In many cultures there are detailed instructions. The messenger must be a child or, failing that, the youngest person in the household. The news must be given in the form of a song. A piece of black cloth must be tied to each hive, or draped over it. Sweets prepared for those who will attend the funeral must be brought to the hives for the bees to feast upon. According on one source I consulted, the bees are then invited to the funeral, "and have on a number of recorded occasions seen fit to attend."
I had never heard of any of this until a writer friend of mine won a major award for an evocative and understated short story called "Telling the Bees," in which the impact of all that a family has lost in the passing of a loved one is finally felt when only when someone goes to tell the bees.
For some reason, the idea of telling the bees has been haunting me this Memorial Day. Could it be because the bees themselves are dying? Associated Press announced two weeks ago that more than one-third of our country's commercially managed hives died during 2007 - most of them from something called Colony Collapse Disorder, "a mysterious condition in which bees abandon their hives" - exactly what they are believed to do if no one tells them of an important loss.
I remember the Memorial Days of my childhood as solemn occasions. As a member of the school band, I had to march through town in a parade each year from the time I was 8. Steeling myself against fainting in the sometimes-formidable heat at noon, when the whole community gathered at the school flagpole to honor its fallen veterans, I also had to make sure not to wince or clap my hands over my ears during the rifle salute at the end of the ceremony. Everything had to be done with a dignity befitting the sacrifices that had been made for us by the members of our armed forces.
The notion that this day of remembrance could ever be turned into an occasion for barbecues, garden parties, major department-store sales, and posters with pictures of fireworks was unimaginable. It seems to me, suddenly, that we've lost a great deal: not only the people who have given their lives for their country, but the will to dedicate a day in which we remember what they did.
Perhaps if we start telling the bees (and ourselves, and each other) about all that we've lost, we'll at least stop losing the bees.
Susan Harper is director of the Commerce Public Library.
