Bee Small But Powerful and Save the World

Another beemail!  Also about saving the world, one baby pollinator bee at a time….

I am immersed in an activity that keeps expanding to capture my heart and my imagination.  A few years ago I began in a small but engaging way to provide nesting spaces for pollinator bees.  This is not “bee keeping” in the traditional sense.  Wild pollinators that I have been working with like the Blue Orchard Mason bee and the Leafcutter bee don’t live in hives and don’t produce honey. They aren’t even very social, though they like to work and nest side by side. There are thousands of species of wild solitary bees, and they are the best pollinators in the world.

Because of the growing plight of bees, providing safe protected places for these bees to create their larva cocoons is a wonderful way to be part of the earth’s conversation. I think of it as helping to make sure that tomorrow will come.

My bee endeavor started kind of lightly, with interest and curiosity. But now I can feel how my contribution actually has power and effect. My part is not only about providing nesting structures, it is a lot about coming to trust that Nature probably knows better than I do.  This has involved a more intimate, more complex relationship with the world than I had known would happen when I started out.

Over time I have realized that I had been kind of unconsciously thinking of myself as the mastermind of the project. (Oh, humans…rolling eyes.)…  I was inadvertently trying to be responsible for what happened.  I was not really asking myself that question: “Who can I be as a living partner?”

And then, the hardest thing, trusting that the earth and everything in it all have their own flow with all of life.  All I really need to do is feel into my place in it. I am learning to keep up my end of the conversation—without interrupting, or talking too much.  That is harder than it might seem, when I care so much!

Each autumn I collect the cocoons from the nesting sites that I have mounted on an east facing (warmth of the rising sun) wall of our house.  When I started doing this it was with just 20 cocoons. This year, yikes, I feel responsible for hundreds of bee babies. They began their journey last summer as eggs laid by incredibly hard working bee mothers, and now are larvae in cocoons, 6-7 in one nesting tube.  I have almost 200 tubes ready to be filled over this next season.

Until last week half of the cocoons, the Blue Orchard Mason bees from last summer, were hibernating in my refrigerator at a relative constant 37 degrees (no danger them flying around…). Now it is time for them to awaken from their deep, cold creative sleep. The other half is still in the fridge. They are the Leafcutters, and they begin to wake up when it is really hot outside. Emergence is different for the two species, one in the cooler spring and one in summer.

Every year I try to create the right set up, and watch the bees go to work. This year in particular it seems to be about delicately but decisively seizing the upper hand in a negotiation over space with a small but fierce nation of wasps who claimed part of the bees’ nesting territory last year, and are waking up now to renew their claim.  The wasps are interesting critters, also good pollinators, but my allegiance here is with the bees.

I spend a lot of time during the summer watching the mother bees (there is no Queen… each working woman bee is a queen mother, and isn’t that the truth!!) fly home, bringing a tiny mouthful of mud (or a circle cut out of a leaf or a petal for the Leafcutters) over and over again, painstakingly creating little rooms, one for each egg, bringing a little load of pollen for the eventually-hatched larva to be nourished by. They are known as “gentle bees.”  They seldom sting, and if they do, when provoked, it is just a tiny prick.

I think, as I watch their bright movement of embodied intention, that bees are made out of the sun.  So are the flowers ands fruits that they pollinate. I too am a sun in my own way.  It is not only that I eat what the bees and the plants have created from the sun, and I soak it up through my skin.  I have the power to be a source myself, be generative, supply energy, empower and nourish.

Standing in front of the bee nesting boxes, I am feeling part of all the activity. The bees are a continual flow in and out of the nesting tubes, to my right and my left and over my head, zooming off to find nectar, and zooming back with the sweetness of the flowers or a mouthful of building materials. I saw two of the small Mason bees mating in mid-air once, just a few seconds, and it felt like an explosion of light.

Standing there, what captures me is the sense of “weaving flying.”  If I could see a day, or a week, all at once in a moment, I can imagine actually seeing the presence and work of the Spirit of Renewal.  I have a sweeping, flowing image of the fabric of her cape, a fine gossamer silver gray, dancing by and through me, sparkling with tiny lights of Life in conversation with itself, held in the powerful glowing presence of fiery hope.

As a human I can collaborate with the this spirit that generates bees zooming, and flowers and vegetables growing, to feed life on earth.  I get an image of myself holding hands with all the players in this vast project— the bee deva, the Spirit of Renewal, the sun, my house holding the bee nest structures, the bees themselves, the weather devas, the angels of the Future and the Past and the Present…  I have lots of co-creative collaborators. My presence is a field of blessing too. It is not a small or finite activity, this bee work.

This is such an evocative image for me.  I feel myself being a part of the movement of life, a light myself, in the powerful, intricate flow of renewal. What a wonderful privilege.

(If you are interested in knowing more about how you too can help pollinator bees go here:  www.crownbees.com)

With love and blessing to you, and faith in the future,

Rue