|
The Flowering Plum Tree: Bees, Science, and Sadness
by Nancy Holmes
The massive pink ball was vibrating with bee wings, sunlight, and buzzing. For a moment I felt I was inside a glass skull and that living, hundred-thousand-faceted thing was a brain. A brain so close I could touch it.
What a brilliant, thinking brain it was, too. The tree itself was fully concentrating on its multitudinous sexual longings and creating its glorious scent speeches; the petals were generating their pinkest dyes and arranging their wares; the pollen’s microscopic hooks were polished and primed to latch onto passing bee hairs and maybe an occasional desperate hitch on a breeze. The bees, too, were rich in their own special knowledge. If they were honey bees — and there were many honey bees in the tree — likely a few scouts had carried the discovery of this super excellent nectar and pollen source back to the hive and had done a knowledge transfer with smells and dances. The mason bees and mining bees and queen bumble bees who live more solitary springtime lives had found clues in the air and had also come to that epic seduction of bloom. All of them together were preening, feasting, collecting, bagging and packing, figuring out their load capacities and their best way back home, gauging the promise of temperature and the threat of sundown.
“Ways of knowing” is a catch-phrase in the academy these days, though our education system generally favours a very narrow intellectual band of possible ways, and it certainly doesn’t consider the perceptual world of other species. The way of knowing that dominates our culture these days is the scientific. The methods and stances of science that drive policy, the verging-on-miraculous applications of science through technology, and the spike in funding and support of what the educational system calls the “STEM” disciplines (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) reveal how our contemporary culture is driven by scientific ways of knowing and the subsequent mighty manipulation of the world. Whether or not we understand how a cell phone or an internal combustion engine works, we are inhabitants of a science-generated, though capitalist-funded, material culture.
[Distillate © HA&L + Nancy Holmes {from the Greek bios} -- the course of a life.]
|