By The Landlord
“If the bee disappeared off the face of the earth, man would only have four years left to live.” – Maurice Maeterlinck, The Life of the Bee
“Every saint has a bee in his halo.” – Elbert Hubbard
“Handle a book as a bee does a flower, extract its sweetness but do not damage it.” – John Muir
“If neonicotinoids are the answer, what was the question?” – June Stoyer
“It is the peculiar nature of the world to go on spinning no matter what sort of heartbreak is happening.”
“It takes a bee 10,000,000 trips to collect enough nectar to make 1 pound of honey.”
“Don’t even think about swatting. If you feel angry, whistle. Anger agitates while whistling melts a bee’s temper. Act like you know what you’re doing, even if you don’t. Above all, send the bees love. Every little thing wants to be loved.” – Sue Monk Kidd, The Secret Life of Bees
Furry packets of hovering sound.
Buckety brackets abuzz the ground.
Purveyors of minute navigation.
Tiny couriers of life’s information.
Built in hexagonal segments,
Contents saving whole continents.
Editing sorters of vast colour supplements.
Gelatinous artists, collective intelligence.
To mark next week with a big day’s bloom,
(sounds like a festival of the bathroom)
As 20th May marks big World Bee Day –
So time is ripe for a song-list bouquet.
Burly bee
So bees are the theme, and all association,
Nectar, honey, hives? Nature’s great libation?
Metaphor or literal, flirtation or gyration,
Social circulation, structured adaptation,
Strict task allocation. Equal? Subjugation?
All may be sources of lyric’s inspiration.
Bees in trees and flowers, bees below ground,
What about music that mimics bees’ sound?
Meandering motion from station to station,
Flighty uplift, minutiae’s imagination.
Vocal, chorus, drone, or just guitar’s strum,
Sound effects too create buzz and hum.
For thousands of years we’ve worked with bees,
The Mayans, Ancient Egypt, to Archimedes.
Yeats, Beatrix Potter, both crafted character,
It’s also a great symbol of the city of Manchester.
And that one-liner by Muhammed Ali –
Cultures and works connect through the bee.
One of hundreds of mosaic worker bees on the floor on Manchester’s town hall. The symbol can be found everywhere around the city
But it’s not just honey, bumblebees, or hives –
16,000 species have Anthophila lives.
Most bees are the type in the category: solitary,
Doing what’s necessary away from a colony,
Sweat bees, masons, dwarf bees, or carpenters,
Leafcutters, diggers, squash bees or plasterers.
They burrow underground, in nooks or dead trees,
And vary in size by many degrees.
The tiniest, stingless – 2mm long,
The leafcutter 40mm – amazingly strong.
Meticulously tidy, on petal and wing,
Only in rarest, last resort will they sting.
Meticulous cleaning
Vast are their tasks and behaviour’s expanse
But perhaps most advanced is the intricate dance
Of colony members, in communication
On distance, direction to rich pollination.
Excitable movement, like market stall haggle
Turn, repeat, shake, with a tremble and waggle:
From queen to her workers, focused, infallible,
Producing, defending all things hexagonal,
Devotion to a cause, in communal commotion
Bees are the knees that keep us in motion.
They give us a buzz, food chains interlock
But poison pesticide makes huge decline shock.
So it’s time to step up, block Neonicotinoids,
Support the campaigns, no other way avoids.
The drive for efficiency? Insane deathly tyranny,
Higher yield targets bring self-destruct irony.
So plant and protect, with shoots in the breeze,
And sing out right now for those pollinate bees.
Natural beehive shapes
Other busy beehives from the Ronettes to Amy Winehouse
So then, please get busy and nominate your songs about bees with a friendly buzz before deadline on Monday at 11pm UK time. This week’s chief beekeeper is the excellent Alaric, whose playlists will be published next week. The hive mind always provides …
Stranger bee-haviour
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