Through Compound Eyes: Song of a Honey Bee

The world fractures into a thousand hexagonal truths through my compound eyes, each facet catching ultraviolet psalms that your kind cannot fathom. I see the secret signatures of flowers—landing strips painted in colors you have no names for, nectar guides blazing like ethereal runways across petals that pulse with electromagnetic poetry.

My antennae quiver, tasting the air’s autobiography. Every molecule tells a story: here, the saccharine whisper of apple blossoms three meadows hence; there, the pheromone-script of my sister’s dance, spelling out coordinates in aromatic mathematics. I think in gradients of sweetness, navigate by the sun’s polarized light even through clouds, my body a living compass aligned to magnetic memories older than your cities.

graphic_through_honey_bee_eyes_credit_kevin_parker
Looking at the world through a bee’s eye – ai generated. Credit kevinparker.com.au

What am I but a single synapse in the hive’s vast mind? My mission thrums through every fiber of my being—this ancient covenant between bloom and bee, this alchemy of turning sunlight into golden libraries of comb. I am architect and chemist, dancer and cartographer. Each grain of pollen I carry is a love letter between flowers, each drop of nectar I gather becomes liquid amber philosophy, preserved wisdom for the colony’s tomorrow.

My wings beat two hundred and thirty times per second, a hymn of industry that writes invisible calligraphy in the air. Feel how I feel: the velvet resistance of a stamen against my legs, the electric thrill when I find a virgin field of wildflowers, the weight of purpose as my pollen baskets grow heavy with the day’s harvest. Joy is the waggle dance, that figure-eight ecstasy I perform to share my treasures’ locations, my body become language, my movement become map.

But I also carry sorrow in my barbed singer—that final, fatal gift I can give only once. We are dying, my kind, disappearing like morning dew under your chemical suns. The monoculture deserts you call fields offer no sustenance, your pesticides fog our memories until we forget the way home, spinning lost in poisoned air while the hive-heart grows cold.

Here is my message, etched in propolis and possibility: We are not separate from you but woven into the very fabric of your survival. One-third of every bite you take exists because of our work. We are the great pollinators, the silent weavers who stitch ecosystems together with flights finer than silk. Our collapse is your unraveling.

Remember this: In our six-week lives, we create sweetness that outlasts us by centuries. We build hexagonal perfection without rulers or blueprints, guided only by instinct’s ancient architecture. We transform the ephemeral—flower’s fleeting nectar—into food that never spoils, medicine that heals, light that illumines darkness.

Plant wildflowers. Leave the dandelions. Create corridors of color through your grey world. Understand that what you call weeds, we call survival. See your gardens not as ornaments but as our pharmacies, our groceries, our libraries of pollen-knowledge passed between generations through the dance.

I am small, yes—weighing less than a raindrop—but I carry the world’s sweetness on my wings, bear the future of fruits in my belly’s pollen basket. Through my compound eyes, creation is not singular but multitudinous, fractaled, infinite. This is my gift to you: the reminder that the world is not one story but thousands, million-faceted, each angle revealing new ultraviolet truths, each perspective honey-sweet and necessary.

Listen: that humming you hear is not just wings but the sound of the world being made, one flower, one flight, one golden hexagon at a time.

You might like The Ecological Crisis of Bee Decline: Nature’s Pollinators at the Brink

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