May 21, 2023

I texted Chelsea earlier today to tell her about the tradition of beekepers, mostly in the U.K., of telling their bees about a family death. The tradition says that, if the beekeepers don't let the bees know someone close passed away, they will eventually sense the loss, get offended at not having been told, and stop producing honey.

Surprisingly, Chelsea took the whole thing quite literally, saying she was quite confused and asking how on earth would the bees understand English and asking if it was actually true that they would stop producing honey. She was dead-serious asking if I was screwing with her or not.

I told her I wasn't, and I told her that bees may or may not know English, but they understand what the beekeeper is saying when the beekeeper is talking to them, the same way a child understands what you are telling them when you tell them someone has died, although they know not of death (Borges used to say all animals are immortal, because they don't know what death is). Or, also, the same way we understand when someone talks to us about death, although we know not of death, either. What the heck is death? Well, it's a label (what is a label?) to indicate those similar events that have happened in the past and that we are now relating to the one trying to describe now. That is, we are just grouping similar events and calling each of them “death”, not having any idea what that means.

I also remembered when I was a child and my mom used to go sunbathing at the stream, in the farm, and I would go with her to play. She would tell me that the butterflies that were chilling around the trees nearby were actually goblins, but they didn't like to be seen, so they would only actually look like proper goblins when I wasn't looking, for example behind the trees. I spent countless hours running around trying to catch a goblin behind a tree before he turned back into a butterfly, but, whenever I looked, there was only a butterfly roaming around. My mom would tell me she had just seen them, but they had just turned back into butterfly. Was my mom telling me the truth? Well, if you don't believe, then no. If you do believe, however, there might be a goblin just behind you, short and green, with a funny hat and his hand covering his mouth, trying not to laugh too hard at you, who are naively reading this instead of looking at him. You will never catch him, though; they are super fast.

Do the bees actually stop producing honey? Yeah, I love to believe they do.