Home Is Where the Honey Is

After the overnight rain, Mack and Paddington had strolled out in the early morning mist together, one of their favorite activities. Mid-morning sun shone forth brightly now, and Mack was up back on the deck working on his merits and demerits book. It is his considered opinion that everyone needs to be kept in line and that his method of apportioning stars and black marks provides the most effective means of accomplishing this. A huge honey bear, towering over the other Teds, Mack is a Virgo and thus a natural critic.

Paddington decided to join most of the rest of the Teds who are helping their “Mommola,” my beloved Thea, and me as we plant more flowers in our garden. Birnie and Biwi had just flown Tweed, our adventurer honey bear, back home from his latest explorations of the Amazon. Lately he’s been spending most of his time exploring the ins and outs of that fascinating river as it winds its way through the dark heart of South America. He brought back over a dozen varieties of bananas that he’d picked up in Ecuador. There were enough for everyone, but they were a particular treat for Bunkie, who has a special love for bananas. Bunkie is a little brown bear who claims she is the world’s only brown Panda bear. The Pandas all back her up in this claim, so who are we to argue?

Thea has organized today’s flower planting party partly in response to Tweed’s latest ecological campaign. Beekeepers and Teddies all over the country have noticed over the past few years that honeybees are disappearing at an alarming rate. Nobody knows what is happening to them. There don’t seem to be any dead bodies lying around or anything. They just up and disappear, leaving only their larvae and maybe the Queen behind. Unfortunately, the Queen can’t survive without the food the worker bees bring her. Needless to say, this has Teddy bears greatly worried. How could they survive without their honey? After all, home is where the honey is. Tweed, a world-renowned ecologist, is particularly concerned. “It isn’t just the honey supply that is affected,” he informed us. “A good deal of the world’s fruits and vegetables depend upon bees to pollinate them, too, you know.”

“Tweed has suggested several ways for us to encourage honeybees to stay around and help us feed all of the plants,” Kippy told Thea and me, while planting another Buttercup.

“For one thing, we shouldn’t have just one or two kinds of flowers,” Brighton added. “Bees like lots of different flowers. So it’s best if we plant at least 10 different kinds.”

“An’ don’t use pes’asides,” Itsy chimed in, as she dug energetically in the soil at Thea’s knees. Whatever her Mommola does she has to do, too. In spades.

“Pesticides,” Benjamin just had to correct her. “Pesticides.”

“Yetz, that, too,” Itsy agreed, throwing soil every which way with her little shovel.

“OoOh!” Benjamin huffed. But, with a great show of effort, he turned back to planting a Sunflower with his Brighton.  

Just then a lone honeybee came buzzing into the yard. He zipped over to where Gracie hovered over the flowers, stopping right in front of her snout to look her in the eyes. Gracie looked right back at him, smiling beatifically, until, apparently satisfied, he flew out into the yard and began visiting our many yellow dandelions and purple clovers. Benjamin looked back over his shoulder at me, and with a goofy grin on his face, informed me snidely, “Tweed also said we shouldn’t weed so much. Bees like weeds like dandelions and clover a lot, too!”

“Ahh, good to know,” I replied.

“Don’t get any ideas, dear,” Thea warned me.

“Wouldn’t think of it, sweetheart,” I assured her. “Although, we do want to do our bit to encourage the return of the honeybees.”

“Let’s just see how well we can manage without the weeds, shall we?” she suggested.

“Itsy!” Benjamin squeaked in irritation. “Stop throwing your dirt into our hole!”

“Sorry, Benjamin and Brighton!” Itsy apologized and redirected her dirt throwing elsewhere.

“Okay, we’re done for today, anyway,” Thea announced, standing up and brushing the dirt off of the knees of her jeans. “We’ve planted all of our flowers. Tomorrow we’ll plant some zucchinis and pumpkins. Now, I’ll just go get my honeybee attractor spray,” she said spritely, walking off to the deck to get her spray bottle.

Meanwhile, the Teds were gathering around Tweed, Birnie, and Biwi, waiting eagerly to get outfitted with their very own beekeeping hood, complete with netting to be pulled down over their faces.

I began to ask what they were preparing for now, when Itsy ran over to her Mommola and, jumping excitedly up and down, exclaimed, “We’re goin’ on a hexpaditchun!”

“You are?” Thea asked, smiling down at her little “bestest” pal. “What kind of expedition?”

“A hexpaditchun to find some bees and bring ‘em back for a new beehive for us!” Itsy explained. “Tweed said,” she added for emphasis.

