What the bees taught me

When I was 11 years old, we moved to a house on a street in a small town. My room, if that is what you could call it was a curtained off section of the basement. My bed was under a window whose ledge was at ground level. There were flowers there when we arrived. Most of them were not there when we left, grown over with weeds. One morning I woke up and something had stung my calf. A bug of some sort. It was quite a ferocious bite and when I jumped it stung me again. I whipped the sheet off and found a bee. 

I captured it with a glass and a piece of paper and took it upstairs. My brother or my father, I don’t remember which, told me it could not have stung me twice because bees will die if they sting you because they have barbed stingers that end up being left behind in whoever they bite and that kills them. Two days later I got another sting and another bee. So my brother killed it. And this became a regular occurrence for a number of weeks, waking up to a bee. I became quite adroit at whipping the sheets off when I first woke up to avoid being stung. Sometimes they bit me anyway. I would find out later that there are indeed types of bees that can sting twice.

The thing was, I began to feel sorry for the bees. Because if I brought them upstairs they would be killed. So I got a bowl of water and a dinner plate that I smeared with honey and then I began to collect the bees. They lived on the plate of honey in my bedroom. I would collect them and feed them the honey and watch their antennae-like things slipping into the honey. They seemed quite content to stay there. I had quite a few of them over the weeks. So I lived in the bedroom with the bees until one day I took them outside and let them go. That bothered me because I didn’t know who would feed them then but I had thought it the right thing to do.

On the surface of course one could ask why on earth no one cared enough to find the source of these bees that would sting me. No one cared to even notice that I had a plate of bees in the bedroom. But that is, although a factor of my life, not the thing that defined me. What defined me was that even though the bees stung me, I cared for them. It is why I have cared for even the monsters of this life who will sometimes sting you. It is their nature. Just as it is my nature to forgive. But I will not have a plate of bees in my room again. Forgive and set them free. That is what the bees taught me.