Beauty and the Bees

My husband and I live next to a cornfield in the middle of the city. Beyond our St. Paul apartment lies the agricultural land belonging to the University of Minnesota, and from our second-floor balcony, I have a view of horse pasture, corn, potato, and bean crops, as well as groves of young apple trees and grape vines. Past the apartment parking lot and behind the row of garages, just before the field starts, there is ground tilled for tenant plots, and our first spring there we start making plans for a garden.

To take up the task feels right, as we are both transplants to the city, having come for college from small midwestern farming towns, grown on more acres than we could walk, fed from fruits, vegetables, and meat that came from the land we lived on. We have been in St. Paul five years—our life is here, but still the city makes me feel severed from the earth in ways I hate, and I am aching for something of my own to cultivate. In June, we agree to plant tomatoes, peppers, and onions for garden salsa, kale sprouts and carrot seeds for summer salads. I help Riley weed and dig rows for the vegetables, but insist we leave room for a flower patch, because I have been thinking of bees.

I have been thinking of them in their quiet disappearance, our self-sabotaging failure to protect them and the natural world they prop up. United States National Agricultural Statistics indicate a 60 percent reduction in hives from 1947 to 2008, and 2018 saw 40 percent of US bee colonies perishing in a single winter with one in four wild bee species at risk for extinction, though seventy out of humans' top one hundred food crops and over 80 percent of all flowering crops depend on bee pollination. The consistent loss in bee numbers is typically credited to pesticides, climate change, and habitat loss, the native grasses and wildflowers continually mowed down and paved over.

I have been feeling guilty and helpless ever since I walked outside the previous September, clumsy with bags and late for work, and saw a single exhausted honey bee stalled on the roof of my Camry. He lay there weary, wings panting, collapsed in his pursuit of nectar, the distance too far and too much. I'd heard to leave bowls of sugar water outdoors to give bees energy on their journey from plant to plant, the distance between bee-sustaining flowers and nectar becoming ever greater, and though I had no sugar water, I took my paper towel blotted with wet jam from my toast, scooped him onto it, and set him in the grass beneath an old oak, hoping he'd recover. I came home from work in the afternoon and found him gone, but knew he had just as likely been eaten as resuscitated.

Come spring, my husband is reluctant to give up garden real estate to plants we can't harvest and eat, but besides wanting to attract pollinators, I want to make something lovely just for its own sake, so I plant my corner of the garden with seeds of fennel, lupine, coneflower, aster, daisy, and sunflower, sprinkle them into rows from a paper pack. I don't know if anything will come up, don't even know if I'll be able to distinguish them from the weeds I pull when tending to the tomato and kale. In the afternoons, after I finish working and writing from the deck, I carry my homemade quilt and book down to the garden patch and sit with the plants or nap on my stomach in the sun, waiting for the quiet signs of something blooming, the buzz of small wings.

When I mention my flower garden to my poet friend, my sheepish desire to create something not just good but beautiful, she brings up a Dostoevsky quote, one that I'd heard many times and clung to, the one that so boldly claims, "Beauty will save the world." In response, my friend says, "Beauty may save the world...