Imagine a honeycomb. The perfect, six-sided cavern. Its structure: solid. Craft: cultivated. Design: untouched. For thousands of years, it has been untouched . . . and will remain that way. Home and hive. Hive and home. 

          So you crawl into one. Make your burrow. 

          It drips with honey. Lush and thick and sweet, you could get attached, sucking on it. It fills your stomach until it swells and slips into your young lungs. 

          Now you are attached. Addicted even. So you don’t mind as the glucose-cage comes down, locking you in, distorting what’s in front of you as you lick and lick the honey-coated pane and keeping you from realizing what is going on. 

          You are becoming the worker bee. Destined to break the pane and immediately start about the hive, building for others what you wanted for yourself. Others fly in and out, scouting for new homes and food, but you stay, as you are told to do. Work, work, work. 

Eventually, you grow tired; yet the other bees have all their energy. Everyone buzzes around you in circles while you try your best, but your best isn’t good enough, so they do their little waggle dances around you to tell you what you already know, that you cannot keep up and by the time you notice and try to stop try to change what you are try to put more effort back into it with their buzz buzz buzzing around you drowning out any sound of your own thoughts you realize there’s a new queen bee you’re serving and your waggle dance isn’t good enough for her so she kicks you out of the colony to make things more productive to her standards and then you see, finally see, what the hive really was: high school. 

           And those honeycombs dripping with yellow glucose that you climbed out of to have them: your eyes, and heart, and mind.  

           The honey you build to protect is secrets. It is drama, and empty promises and love and friendships and things you didn’t realized you halfway had until the day you didn’t have them at all. 

          Nectar now gone. 

#

          I know I will not attend my own high school reunion because my high school was filled with bees. They’re dispersed now, but they’ll return—at least, the certain type of them that cares to go back and relive their “blue in the face” years. I won’t go, for fear of seeing one bee in particular, who showed her stinger in the spring of our junior year. It was long, and sharp, and with cartoon-bee-like accuracy, stung me in my back. It felt like a knife. 

Long, raking against my spine. 

          Obscuring my vision, until I see through broken honey crystals. 

           And with a simple in-up motion, the stinger cuts my spine free from me. The stinger stays inside me. I’m a puppet on a stick. 

#

          Years after my fear of bees was formed, I went camping the weekend my two-year-old sister started to potty train. I was six. Or maybe she was three and I was seven. Does it matter? No. Because I stepped on a bee. 

          I stepped on the bee with my bare foot and flung myself into my mother’s arms.  I propelled my head into her stomach with such force, both her and the old collapsing camping chair she sat in groaned. My exposed, stung foot kicked in the air as I screamed. And as I screamed, I saw the bee fly away, rather drunkenly, rather clumsily, while I still screamed until my face turned red like my stung foot. 

          My mother brushed my hair with her gentle fingers, trying to soothe me. “It’s on its way to die,” she said. 

          An eye for an I, I think, looking at my foot almost a decade later. Hammurabi’s code. 

#

          I like short things: Short films. Short stacks. Short drives around town. Short poems and stories. 

          Bees are short. 

          Hornets? Definitely not. 

#

          I read an article on the different types of bees in the world. There’s around twenty thousand types, and most are classified into two groups: social and solitary. 

Then it branches into the differences between bumble bees and honey bees. Both fall into the social category, but as the article makes abundantly clear, they are two different species.            Then it identifies the three types of bees in a colony—queen, worker, drone—and the differences between bees and wasps, but never addresses solitary bees. Their habits. What in nature made them like that. What kind of lives they live, alone without a hive. These are the questions I have, the questions the article does not answer. I suppose they’re not what people want to read about, or gain a greater understanding of. 

          The last year of high school, I went from social to solitary. 

          Ergo, I am not worth greater understanding.  

#

          My mother does not let go of a betrayal for years on end. Some say this isn’t healthy, but she has so many emotions that I feel it is better than the opposite, than what I fear I have: none. I do not care enough about things that should bother me. I act like I do, but this is only temporary. Everything is dissociated in my mind, and I’m already looking for the next thing to focus on through my honeycomb-paneled eyes. It’s how I make it through each day alive.

          Mom and I, our pain is different. Our build, our species, is different. And right now, I am a bee: small, zipping around, and when I try to get close, makes people like me scream. My mother is an elephant: remembering, trampling, flinging her limbs through the house with a resounding call our family knows well. 

#

         Apis Mellinera. Bees. Little pains.

         Hymenoptera. Hornets. Big pains.

         Homo Sapiens. Humans. Pain I can’t unfeel. 

#

          I have a hard time touching this piece because I don’t want to give the queen any decree in my portfolio. But she and her deeds are fossilized in sap, thick and sticky, forever in my thorax. 

