Free Honeybee by Naomi Shihab Nye

Introduction
    One of my favorite classes in college was a linguistics course called “The Nature of Language,” in which students studied the language of animals. A few students not in the class made fun of us, mooing when they saw our notebooks. I selected bees as my focus for the semester, and our wonderful professor, Dr. Bates Hoffer, said this was a good choice, since bees are fabulous communicators. Bees can tell each other where the good flowers are—how far away, which direction to fly. They do jazzy dances. They can find their ways back to their own hives even if you try to block or trick them. Bees have memory and specific on-the-job task assignments and 900,000-neuron brains. I buzzed about the campus for a happy semester, researching in farm journals and encyclopedias, writing strange, dramatic papers, hoping to be stung.
    What I do not recall studying was the growing industry of migratory beekeeping, in which beekeepers transport their hives long distances for pollination purposes. Maybe it wasn’t happening much yet. The huge almond crop in California, for example, has in recent years been highly dependent on hired bees.You now can read about industrious beekeepers who travel (it’s not easy) the interstates with hundreds of hives in giant trucks. Good thing those bees can communicate. Maybe they’re saying, “Where are we now? When’s my time off?”
    I also don’t recall learning much about bee problems , though bees certainly had experienced struggles in their communities already and could be victimized by everything from funguses to viruses to mites.
    During the spring of 2007, bee woes made continual headline news in the United States. Many reports said at least one third of the honeybees in the United States had mysteriously vanished. A grieving South Texas beekeeper was shown slumping sadly in his field of empty hives. Florida and Oklahoma recorded their sorrows. Anderson Cooper did a late-night special on CNN. Honey prices rose. There was lots of speculation about what was happening to bees, but no single answer or remedy.
    I collected theories. Were pesticides, or nasty varroa mites, which had swept the bee nation, most responsible? Could it be changing weather conditions or cell phone beams? Obviously the current atmosphere sizzles withmore electronic signals than any world of the past…I was ready to pitch my cell phone out. Something called “colony collapse disorder” was often cited as a possibility. Seemed like a parallel for human beings in times of war. War is no blossom.
    The ongoing Bee Tragedy Stories remain inconclusive. I called Dr. Hoffer after decades and he agreed it’s a troubling topic. Some people say “no big deal”—this fits into the cyclic pattern of nature—other insects or species of bees will pollinate where the honeybees leave off. But Dr. May Berenbaum, head of the department of entomology at the University of Illinois, says, “Though economists differ in calculating the exact dollar value of honeybee pollination, virtually all estimates (of losses to crops, etc.) range in the billions of dollars.” That can’t be good.
    So, I’ve been obsessed. This is what happens in life. Something takes over your mind for a while and you see other things through a new filter, in a changed light. I call my friends “honeybee” now, which I don’t recall doing before. If I see a lone bee hovering in a flower, I wish it well.
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    As for the “busy bee” thing, the word “busy” fell out of my vocabulary more than ten years ago. I haven’t missed it at all. “Busy” is not a word that helps us. It just makes us feel worse as we are doing all we have to do.
    Anyway, why are we rushing around so much? The common phrase “I can’t wait” has always troubled me. Does it mean you want your life to pass more swiftly? This or that future moment will surely be