Rescuing the presumptive queen
“Look, Pop Pop! It’s a queen bee.” And so I looked, and with my scant knowledge of bees, I couldn’t find anything to cast doubt on my six-year-old granddaughter’s conclusion. The insect was about twice the length of the average bee, its abdomen was dark brown with a few yellow stripes and it was tapered at the tail end. The real clincher, though, was the two long wings that gave this bee, if indeed that’s what it was, it’s regal stature. How about that, a queen bee gracing us with a royal audience right at the edge of our driveway?
Only thing is the bee wasn’t looking very royal on this late summer day. She wasn’t attempting to fly. Standing up was hard enough. She would take a few steps forward and then roll over, a sure candidate for a breathalyzer test if the insect police were watching.
Coming to the rescue, my wife coaxed her highness onto a leaf and transported her a few inches to the lawn and a nearby flower bed where we thought she would be more comfortable. There, the granddaughter who found her made a bee patio with some flat rocks while her little sister decorated the residence with flower petals. The bee settled in to a grassy patch and then lay perfectly still.
“Queen Blueberry is taking a nap,” big sister announced. Now she had a name.
“Yes,” I replied, “a nap,” hoping all the while that this was not the beginning of a funeral.
We had had enough talk of death a few days earlier when big sister’s metal detector started buzzing over a spot of ground under which our daughter’s cockatiel was buried in a metal box.
“Dig here, Pop Pop. It’s buzzing.”
“We can’t really do that,” I said, anticipating and dreading her next question.
“Why not?”
“That’s where we buried your aunt’s pet bird when she died. We shouldn’t disturb the grave.”
“You know what kind of pet I’m going to get? A turtle. They live for 100 years.”
“And people usually live a very long time too,” I replied to this six-year-old, while silently wishing her and every living creature she loves a long healthy life.
We moved on to other things, and now I feared we were back on the topic of death with a napping bee. After some time passed, I wondered if the queen was hungry and remembered a jar of honey in our cupboard. But wait, bees make honey, but do they eat it? You can google anything these days, and soon I had my answer. Bees eat the nectar of flowers and turn it into honey which they store for food in the winter months. All right then, a winter snack a few months early. Why not?
Big sister dipped a clean popsicle stick in the honey and placed it in front of the queen. She stirred. Moving her forelegs slowly toward the treat, the queen bowed her head and either tasted or just inspected our offering. It was hard to tell. Hard to tell until her royal highness took off with a honey-fueled burst of energy.
Up to this point, I wasn’t worried about the kids getting stung by our lethargic royal, but now she clearly had the strength to do some harm. You can google anything these days. Do queen bees sting? I learned that they have three stingers but use them mainly against rival bees, specifically, to kill their sister queens and establish their own reign. Okay, this was clearly a case of TMI, too much information for two little girls still working through their own sibling issues, so I kept my mouth shut.
The girls were happily letting Queen Blueberry crawl on their hands and arms when their Mom appeared on the scene clearly worried that the girls were playing with a wasp. You can google anything these days, but now we have AI for even more accurate fact checking. Our son snapped a photo of the presumed queen, and AI promptly told us that we were dealing not with a bee or a wasp but with a bald faced hornet. Very aggressive. Venom can cause pain. Attack to defend their nests.
“Ok girls, it looks like Queen Blueberry is actually a hornet. You’ve helped her a lot and she’s feeling much better now, but hornets can sting. Let’s just leave her alone, and we can do something else.”
“I’ll get the metal detector, Pop Pop.”
“Ahh…How about a nice game of Connect Four?”
And so the story of our rescue mission ends with its lucky outcome for all the living creatures involved. The presumptive queen turned out to be a dangerous hornet, but she got some extra time added to her insect life. Nobody was stung, and the kids came away with some further knowledge about bees and hornets and some real-life experience in nurturing.
As for me, I was reminded of the thin line we walk between living life and analyzing it, the fine balance of informed decision making with spontaneous action, knowing when to speak and when to be silent and the importance of timing. I’m sure I missed more than a few teaching moments in our adventure, but at least I can close with an endorsement of that line in the credits at the end of so many movies. No animals were harmed in the making of this film.
Or, human animals included, in the making of this story.