Bees of Spring

Bees of Spring 15th October 2008
Today a swarm of bees came like a willy-willy dust devil with a sting in its tail. It swarmed in front of my parent's house funneling in the centre of the roadway T-junction...
It didn't seem to know which way it was going, but that it kept together showed its movement, its flight and the formation of thousands was intentional, they were seeing, seeking, feeling their way.
They moved as if they were a spirit dancing, I could see an outline of their form grouping and regrouping, then dispersing, around and around and around they went till all at once some scouts found their way to a lower branch of a rose bush.
Just as suddenly they attached their bodies beneath the apricot flowers of a Just-Joey, a sweet scented Rose.
Perhaps it was the scent of nectar that lured them there.
Equally surprising was mine and other's reactions.
Me, with my memory of bee stings went primitive, instinct took over...
"There was danger in the neighborhood, my neighborhood."
There in my mother's garden bed was a thousand honey producing stingers, each one of them irrational, poised in their possibility of thrusting their stainless steel elongated tiger-striped abdomen injecting pain pincers into my memory of allergic reactions.
Yep, and so I stood ready... ready to run, or to hide behind fly wire.
"Let sleeping bees lie" said my father.
"Stay away" said my mother.
"Show no fear" said a neighbor.
"Find the queen" said another...
But no, I stood fixed to the veranda and watched with an irrational fear that soon, any moment, they'd hatch a plan to make a bee-line - whatever that is - to where I stood watching.
But as they quietened down, and settled, so did I.
Maybe they could feel it in the watchers around them, maybe they were equally watching us as we were them...maybe...
Just like the menacing zealot magpie's watching from their eucalypt castle towers, watching for anything that moves.
"If only the world would stop moving."
I watched one today attempt to catch and savage a passing Catalina-pelican.
As soon as the pelican saw the black and white mirage fighter closing in, it dipped its wings, lifted and sliced the surrounding thermals and quickly changed course.
The magpie mirage was left in its jet stream, but I think I saw it celebrating, dancing by the way it dived, celebrating that it had seen this flying Catalina on its way.
The sight of it going after that pelican-Catalina made me wonder if it ever considered going after a Boeing A-300.
Maybe that Qantas QF72 that fell from the sky was attacked by a magpie, and not by a computer fault.
That no one mentioned it does not mean it never happened.
It is spring time after all - a time of swarming bees and a testing time it appears, for the swooping black and white menacing mirages - we call magpies.