Our workers, those hardy souls, have found new logs, new tin drums. We and the queen shall stir here to the end. Our purpose is her purpose. Our duty is her. It is she we serve. And despite our stockpiles, we just don't feel like eating. The taste of the wind has changed. More than the shift of seasons; that one's in our DNA, September swarm around any sweet dying thing. This smells apocalyptic.
Our wings shimmer, devouring the air. The worker bees have flown, never to return. We have a mass of stored food and we offer it to her, but our queen declines. She royally declines. And because she refuses, we refuse. Unseemly, should drones slurp what she will not touch. We inch toward starvation. With bees, an inch might as well be a mile. Our fellows suffer ailments of mystery. No matter what we bring back from the garden, it does not appease, it does not stem the ills.
Pollinating is hardly our first concern. Our monarch, our queen, she lies febrile and morose. Who could have thought her emotionless majesty might collapse into angst? She wants for a king, she says. How odd. A king. No hive has ever had.
Our workers, those hardy souls, have found new logs, new tin drums. We and the queen shall stir here to the end. Our purpose is her purpose. Our duty is her. It is she we serve. And despite our stockpiles, we just don't feel like eating. The taste of the wind has changed. More than the shift of seasons; that one's in our DNA, September swarm around any sweet dying thing. This smells apocalyptic.
Invaders? Usurpers? No marauder bees are interested in crossing our portals. No one for the royal announcer to announce. Our honey and nectar are safe. No one cares to steal it. We overflow with honey and nectar. Pests, too, have fled, to invade healthier hives.
Our culture is not so complex. Researchers, in your nets and bonnets, behind your smoke, we will tell if you only ask. Tired, we are, of gathering life, sick of nurture and feed. We are no longer one colony, but a pulsing barometer of thought. She no longer occupies our lobe. Instead of the queen we consider ourselves, our small, pitiable selves. Independent thought. Our hive is a mind turned against itself. A bee can't survive. Only bees, in the plural, survive.
Our queen wants for a king. And we want, for what we do not know, but the ache spills pure, sweet, honey-streaked, the one thriving thing here.
Donna D. Vitucci raises funds for nonprofits in Cincinnati. Her fiction has appeared in dozens of print and online journals, including Hawaii Review, Meridian, Front Porch Journal, Beloit Fiction Journal, Storyglossia, Juked, Night Train, Freight Stories and Another Chicago Magazine. Her stories have been selected for Best of the Web 2009 and is a notable by storySouth Million Writers 2008. She has been stung less than five times.