“That sounds dangerous,” Thea said, furrowing her eyebrows slightly and looking over at Tweed.

“Not really,” Tweed assured her. “We’re just going to place a trap with some Queen scent in it to lure in a swarm. Then we’ll all come back here and set up our new hive while we wait for them to arrive. Birnie, Biwi, and I will go back later with Mack and Paddington and bring the swarm back to its new hive. All of this,” he motioned to the Teds busily settling their beekeeping hoods on their heads, “is just a fun bit of dress-up for everybody, to get them into the spirit of the thing.”

After making sure everyone was suited up properly and each one had a canteen of cold, honeyed water and a banana, the full embrace of Teds trooped off into the woods, singing raucously and raggedly, “If you go out in the woods tonight you’re sure of a big surprise….”

Back at the garden, Thea started spraying her homemade honeybee lure on the flowers and other plants. “I made this myself from a recipe Tweed gave me,” she told me. “You just fill a mason jar with half a quart of warm water, add 1/8 a teaspoon of lecithin, 7 drops of lemon grass oil, 7 drops of spearmint, and two cups of sugar. Spray it on your plants and watch the honeybees come!”

By the time the Teds came trudging back later in the afternoon, noisy and excited, clamoring for cold, iced strawberry tea with honey, the honeybees were already beginning to swarm around the flowers in the garden. Not a few of them were busily flying from dandelion to clover before moving on to the lavender bushes and cletheras. Two buzzed inquisitively over Bentley as he snoozed the day away, lying in the middle of the yard wrapped in his blanky.

Itsy ran up to Thea and exclaimed, “Tweed showed us how to trap honeybees, so we could bring them to a new home! Tweed’s a good boy!”

“Yes, he is,” Thea agreed, smiling down at Itsy, who was hopping up and down, her beekeeper’s hood flopping around on her little head, with her own bonnet all twisted up underneath it. “All of our boys are good boys,” she added.

“Well,…,” Itsy hesitated at that generalization, “sometimes. I guess. Maybe.” Then, by way of changing the subject, she asked, “Did Bentley waked up while we were gone?”

“Not that I noticed,” said Thea, looking over at said Ted, snoring away contentedly in the fading afternoon sun.

Itsy ran over to his snoozing body, stopping at his head, where she stretched up on tiptoe, the better to get her snout closer to one of his ears, and shouted as loud as she could, “You ‘wake, Bentley!?!”

With her shout, all of the bees in the yard flew back away from where she stood next to Bentley, like waves in a pond after a huge stone has been thrown into its middle, leaving a rather large circle clear of bees around the two of them.

“Itsy!” admonished Thea. 

“What?” asked Itsy, looking back at her Mommola.

“Please don’t yell in Bentley’s ear, sweetheart. You’ll wake him,” Thea explained.

“It’s okay, Mommola,” Itsy assured her, turning away from the big guy. “Bentley’s asleep.”

“Here’s hoping we don’t get hit with an earthquake any time soon,” observed Benjamin sardonically. “The earth could open up and swallow him, and Bentley would just keep on sleeping.”

“Please don’t pick on Bentley, Benjamin,” Thea told him gently. “He’s not bothering anyone, and he has a right to hibernate if he wants to.”

“I was just saying,” muttered Benjamin.

“Don’t be a silly bear, Benjamin,” Itsy scolded him. “Only girls can dus’ say, not boys.”

“OoOh!” he responded testily, as Brighton pulled him closer, cuddled him, and soothed his troubled soul. Yes, Teddies have souls, and, yes, they can be troubled. Just ask Mr. Fluffy and Kippy sometime.

“Be nice to each other, the two of you,” I told them.

“You didn’t say please, Dad,” Itsy corrected me.

“Just do it,” I ordered, lowering my voice and intentionally omitting the please.

“Okay!” Itsy responded chipperly.  

“Yes, Dad,” Benjamin mumbled, reluctantly.

Meanwhile, the honeybees had slowly regrouped and returned to their smelling of the flowers. An intrepid few even had the temerity to fly over and investigate the source of the former explosive sound. As they buzzed around her, Itsy giggled and laughed. “When honeybees talk, it tickles!” she exclaimed, falling backward onto the ground.

Meanwhile, Tweed was supervising the bigger Teds as they assembled the new hive, the bees buzzed, Itsy giggled and rolled around, and Mack busily apportioned stars and black marks aplenty in his book. Thea smiled on all she surveyed, and all was right with the world once more.