they're gone

Have you ever seen that scene toward the end of Fried Green Tomatoes in which Kathy Bates's character discovers Jessica Tandy's character sitting on her suitcase in front of a vacant lot where her home used to be?

If you have, then you can picture what I must have looked like when, walking home from work this afternoon, I saw a bare spot where "my" bee colony had been only a few days ago. The only evidence of its existence were some twigs lying on the ground with the torn remnants of honeycombs clinging to their surfaces.

At first, I thought the high winds we had last night and this morning might have blown the hive down. I searched frantically in the grass and bushes for its crushed remains, but there were none to be found.

Then my eyes lit on the smooth stub of the tree branch where the limb containing the cluster had been cut away. The clean whiteness at the site of amputation seemed so casual... so matter-of-fact.

When I reported the presence of the colony back in the fall, I expected this to happen. I thought the campus community would rush to remove this threat to the safety of students, faculty, and staff. But when my report was greeted with disinterest and nonchalance, I assumed the bees were safe in their new home, at least from the campus authorities. And as the fall gave way to winter and then spring, you know how much I came to regard the bees, stubbornly clinging to survival under the harshest conditions and despite all odds. I should have known that it was merely bureaucratic slowness and academic insouciance that preserved their meager lives for a few paltry months of struggle instead of any strength of will or determination on the part of the bees, their famed busyness availing nothing in the face of the constant, inevitability of red-tape bound progress that would eventually catch them up.

I would like to think that some eager bee-keeper scooped up the little colony and gave it a nice warm home in a box in his back yard, but I know too much of the ways of the world to trust to that shallow hope.

Is it silly to feel so strongly over a bunch of bugs? Especially when I violently destroyed several members of the same species when they invaded my home via the chimney on Monday of this very week? Is it hypocritical and ridiculous? I think maybe it is. But as I stood, staring at the emptiness where for so many weeks there was buzzing life, I cannot help but feel a profound sense of loss.