         Please, rip it out with incisors, tweezers, knives if you have to. Just not stingers. I’ve had enough of those.  

#

          Imagine yourself. One worker bee, sitting in a honeycomb. You hear the thump of the outside world. The thump. The thump. 

          Crash goes the hive and workers and drones and queen alike scatter but you are stuck in the six-sided walls that were smashed on impact and your safe space is broken. Structurally sound pieces fit to be a house for the next generation crumble. Your wings break. You’re stuck in the honey. But the colony . . . the colony has survived, and they’re off to cultivate a new one with new worker bees that will develop quickly and take your place.            You are forgotten because you are One. Of. Many.  

#

          I climb down from the little play slide we have near the pool, the one that’s positioned at the deep end, away from the house, so my siblings and I can scream and sing as we slide down into the cool, cool water. Back on the deck, I tell my mom, “There’s a hornet’s nest inside.”  

          She looks at four-year-old me, then picks up a pool noodle. She walks over to the Climb-and-Slide and pokes her head in. Then the blue pool noodle comes slamming down on the corners I saw the nest in. Whack. Whack. Whack. Whack. Mom stops and breathes, then goes again for good measure. Whack. Whack. Whack. 

          Across the warm pebbles, she comes over to me. “They flew away,” she says, beaming. Not a dent in the pool noodle. 

          I scream with delight and charge over to the other side of the pool, scrambling onto the structure’s first level before ascending to the second. 

          Then loud humming swarms me. Coming in all different directions. By my ears and hair and hips and legs. Needles dig into my calves. Again and again, left to right in rapid succession. And then I scream for a whole different reason. I can’t see them around me, my fine brown hair draped in front of my face. Backpedaling on my knees, I throw myself out of the Climb-and-Slide and run far and fast away. Tears stream down my face. 

          “They came back! They came back!”
          Mom makes me sit on the step with my calves dunked into the pool. She holds me close, tells me she’s sorry, smooths my hair back. Tells me they shouldn’t have come back, that their nest was knocked down so they had no reason to return. 

But they did anyway.  

           I sit there for minutes, not speaking, letting my tears change the chemistry of our pool. 

#

          A queen bee lives up to five years. A worker bee, mere weeks or months. No wonder my best weeks in high school were short lived. The rest? They were a glucose cage, holding me captive. 

           For all those weeks, the queen is on top in each one, in each year, one after the other.  

#

          Months after my in-hive betrayal, I am in the sky-blue bathroom with my sister, complaining that Mom should be over her four-year-old pain that was caused by a trust-fund mom, when the door is ripped open. Mom’s light blue eyes pierce my hazel-green ones. She points a finger at me. “[Trust-fund mom] did the same thing to me that [the queen] did to you, and they’re only the beginning. There’s a lot more of them out there, selfish people, jealous people, and you’ll see that.” 

          She leaves. 

          And I am left stunned. My sister rolls her eyes because my mother is using my personal experience to validate hers. 

But she can, because she is right. 

          In the sky-blue bathroom, I realize that I am wrong, that our pain is like pollen and honey: one new, the other curated after an in-depth process. But both start young. 

          And unlike the queen and the trust-fund mom, my mother’s words, her actions . . . they are right.

#

          Bees are invertebrates; they don’t have a spine. 

          When the queen enacted her in-hive betrayal, I did not have a spine. I had a month to process that, after years of the queen promising she would never touch a student council position I'd dreamed of since the fall of my freshman year, she went and ran for anyway. Her reasoning? I was trampling on “her domain.” I wanted to take the broadcast elective, a class that can have twenty-four students in it at a time (when all this goes down, only twelve were enrolled), to see if I truly wanted to be a film major before jetting off to California. My father told me that if I go, I can just stay there, because I’ll be kicked out and he won’t let me come home. 

          In this self-searching to make sure I can keep my family before potentially losing them, or ensuring cinema is an art worth losing them over, I unknowingly trampled on “her domain." The queen, ever since we became friends freshman year, has wanted to be an architect; her plan for senior year was to take CAD, a computer class, to help her chances at getting into architecture school. But when I told her I was, enthusiastically, thinking of going to film school and would be enrolling in broadcast to better my chances of getting California film schools, like she was doing with CAD, she smiled at me, walked down to the guidance office, gave up the CAD class, and ran against me for the singular student council spot she promised— promised—for years she would never touch. "You'll be social coordinator, and I'll be treasurer. I really want to be treasurer," she always told me. "We'll be great on the student council exec board together." 

          It was in A Hall, in the student council faculty advisor’s classroom, that the previous year’s president asked who was interested in running for what. I heard the queen say, "Social coordinator." She didn’t look at me, didn’t blink, didn’t say “Hi” or “Goodbye” as either of us entered or excited the classroom. Because I'd been talking about this for years, no one asked what position I was running for—they knew. 

