A Language Older Than Words - Derrick Jensen [133]
The primary link is not causal, in that my hot shower does not lead causally to the showers at Treblinka, but familial, in that my own shower and the other are distant cousins. Both ultimately spring from the same ancestor, which is the need for control, and a willingness to deafen oneself to all other considerations. I'm not talking about the simple act of heating water to pour over oneself: I'm talking about the systematic bending of others—human and nonhuman, animate and "inanimate"—to our will. There is obviously a difference between me taking a shower, and Jews being killed in gas chambers. And there is obviously a difference between hot showers and napalm. I've not said they're identical: they're kissing cousins. One seemingly benign—at least so long as we ignore the death of the salmon from dams, the irradiation of the region from nuclear power plants, the drawdown of the Spokane aquifer from wells, the toxication of the landscape caused by the production of metal and plastic used in plumbing, and so on—and the other obviously malevolent, but not without its uses, as those in power are only too aware.
Each bee is an individual. She has a personality and preferences. Although there is a general progression from job to job as bees get older—younger bees tend to do housework and nurse the babies, older bees fly out to collect nectar and pollen, and the oldest bees of all (bees live perhaps a month in the summer before they wear out their wings) perform the most dangerous task, which is to scout for new sources of nectar and pollen—it is also true that an individual bee may choose to spend her life cleaning the hive, or may skip the nursing phase and go directly to the field. For the most part they do whatever tasks they want, and what they perceive the hive as needing most at that moment. But they also spend a lot of time doing not much of anything (in the lingo of bee research, "loafing").
As observed earlier, hives, too, have personalities—some are gentle, some friendly, some short-tempered, some sickly—and it is not unfair to consider the hive as a whole a creature in its own right. Hives maintain a constant body temperature of about 95 degrees Fahrenheit, lowering it if necessary by bringing in water to evaporate in currents through their home, or raising it by metabolizing honey and clustering. They make community decisions, such as when to make a new queen (queens are made by feeding normal babies a special food: no one knows how they decide to make a new queen, or which grubs to so feed), when to kill an old queen, and so on. And they reproduce, throwing swarms in which some percentage of the bees move out, taking with them a new or old queen, to find a new home. Thus a new hive is born.
When bees swarm they almost never sting. This fact has been used by countless beekeepers to impress upon others their ostensible courage at virtually no risk. When I was staying with Glen and Susan, they received numerous calls from around town requesting they pick up swarms. If my friends were busy, I was always glad to go, in part because it meant a free bee colony, and in part because it meant the opportunity to show off. I went once on a call to a motel at a main intersection of Modesto. It was near noon, and hot. The street was crowded with cars, but no pedestrians went near the basketball-sized bundle of bees that hung from the branch of a waist-high bush. It should have taken me less than five minutes to pick up the swarm; I only needed to put a box beneath it, give the branch a hard shake to dislodge the cluster, cover the box, and go. But as I approached, wearing cutoffs, no shirt, and baseball cap, and as the loose bees at the edge of the swarm started to fly around my head, people began lining the plate glass at the front of the motel's office, and traffic started to back up as drivers rubbernecked to see this death-defying young man step into a cloud of crazed bees. I made it take a half an hour. When I got back to my friends' house, Glen asked what