The bee looked dead. It lay on the sidewalk, unmoving, its wings splayed at its sides. A fellow bee hovered over it, as though it knew its brother, its playmate had fallen and was waiting for him to return to the sky.
It’s a lovely afternoon. I was sitting outside, reading Ring Lardner’s How to Write Short Stories (which is not, in fact, about how to write short stories), and enormous bees danced and jousted in the air around me as I read. There’s a carpenter bee nest in the step overhang, and in the summer months my Adirondack chair becomes covered in sawdust as the bees dig deeper into the wood. The bees are generally harmless–they will zoom up to me, buzz my shirt, hover, then flit away, going back to doing what they do, fighting and playing and jockeying for space in the sky.
Smack!
I looked up, and one of the bees had slammed into the sidewalk in front of my apartment. Its body twitched, the wings fluttered. Another of the bees swooped down and hovered over its mate, almost as though it were saying, “Someone! Anyone! Help!”
I stood and walked over. The hovering bee backed off but didn’t flee, and I leaned in to take a look.
The bee? Was it dead? It was motionless. The wings were extended, but the body no longer twitched. The hovering companion darted away.
Dead.
I went inside, grabbed an index card. I was at least going to poke it and move it off the sidewalk.
I poked it with the edge of the index card. Suddenly, the wings retracted, and the bee took flight so quickly I wondered where he’d gone.
The bee wasn’t dead, merely stunned. Probably stuck on his back, and the index card jostled him enough that he would fly again.
I sat down and took up the Lardner once more. (“Harmony,” an odd tale of a baseball team’s singing quartet.) The bees came, singularly and in groups, to investigate me, hovering in front of my face before darting off.
I felt like I was being thanked.
Even the littlest things, like bees, need a little help every now and then.
