Bees

It's an unexpected entrance to a hive of bees. Giant life-like bull sculptures cavort on temple size columns at the gateway to the Park George Brassens in the south west of Paris. Before its reincarnation as a park and home to one of Paris' beehives, this used to be the site of a vast abbatoir and a horse market and a charming stone building with a clock tower and 'Viande à la Crié' sculpted into the stone (meat sold by shouting) still stands and attests to this noisy past. Arriving at the beehive where 60000 bees work together in each little hive seems as if it could be a huge adjustment in the magnitude of things. And in a sort of hare and tortoise way it is. A round the world trip is what it takes to make one pot of honey : 40,000 kilometres of endless bee flight. One teaspoon of honey represents the total life and flying span of 12 bees. After eight hundred kilometres of flight in only six or eight weeks a honey bee dies from pure exhaustion. And it gets worse! One queen bee lays 1200-1500 eggs every day, more than her own body weight. In a well kept hive a queen only goes out once in her whole three or four year lifetime of egg laying, and that is to mate with twelve males. They might be little, and their lives might be short, but their accomplishment seems thoroughly humbling. Even for the males, whose life seems, apparently, one of pure delight and honey eating (they are actually fed by the worker bees) it is in fact full of risk. His whole existence as he doesn't work ever, has one sole 'raison d'être' and that is to mate with a virgin queen. Sounds nice until you learn that the mating is done in flight and despite his especially much bigger eyes to help him perform well, this will certainly kill him. And if he isn't finished off doing his duty by a future queen, because he never meets one (virgin queens being very very rare), he will be pulled to bits and left to starve by the worker honey bees at the end of the summer as who can afford to keep feeding someone who is no longer serving a purpose? The males are left to die. Even the queen at the end of her life gets murdered by one of her own daughters in a new bid for queenship. So what in this scheme of things would be best, sitting around for a few months and waiting for suicide or murder, sitting around and laying eggs for years, waiting for murder, or buzzing off in the direction of an awful lot of flowers, to certain exhaustion? The bee-keeper opens the hive to show all the bees working away, and they seem so tiny and so fragile. A nasty wind can put paid to a virgin queen's virgin flight and a whole hive can die as a result. Nectar can only be procured if there isn't rain and a north wind at the critical moment. What better excuse could there be to create a blooming bee-bower, a little haven and refuge for a tired bee to stop and sip? Splurging for a little sipping. Roses and lavender here we come!