must be shot outside, this question had to be settled; so Marc got together with his Zen Noir cinematographer, Chris Gosch, and I went through an amazing amount of rigamarole to get a permit for us to shoot in the park, and on Thursday we went out and did it.

At the ranger station, bees were swarming under the eaves of the building. I wondered why the rangers hadn't gotten rid of the hive, but figured that this being a park, a place devoted to nature, they had simply decided that as long as the bees weren't bothering, they would just leave them be. So the bees buzzed and danced from flower to hive, and everyone went about their busy business as well.

As a producer, once the shoot began there really wasn't anything for me to do except guard the equipment by the side of the road. I sat there for a long while, under a shady tree, with a lush green field just to the left of me, watching seven deer as they slowly grazed their way closer, closer. Above my head, a bee moved from branch to branch, collecting and pollinating.

I was ridiculously happy.

Now bees, I've always been a little wary of. Childhood experiences have their effect, and here are just two of them: once, walking to school, a bee somehow flew inside my shoe and then stung me on the instep, a particularly painful place to get stung; and once when my dad lived in Atlanta, I was up there visiting for a month and was sledding down those red clay hills with some friends when we went right over a yellowjackets' nest. The wasps swarmed, we all got stung multiple times and spent the rest of the afternoon watching the Batman TV show with baking soda caked all over us.

Thus bees (and their even-scarier cousins of the wasp family) became equated with Pain. And since I have spent a remarkable portion of my life trying to avoid Pain in every way possible, I've generally reacted negatively to the mere appearance of a bee. Swatting it away, jumping myself away, whatever it took. (And of course, bees just love me. Maybe it's my very blond hair gleaming in the sun like some gigantic daffodil? Who knows.)

But I recently read a review, by whom and of what and where it was I cannot remember, that talked about bees and their long-standing place in culture. Of the bees that supposedly swarmed the mouth of the infant Plato, indicating the greatness of the man-to-be; of the bee's essential role in pollinating most flowering plants (there would be no almond industry, to pick just one example, without the honeybee); of the symbolic nature of the bee as a crucial part of the cycle of life. With me, if you want to turn my head around on something, just give me material like this, I'm a complete sucker for it.

And so I sat there on Thursday, a bee buzzing just above my head, and for once I was happy to just sit there. And the bee, I discovered, wasn't at all interested in me or my daffodil head, and that we were both perfectly content to do what we were doing, now near and now far apart.

The very next day, I went outside my apartment, around the back and up the stairs to finally clean out my car of all the stuff that had gathered for the shoot. (Two wooden planks, an air mattress, leftover craft-service food, and a power inverter, to name just a few of the oddments.) As I marched up the stairs, I saw several honeybees on the ground, writhing; then heard a fearsome buzzing just above my head. Stepping into the clear of the parking lot, I saw that a hive had taken up residence under the eaves of my building, just as they had at the distant ranger station. And apparently an exterminator had just been there, had just sprayed, so the bees were agitated and dying.

My old thinking was that maybe I should clean out the car later. An angry swarm is an entirely different thing from a lone bee dancing around a fragrant tree. But I felt a new sympathy for them, as they lie there dying by the dozen, literally dropping out of the air. I knew that I no longer bore any animosity toward them, and that they would not wreak their vengeance on me. So I did what I had to do, made several trips slowly carrying things right under the dying hive, and by the time I was done, so too, alas, were the bees.

It felt very like a loss. But at the same time, I have to admit--I'm glad they hadn't built a hive in my walls....