The White tailed Bumblebee; A persona poem.

Bombus Lucorum’s  Dramatic monologue or Persona Poem

( Her thoughts while being photographed in January at Finca Navasola, Sierra Aracena Spain)

 

 

 

 

 

 

You may well know me as just a mere bumbling bee

But I am more clever than you think.

My lineage is pre Linnaeus *and to our own kind

We keep ourselves. It’s only you who can confuse

And give us a Bombus Lucorum complex.

If you observe more carefully

And observe you must

Our whiter than white tails, our yellow bands.

But we are more deceptive than you think:

We will not help to pollinate

We merely take the nectar sweet

With proboscis purposefully evolved,

Or tongue for you non latinates,

Adapted slowly over time.

 

I fear I speak abruptly for your kind of kind.

My life is too worn out with weary work.

My genes do not give me the time

To rest inside a burrowed hole,

Like her, with constant demands for more and more.

 

Today you see us swinging from bright flowers;

The yellow sun was kind when first we left.

Our Lady Queen insistent on our following

The path of workers gone before.

We serve, we serve the future of our kind.

We work and work and have no time

Like you to stand and stare.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Why does the weather change like this?

The stem I have to cling to fast.

The wind is strong too strong too strong for us.

My sister worker in a gust falls into fallen leaves,

So wet with days of rain, her wings can’t fly,

Too weak with days without the chance of food.

The rain it comes with furious speed.

So wet, too wet on dripping leaves.

So near, so far from the desire to feed

On flowers few in this so cold a Spring.

Why did our Lady think this was the time to breed?

So warm it was and then the weeks of rain.

The wind now stronger I too fear I’ll fall

Be blown away far from the way back home.

I fear today we came too far

Too far.

I fear today we came too far.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

*Linnaeus 1761

THANKS TO

1. Wikipedia for so much information in one place on the White tailed Bumblebee   https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White-tailed_bumblebee
2. The Bumblebee Conservation Trust. And ideas to be  BEE KIND

 

This was prompted by a prompt from Dverse Poets  http://dversepoets.com/ on creating another Persona. This is a great poetry website to check out and follow links to some diverse poetry and blogs on Mr Linky.

At present this persona style is a particular challenge to me with a story I am writing about the wild. I am caught between wanting to keep the creatures wild and not really speaking but also  with the need to create empathy for the struggles they have in our very current climate.

I hope the photos are of white tailed bumblebees. Please inform me if you think otherwise! The ones on the Christmas, Butchers Broom post were the slurred and blurred ones and I have been trying ever since.  With my friend Madeleine’s Fuji camera she took one of the bumblebee on a fallen leaf. The other day when it was sunny in the morning I found two bumblebees on the yellow daisies. They were struggling as the wind was getting stronger and then it started to rain again. One fell somewhere. I put out some sugar water in case they needed more food. I wonder if they did get back to their hive. As there were two they were possibly the worker bees. A queen will usually emerge in early February and look for food and begin to build up reserves and to lay their female worker eggs. I wonder here if these bees have emerged earlier because of the warm weather in December. Nature is so incredibly complex and so well adapted over millennia. At present these bees have certain skills to help them survive but as the climate is less predictable and more extreme there may be more problems foe even the common species.