Sometimes, as I sit eating my stale cornflakes, I wonder - what's the point of it all? Is the pursuit of the next big scoop really all there is? Or am I just buzzing aimlessly like the bees in Jim Barker's enormous, deafening bee farm?
It all began last summer in North Dakota, where I decided whether these little buzzers pondered mortality as I do. I was surrounded by hordes of these winged philosophizers, all humming what I imagined was the bee version of "Don't Fear the Reaper."
Here I was, a hardened reporter for the Eating Places of The New York Times, usually critiquing calamari, and suddenly I'm face to veil with thousands of bees. Why, you ask? Well, on a flight, sandwiched between a man who snored like a chainsaw and a woman who claimed to be the "Bee Whisperer's" apprentice, I had a revelation - I needed to understand bees. More importantly, I needed to see if they had any life advice.
The Bee Whisperer, a.k.a. Susie Homemaker, and her husband, Bob "Stings" Barker, agreed to let me into their elusive world of moving swarms from place to place. They didn't just produce honey; they produced moving, buzzing metaphors for my increasingly existential dread.
As I zipped up my bee suit, I couldn't help but relate to these creatures. They work their whole lives, but for what? To make honey for humans? To sting intruders and then meet a tragic end? There's a moroseness to it, a sting of tragedy that I find artistically compelling.
Honestly, dancing through that bee-crazed tornado made me feel alive - or at least more accepting of the eventual, lonely embrace of death. It made my usual column on five ways to cook tofu seem depressingly trivial.
In conclusion, dear readers, if you ever want to ponder the oblivion in the company of thousands of potentially lethal insects, I highly recommend it. It’s either that or we all just die alone eating cornflakes. Either way, it’s a wild ride!
Based on the original article "A Reporter Gets a Buzz From Thousands of Bees".
