I've pulled a chair up close to the hive so when I come home from work in the evenings, I can sit for a while and observe Beedicca. I'll make a circuit of the yard before I settle: check the baby chick (one of them is almost definitely, unfortunately, a rooster), check the progress of the herbs, seeds, and veggies I've set out this year, collect the day's eggs, pull a weed here and nibble a weed there. One of my favorites is coming up every where this year, passionflower. The young leaves are succulent as lettuce and are a sovereign remedy for tight shoulders, sore eyes and busy mind.
From a couple feet away, I can hear the steady warm hum from the hive, and watch the workers arriving with their loads of pollen and nectar, then departing. Sometimes a scout arrives and tickles antennae with someone who's leaving. Our cat Peanut, a certified xenophile, usually hangs out with the chickens, but these days he likes to loll about in the pools of sunlight near the hive, purring as if to match their buzz.
The sound of the hive is simultaneously challenging, like a snake's rattle, and calming as a mantra. It calls to mind the sound of Buddhist monks chanting prayers: sonorous, unintelligible and holy. The hive is at once racketing with activity and perfectly ordered. After a day of chaos and interruptions at the store, it's medicine.
In the forest that is our yard, chickasaw plum, dogwood, azalea, poisonous jessamine, and wisteria blooms are giving way to dewberry, huckleberry and satsuma. A Florida maple seed winged down to sprout in my bonsai juniper's pot, which seemed to me an invitation to try my hand at bonsai from seedling. The transplant went well, so I'm hopeful. Just outside the back door, our towering swamp magnolia is preparing new leaves and flower buds, scattering those mysterious velvet furred husks and broad yellow leaves over the forest floor.
This time of year all is promise and lushness, all flower and new green. The air is hazy with pollen. Later, in August, that haze will be heavy, dusty humidity, and it will be hot enough to see shimmers in the air. By then my new tomatoes will be wizened, diseased stalks, and I won't be able to sit outside for the mosquitoes. But there's a little time yet, before summer closes over north central Florida like a mouthful of bad breath, and I'm heading outside to enjoy it.