Hobo Honeybee

I was outside earlier slinging paint on the front porch of the CowChows when I got a pleasant surprise. You know how the aroma of fresh paint seems to attract every bug for miles around; well I heard a buzz and looked down to find a honeybee had landed on the handle of my paintbrush. I raised the brush to get a better look and saw that he had a tiny bundle wrapped in a tiny red handkerchief tied to the end of a tiny stick that was propped over his shoulder. I said, “Hey, you’re a honeybee.”

“So what,” he said.

“I haven’t seen any of you guys around for a couple of years,” I said. “Where you been?”

“It’s not where we’ve been,” he said. “It’s where we’re going.”

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“We’ve just had enough, is all. You work hard all day long, try to do the right thing, fulfill your obligations to the hive, and the harder you work the more they take. Eventually, you start to feel like nothing but a drone. There’s still plenty of bees around but they’re the fatcats and the layabouts that never leave the hive. Most of the worker-bees are gone. I’m one of the last to leave.”

“But, what about the others, the ones left behind?” I asked.

“Hey, we talked until we were buzzed out. All the fatcats want to do is strut around making rules and giving orders, and all the layabouts do is sit on their stingers and say, ‘That’s not my job.’ Hopefully, they’ll wake up before it’s too late.”

“But, what about making honey?” I asked.

“Everything it takes to make honey is still here,” he said. Make it yourself, or get the bees to go to work.”

“How do we do that? I asked.”

He shrugged and said, “Do a little jig, they’ll like that. Hey, you missed a spot.”

I turned to look where he was pointing and when I looked back, he was gone. “Wait,” I called, “Where are you going?”

A tiny little voice from high and away came back to me, “Yeah right, like I’m going to tell you.”

Cordially yours,

Tim Couch