I crouch down on my hands and knees to watch the forager bees bringing the pollen back home to the hive. I don’t have on one stitch of beekeeping gear, just jeans and a t-shirt and my barn boots, but I’m careful not to be in their flight path. If I don’t watch myself, I may just stay out here all day.

Maybe this isn’t a good idea.

Dennis is saying that maybe I look to the bees like a Big Wooly Bear (I shoot him a big, hey, thanks, look.) Any moment they could decide to run me right off of their turf, he’s smirking. But he and the kids are peering at the beehives right alongside of me. Momma Bear. Daddy Bear (who’s still wearing his bee suit, sans the bee bonnet). And Baby Bears, who haven’t stopped begging me for bee suits since we got the bees home, but I expect we’ll be eschewing those soon.

When we pick up the nucs, the beekeeper tells me that bears actually eat the bees’ brood (babies), not the honey. It’s not so much a sweet tooth, she explains, as a taste for protein. I’m hearing her words, but I’m overwhelmed by the vision of a hundred plastic honey bear bottles lined up on the grocery store shelf.

Bears with blank stares.

Bears on conveyor belts going clickety, clackety.

The foragers are coming home in droves. Each forager bee carries her golden prize in pouches on her hind legs, kind of like the saddlebags we put on the horses for back country rides.

Some of the heavy-laden hover in the air right before the front door of their hive as the guard bees inspect them. If they pass the scent test (What’s the password? the kids are sure they are saying.), they are waved on inside. Others dive in through the front door like The Great Waldo Pepper.

In a daring feat of reckless stunt piloting, one of the bees drops half of her load.

We wait to see if she will retrieve the lonely looking little bundle of gold. But she’s already disappeared inside of Gotham, driven by the mysterious forces of the universe.

And none of the other bees seem to notice.

Seizing the opportunity, gingerly, cautiously, slowly, so as not to disrupt the whirring air traffic flow that would make most of those control tower fellows commit suicide, Dennis picks up the miniscule yellow package with one gloved fingertip. We stare at this priceless object of marvel, wondering what to do.

Taste it, he says.

I stare at it, dumbly, wrestling with the idea of giving it back to its rightful owners and the delectable, buzzing temptation of this forbidden thing, this downright thievery.

Yeah, Mom, taste it, the Baby Bears chime in.

And then I am tasting it, the yellow smear of pollen, feeling guilty because it is after all, the bees’ pollen that they lugged for miles through wind and bee-eating birds and the heat and only god knows what else.

The pollen is sweet on my tongue. But not like candy.

It is gritty.

The color of the yellow cactus bloom at my feet.

This is what the earth tastes like.