Bees

I don't know if you can see this image very well, but what you are looking at is a framed bee hive in the middle of a field of blueberry plants. I found it during the summer while I was hiking to Foss Mountain and I returned there over fall break to see some foliage and shoot this photograph. When I initially found it I didn't know that it was a bee hive, and it's this really colorful stack of plastic bins so I went up to inspect it more closely. Needless to say, it became obvious what it was when about a billion bees started flying around me, so I ran away. Miraculously I got away without being stung.
The experience made me intrigued by bees, especially since they decided to let me live another day. Through coincidences the topic has been brought up to me in our class. First by Eve when she gave me a book of Nick Flynn Poems called Blind Huber. The poems are phenomenal as a group and very precisely written with a fantastic kind of deliberation which makes me feel like I am seeing through the scope of a bee or bee keeper (one of the poems "Swarm" is already up on the blog). After reading these poems I had a conversation with Lee and Olive about Bees. Lee and Olive were telling me how apparently Einstein said "if the bee disappears from the surface of the earth, man would have no more than four years to live." I did some research on this and supposedly Einstein didn't really say it, because the quote was written and documented 40 years after his death in 1935. It was most likely accredited to him in order to give the notion some authority of truth. However, that was unnecessary because there has been a noticeable decline in North American honeybees and bumblebees and the problem is a very big one, I don't know if anyone can prove that we would perish 4 years after their extinction, but it would lead to some humongous problems for ecosystems worldwide. According to www.thedailygreen.com:
If all honey bees disappeared worldwide, food would be scarce, as colonies of bees stopped pollinating fruit, nut and vegetable crops. (“Except for grains,” Berenbaum said. “There would be plenty of bread.”) Honey would disappear from the market, and the surprisingly varied users of wax would be forced to turn to more expensive alternatives. The ripples through the world economy would be profound and prolonged.
Anyhow, if you see a bee in your apartment please don't kill it. Just open the window or catch it in a cup and release it because in a way these bees are sparing all of our lives by merely existing.