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Telling the Bees

Bees have long been witness to human grief, carrying messages between the living and the dead. Finding solace in the company of bees, Emily Polk opens to the widening circles of loss around her and an enduring spirit of survival.

I pass a caravan of rusted school buses and flat-tired RVs occupied by old men wearing the skin of the city on their faces, and park next to a blue tent that smells like piss and wild sage pitched in the middle of a sidewalk. I FIRST HEARD about Khaled Almaghafi, the bee-covered man in the photo, years ago when our Bay Area Transit System (BART) tasked him with removing hives found in various locations—from the train yard to the rails—and relocating them where they could continue to thrive. But so is habitat destruction from increasingly extreme weather events, and starvation stress due to changes in flower blooming times, all of which threaten fruit, vegetable, and nut crops like apples, blueberries, and almonds.

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