Let us celebrate the bees, the fat bumblers, the drunk stumbling, window smacking, honey heralds, be-winged and bedazzling, gold-sashed. The blustering pomposity of the lot of them. Their bellies full of spring. Bees brimming with busy beeness. 

Lift a glass of catmint, a dinner plate of dahlias, a salad bowl of aster, yarrow.  Lift them to the sun and call them sacraments. Watch the bees waltz with Joe Pye weed and black-eyed Susan. See them swoon to the music of the wind in the hyssop.

These are no wallflowers, not these bees. Bees that bore holes in your Adirondack chairs. Bees that stare at your cold sweet tea. Bees that lick your lemon sherbet bowl. Bees that sniff the scent you spritzed on neck and wrist. They take their sweetness where they can—do you?

Beware the bees. The electricity in their vicinity. The buzzing in the slices of your sweet fuzzed peach. The venom hidden beneath the wink of wings. Oh—but some of us would like to be a bee and have a stinger, too.

Free the honeybees from their wood-framed hives. From the poking, prodding, pushing fingers of their keepers. Free them from those children with their faces pressed against the glass in summer camp. Let them beehive in the wild, why don’t we.

And let us bumble, too, befurred and fat, and be queen bees of our beeswax castles. Let’s buzz and sip and when we’re drunk as dahlias in midsummer’s breeze, we’ll loll in honeycomb, pleased as punch that we’re not drones.