A Colony of One

By Ted M.

A friend once showed me a beehive during a hot summer.

Thousands of bees moved in and out of the entrance.

The colony seemed alive in a way that no individual bee could ever be.

Then I noticed a single bee on the ground.

It was alive.

But only barely.

Without the colony around it, it seemed fragile.

Almost unfinished.

That thought stayed with me long after I left.

Not because of the bee.

Because of the people.

One afternoon, I was working beside an older gardener when she pointed to a row of beans.

“They came from my grandmother,” she said.

I assumed she meant the variety.

She shook her head.

“No. These seeds.”

She explained that the beans had been grown by her family for decades. Every year someone saved seed. Every year someone planted them again.

They had crossed an ocean. I had only crossed a garden.

Then she handed me a few.

They looked exactly like ordinary beans.

Small.

Dry.

Unremarkable.

Yet standing there, I realized I was not really holding seeds.

I was holding a chain of decisions made by people I would never meet.

The bee on the ground seemed smaller than its colony.

The gardeners did not.

One carried the memory of fruit trees from another continent.

Another carried seed-saving techniques learned from a grandparent decades ago.

Another could identify plants I had never noticed despite walking past them for years.

The more gardeners I met, the less they resembled members of a group.

Each seemed to contain a world of their own.

A bee gathers nectar.

A squirrel gathers food.

A slug searches for another leaf.

The purpose is immediate.

Practical.

Necessary.

Humans do those things too.

Then we do something else.

We save seeds for seasons we may never see.

We write books for readers we will never meet.

We plant trees whose shade we may never sit beneath.

We preserve knowledge that may not become useful for decades.

None of it is particularly efficient.

Much of it makes little sense from the perspective of survival alone.

Yet we keep doing it.

Perhaps that is because human beings are not merely individuals.

Each of us carries things that did not begin with us.

The bee needed its colony.

People seem capable of carrying much of their colony within themselves.

Perhaps that is what makes us such strange creatures.

We know we are temporary.

Still, we keep passing things forward.

Ted M. is a gardener in Vancouver, BC.