Over nineteen months, all the swarms disbanded. Not just the wild bees, apiaries too. No more honey, true. More importantly, flowers went unfertilized. Bluebells with blueballs died chaste and childless. Honeysuckles pined for the pollen-dusted thighs of their once-mistresses. O! for one last tryst, the chrysanthemums lamented, with those three-bulged hourglasses looped in bangles of gold and black. But the obtuse love rhombus between drone, anther, queen, and pistil had collapsed abruptly and irrecoverably.
The flowers drooped, stems limp, petals flaccid. What once bloomed now withered, aged, and died. The world paled to a monochromatic dystopia. Holiday commerce could not subsist on greeting cards and bonbons alone. Animosity between mothers and sons, fathers and daughters, lovers and others, all these relationships stoked a conflagration. When misfortune knocked on the cardboard door of modern love, the artifical mise en scene was exposed, then the whole illusion our civilization collapsed. Something was clearly absent.
We tried everything to get them back. Developed pesticides to kill the bee mites, waging genocide. We terminated all the cell phone networks, left to antediluvian landlines and emails. We replanted the blossoms we thought they found so irresistable, but nary a buzz was roused.
We take some comfort that they perhaps found an elm branch to hang their hive over a daised hillock off yonder, a place for their stingers and honey both.
No comments:
Post a Comment