          If they had asked, they might have heard my heartbeat that shook my whole body start climbing out of my throat. The sweat under my thighs against the plastic chairs would have run from my eyes. The queen flew in so fast with her stinger to stab me, no one saw her get up from her chair to do it. Her strike numbed my whole back, until a section blazed like a searing, deep scar near my spine. My hands went numb. My lips, they tingled. Blood, moving, but just enough to give my brain the thought: How could she do this? I thought we were friends. 

          I could've broken a corner of the desk off I was clutching it so hard. I tried to force my ears to process the rules for how election and campaigning would go when a bug—six hard legs and slender, fast moving wings—crawled down my ear canal. I tipped my head over, trying to shake it out, but the hornet drove its stinger down into my eardrum, anchoring itself in its new home. My vision came and went. Mini blackouts, interrupted with intoxicating yellow streams of the overhead lights. Fuzzy. My whole body, fuzzy. 

           The queen and I were the only people running for the same position; everyone else is unchallenged. It was her, and me. And because I am me, and I want to be liked, and I don't want to be seen as mean like she was to me, or look like I was turning high school student council into a dirty election, I said nothing. Not to her. Not to anyone. Not even the friend group we shared. 

           Not that it would’ve done much; most of them didn’t see this as a problem. Probably because they didn’t have a three-year promise severed from their spine and had to spend time rewiring their brain just to feel like their smile could ever be genuine again. 

          In history class, the queen would announce at the top of her lungs how excited she was to potentially be social coordinator. I sat in the desk in front of her, sinking lower, hiding my face underneath thin, brown, lifeless hair. It was like this, in the whole hive. Every honeycomb classroom, every nectar-colored wall. Her announcing; me shrinking away. 

          In that month, I lost my loud voice—my happy, loud voice that I loved. I lost my energy, which allowed me to survive the ten different activities I was in. Losing the election was the least of the pain, was the lightest of the honey coatings that last year of highschool covered me in. Senior year, I lost more of myself, because I was too scared to want anything at all and then find out that my friends—who promised they would protect me, never harm me, support me as I went after my dreams—would fly into the Climb-and-Slide and sting me, like the hornets did. 

          Ninety-five percent of animals do not have a spine, and I’ve been in that percentile since 2016. 

#

          I exposed myself; I got stung. I should’ve learned, stored the teaching somewhere in my memory, like how bees remember the electric field around the flower fields they visit. I, however, lack antenna.

          I exposed myself; I got stung. There was no Hammurabi’s code enacting justice in high school. Justice is not natural, and nothing in nature said the queen had to lose what I lost too. The confidence and voice. The spine and will. 

          At least apis mellinera has a sense of dignity. My pain; its life. 

          I exposed myself; I got stung. So when I pulled the stinger out of my back, I didn’t see her and the swarm flying wayward down the halls to die. Not their spirit or self-esteem or dreams. Not their friend group or social life or trust in friendships built up over years. That was me, sitting there.  

          Stinger in hand. 

#

          Imagine the hive. Ablaze with color. With transformation and unity all at once. Orderly, perfect from the bottom to the top. 

           The bees scurry, going along, checking on what needs to be done and what has not been done, what will make the hive thrive versus merely survive. They need to split it, after all, to increase the population. The queens do their part. The drones theirs. The worker bees . . . they work. Work. Work.   

#

          I fear bees. Anything that stings really. It stings. I run.

#

          Ecology is the study of plants and animals. It is the only honors science that is offered at my high school that is not aligned with an AP test, or geared to pursuing engineering or medicine in college. The class, however, has built-in trips—excuse me, “field research”—involved. And on the week-long camping trip in Big Bend, the queen and I sleep in the same tent packed with six other girls. 

          My father and mother come as chaperones. They are the ones I talk to the most on this trip, because I don’t know who I would talk to that I think would actually want to talk to me. 

          My mother preps dinner with the queen in the campsite kitchen that night. She comes over to me after spending a few hours with the queen, telling me, “She’s jealous of you, and I think it’s because she knows she doesn’t have a lot going for her.” 

          Mom’s words take me aback. So aback, I forget I am in the desert and feel my heart rushing with . . . Pleasure? Pain? Perspective?

          Sometimes, Mom has a sixth sense about people. But only sometimes. 

          I haven’t seen or talked to the queen in years to know what is “going for her.” I don’t plan to; so I won’t know if Mom’s sixth sense was right. Honestly, I hope it’s wrong. I hope we have things going for us in very different directions so she is far, far away from me.  

#

          When I view this writing, I think of aged, yellow paper.  Curling corners. Waxy ink. Flaky edges that need a curator to keep clean. 

