>ali called istanbul this morning, barely coherent. “bees,” he managed to say, “bees!” the bees were swarming and he needed to find the beekeeping suits.
i fell into a deep funk after he hung up. why wasn’t i there too? to hell with weddings, family reunions, shopping and eating meat all the time — i should be back home cooking beans and getting my hands dirty.
about half an hour later, ali called again and gave me the lowdown. he had been topping up the lotus pond in front of our house and he heard this sound, a sort of roar-level humming. when he went behind the house, there was a cloud of bees just filling the air. they gathered on a grape vine not far from the hive, and kept on pouring out of the hive. there was, he said, a pillow of bees covering the hive. he got an empty hive and put it under the swarm and shook the bees into it. there seemed to be two bee balls, so he put them into two separate boxes. there were still bees coming out of the hive, so he was going to go back and check again when we got off the phone.
after talking to ali, i felt a lot better. and i realized that, had i been there, we probably would have argued about how to proceed. we are both novices, and although ali has read more about bees than me and been privy to more bee keepign talk, i tend to be pretty opinionated when i think i am right (leo rising). i can just imagine us, standing around in our bee suits yelling at each other, surrounded by a swirling cloud of bees. i could be rationalizing, but in some way it may have been better that i wasn’t there.
and then later today i went to my dear friend rana’s wedding and wept with joy to see her and her husband grinning from ear to ear as they tied the knot. so in the end it all worked out okay, i guess. but i think i will stay close to home in the early summer months. scratch that, the whole growing season! there really is just too much to miss.