Humming

My Mayday tree is now Mecca for honeybees, wasps, and an odd assortment winged whatnots for which I have no name certain.  Having come to full bloom in the last two days, the Mayday tree now perfumes the daylight hours.

Yesterday, I stood below the tree with only a few medallions of sunlight reaching my shirt through the mad array of blossoms.  The sawing hum of hundreds of winged insects, and the dizzying sight the same insects pirouetting from flower cluster to flower cluster, dizzied me.  For a time I watched a single wasp clumsily bullying through the clusters.  Later, I watched a small bee of some sort swirling from place to place.  Flies and butterflies clung to blossoms like drunks to streetlights.

On the ground, I found a single honeybee.  The bee seemed wounded or weak.  I bent down and cautiously nudged the bee.

The bee fell over and spun circles on its back.

I nudged the bee a second time and it took to a zig-zagging flight toward the Elkhorn Mountains many miles away.

The flight, for reasons I cannot in any manner justify, seemed ill-fated.  But above me, the entire tree hummed on.

Posted is a photograph I captured from underneath my Mayday tree.

--Mitchell Hegman