          I think of fire, and how my older sister used to burn paper for school projects to give it an authentic look. I wish I could make my feelings authentic to me. Like a bee, they should be as big as their impact on the environment. They should be smelled, collected, carried, harnessed, and manufactured into something desirable. Something we put on yogurt, so it goes down easy and sweet, and everyone thinks of me. My contribution. My pain. 

          But the label on my pain bottle says Made in High School, not Organic or Made in Nature. I’ve held these feelings in me—not draining them through my eyes or pressing them out through rage—for so long that when they resurface, I am reminded how little they should matter. 

          Much like a bee’s waggle dance, I can’t forget it. It’s part of me now. 

          So when I pass by my old hive school, I feel the familiar hum in my bones. I shake, tap my finger against the steering wheel, bite my tongue, feel the shiver down my body like a shock where the stinger in my spine remains, and tell myself to push it all down. Make it all stop. She doesn’t care about me anymore, so I shouldn’t either. 

          But the pain’s still there, so I still care. 

#

          A bee’s life, their little bodies with fuzz and stripes, is delicate. As am I. The minute I try to hurt someone back for what they did to me, I will remember I am a bee, not a wasp, and I will die for the attempt. 

          I will bumble, mumble away, and die because I’ll hate myself for stooping so low. It’s not in my nature. And we can’t live outside our nature. 

#

          My mother is the one to tell me, for many, many years, that people are jealous of me. I don’t know why, but while I’m writing this essay, I think I’m understanding any jealousy of past me, old me. Now me, however, has lost some of the spunk and optimism, the adventurous, loud outlook of youthful me. Or maybe I’ve just lost the hormones? It’s hard to tell. Environment, body, social interactions—these change people. 

          I wish I could perform an independent study on me, have two of me—one with my spiraling pain, one without—so I could know if people are really jealous of me now as I am or back-then me. For now, I’ll go off what my mother says and use it when I need a confidence boost. After a lifetime of not having a consistent, nonfamily-member best friend, my mother (alongside my sister and husband) is the closest thing I have, and she will always tell me her truth. 

          Which is more than the queen ever did.  

#

          When my brother has his freshman homecoming game and is on the male cheerleader team, I go to support him. But while there, I casually bump into a fellow worker bee who was a part of the queen’s colony our senior year. From time to time, she would come visit me after my excommunication. She tells me she still talks to the queen, which I find odd, because the year before I was stung—wings broken and drowned in honey—the queen stung her too. She replaced us for one another a couple months later. 

          “I still don’t like [the queen].” I say this out loud, before I can stop myself.  

          We look at each other. 

          It’s been three years. 

         We change the subject. 

#

          I plan to write a novel about taking Hammurabi’s code seriously. Though I know little of it, I know I would love to live in that society, if only for a day. 

          Though I know little of it, its conception still only a note in my idea journal, I believe I will dedicate that book to my mother. 

          Though I know little of it, I will ask her, for the first time and above all my other books I plan to write, to read it pre-submission. 

          Hopefully, she will like it. Hopefully, she will get closure. 

#

          Like pollen on twitchy, grippy little legs, my pain stays with me for a long time. 

#

          My mother can easily tell the two times I have spiraled: once in the hive betrayal, and once in college. 

          I think my first spiral looked like this: 

 

​

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          But I can’t honestly tell you how it looked. Just that I flew it. 

#

          Learning to love apis mellinera while having a welt in my spine is a hard task, but I must remember that pain is a part of life. An apis mellinera will die knowing that it hurt someone. It will die with that thought, and depending on how that makes you feel (and if you have a bee allergy) it may bring you comfort. Or, it may not. 

          I find it nice. A friend should feel like dying knowing they hurt you. Especially if it was something they did on purpose. 

          If a friend hurt me and came back, professed on their deathflower their sorrow, I would take the stinger out of my heart and give it back to them so they could live. I would want them to live, both of us a little wounded, a little hurt, with a chance to get hurt again, but together. 

          But wasps don’t die. So the queen was an imposter species, one I call hymenoptera homo sapiens. A foreign species. A species all over my high school, any high school, every high school. You can tell that some hymenoptera homo sapiens will evolve past the high-school stage in their life cycle, but some won’t. It’s their nature. 

#

          Don’t dance for anyone you don’t want to. Not for anyone less than a person who will make a hive for you that is truly, honestly, and organically certified home. 

#

          When I receive an invitation for my class reunion, I’ll block out that weekend. I’ll call my mother, wherever I am in the world, and see if she and I can spend it together. No husbands. No children. Just her and I. As it’s been in this pain we’ve experienced from our own very different hymenoptera homo sapiens who have stung our different hearts. Just her, and I. 

          Maybe we will go camping. Maybe she’ll comfort me in a newer collapsing camping chair. We’ll watch smoke from our fire rise in tendrils into the air. Our feet will be exposed, warming beside the flames.  

          And maybe with her, I’ll learn how to love the bees.