the absence of bees

          In the rectangular concrete planters behind some hall or another, a few bushes carry flowers, alternatingly bright pink and pure white. As I pause my walk in front of one of the bushes with the white flowers, I lean in to get a closer look. The flower’s five petals extend outward, like any flower’s should, into not-quite-points with slightly rounded ends, dimpled and textured. At a distance they seem perfectly smooth, but up close the infinite nuances of their shape become clear. Looking inward, toward the center, the white looks less white, cast in shadow as light struggles to reach its depths. And with the darkening of the white there is, at the very center, a green that punctuates the merging of petal and stem. From there extend the stamens, seeming to wind and slither their way from the base, reaching ever outward into the path laid open for them by the blooming petals, the newly gaping maw, an expanse of artfully wrinkled fragrant white. 

          The white creates a backdrop, a scenic platform on which the darkened ends of the stamens stand out. They know that their duty is calling to the insects of the world to spread their pollen. The beautiful petals play second fiddle, eye candy meant to attract swarming bees to line up and touch them, roll in their pollen, smear it on their wings, and pass on the substance of creation to another beautiful flower with more twisting and writhing stamens. The geometry of the petals draws them in, sinking and growing smaller, luring the insects to exact their reproductive plan. Evolution has united their forces, for the flower to reproduce and for the bee to gorge itself in beauty and the riches of the senses, to pollinate their surroundings and create honey, sustenance for its people, to help them both live beyond their individual lifetimes, sustain the future of their kind. 

          I shudder to think that if removed from the bush, cut off from the feeding tube that connects it to the rest of its broader organism, the flower would surely and hastily wilt, its petals wrinkling and falling in on their center, blanketing the still-frantic stamens as a shroud of their own decay. The poor flower, a lit-up sex club calling with a megaphone to the bees, screaming just for anyone to take it up on its offer, with such curvaceous petals and shapely stamens, wilting away as the cash flow ends and the bank forecloses on the building, leaving the foundation to crumble and the walls to fall in. Oh, who would be so foolish as to doom such a beautiful display to such a public and undignified death, I think, while snipping the feeding tube of the perfect white with my fingernails. It stays gorgeous and full for a day, its visage still attempting to lure the bees that are so strikingly absent from my desk where it sits. After that it falls into itself, the stamens soon losing the will to struggle against the heavy blanket of the petals laying to rest over them and joining them in their final sleep. 

          I watch them day after day as I sit there. But as I doomed this one flower and watched it die, I don’t feel as if I’ve wronged it. Because while I swiftly sent it along to its grave, the other flowers on the bush around it and the many more flowers on the many more bushes of its row still stand behind whatever hall it was. And while the warm Los Angeles climate means that the flower bushes push out their neon signs of fertility even in the month of January, the bees of the area still take their winter to form a writhing ball of body heat within their hive to keep their queen warm. They rely on their food storage from the rest of the year and aren’t looking for new pollen with which to satisfy their evolutionary urges. As the single flower I picked perishes and crumples and its edges turn brown, the rest of its brethren still set out their sandwich boards on the street every day, still turn on their red and blue neon ‘open’ sign, and wait in vain for customers to arrive. They continue steadfast in their beauty until their much slower, much sadder demise.

Stella Horns is a USC senior finishing up a Political Science and Narrative Studies double major. They like to write and dance and make their own clothes. You can keep up with Stella and their writing on Bluesky.