Bee at Peace, Be at Rest

The solstice occurred a few days ago. Images of Yaldā celebrations uplifted the world. As I complete this post, the temperature outside is well below freezing and is predicted to remain so through the day. In many part of the planet, life is embracing rest.

For the last three years I’ve noticed how the older bees outside take rest in marigolds as temperatures drop. They have silenced their activity now. In late November, I watched their slumber among the still-soft marigold petals. I’ve mused that maybe the bees are taking their last, peaceful rest in the enchanting and calming marigolds.

I meditate on Tricia Hersey’s Rest Is Resistance. Dr. Hersey teaches us that to live through and past extractive systems that are built on working us to death, we must cultivate and welcome rest into our lives. She encourages Black folk to reach into ancestral practices of rest and refusal to sustain our selves and communities.

I ponder the narrative of bees as capitalism’s iconic “selfless” worker. Working to exhaustion and death for the good of the “queen”. The bees in the backyard, dance, play, rest, pass on word of new plants placed in the back, take time to see if the new basil is worth a second look. The bees reaffirm Hersey’s words in their joyful destruction of the narrative.

In Radicalize the Hive, Angela Roell details the cooperative nature of hives, and explores cooperative and approaches to “beekeeping” that center intra-species mutuality. We inhabit this earth together. Roell delves into indigenous practices as well.

What do the bees tell us about how to live and how to transition to other realms of being?

A bee resting
To be resting
we be resting
We bee resting
We be(ing) resting
We be(ings) resting
To bee, resting
To be resting
To beings resting
be resting