If these wings could talk...

Like everything in nature, a honeybee colony has its moods. Here’s a sad one: a weathered worker bee in her final hours. See those tattered wings? She flew to the breaking point to scout out forage locations and gather pollen and nectar to support her colony’s survival. She probably arrived with the original package of bees trucked up to the Catskills from Georgia back in mid-April. She survived that harrowing trip, the rough hiving courtesy of this totally inexperienced beekeeper, and a week of cold weather and heavy snow. She was one of the originals—clustering to keep the all-important, egg-laying queen warm; building the comb on which the queen would deposit her eggs; then taking wing to venture into a totally unfamiliar new habitat to find the sustenance that would carry the colony toward summer and beyond. So much achieved in a lifespan of a just few short weeks. On the one hand, a life to be proud of. On the other hand, my heart goes out to her.