Bee-ing in Italy

As our time in Italy is drawing to it’s final few weeks, I’m already thinking of how I’ll miss Italy. Of all the places we’ve lived on our European sojourn this year, I think I’ve felt most “at home” here in rural Italy. Not sure why. But I think it has more to do with just hanging out in this rich countryside than with seeing new sights. Feeling full with things as they are.

Oh, I can tell you lots about frustrations here in our rather isolated setting: like mobile phones not working from here. Or  the landline phone going dead after a storm and the phone company’s disarray and seeming inability to get it fixed (going on more than three weeks now). Or the failures of internet connections from our house. Or the wasps and bugs who periodically inhabit the house when it’s not occupied. Or the fact that there’s no real city closeby for the usual stuff you get used to after you've lived in cities (your own doctor, dentist, favorite theatres  etc.). I get annoyed. But then, there’s everything else…. which  somehow takes up more positive space and leaves me happy.

For example, there are the incredible bees here. Not that I'm a bug-fancier (though I do find some curiously beautiful).  But I’ve never seen bees quite like this. At first, I wasn’t even sure they were bees. I thought they might be beetles they were so shiny black and big and fat. In fact, they made me think of a little black VW Beetle car. But their buzz was so distinct and they swarmed around the roses. I even watched one extracting nectar. I wish I’d had my camera with me. But I had to search the net to find out what it was that I had seen, and came across this identifying photo by J. Bohdal (thank you).
Today's Discovery

Easily 1-2 inches in size…. and they fly! I’ve learned that they’re called Carpenter Bee in English because, nearly all species build their nests in burrows in dead wood,I pass them every time I walk down the old wooden-bannistered steps beside the rose bush. You cannot pass without saying a respectful buon giorno and letting them get on with their buzziness.  I’ve read that they’re good pollinators and  also lay the largest eggs of any insect. And, although they are solitary bees (contrasting with our common notion of bee-colonies), females may live alongside their own sisters or daughters, forming a social group. I believe the bees at our rosebush are of this coffe-klatch variety.

Today's Thought
To make a prairie it takes a clover and one bee, One clover, and a bee, And revery. The revery alone will do, If bees are few.
--Emily Dickinson

Bees buzz throughout many world mythologies, an archetype of inner circumambulation and internal order, as symbolic creatures connecting the natural world to the underworld and conveying themes of immortality and resurrection, apparent in the inscriptions and drawings of ancient near east and Aegean as well as Mayan cultures, among others. A symbol of kingship, bee-insignias were emblems for many dynasties, including Napoleon's.

As I wrote in one of my previous posts on Umbria, since reading Margaret Atwood’s After the Flood and combined with my walks beside the apiary (containing a different bee species) near our house in Morruzze, my attitude toward bees has become one of respectful admiration. Not exactly their friend (I wouldn’t be so presumptuous), I do my best not to bother them or make a fuss when they cross my path. Not that I would ever want to surprise a swarm of them. But it encourages me to hear them, knowing there are flowers about and more in the making as bees carry pollen, and that honey’s in the making.

Among  our first house gifts were a jar of honey made from bees living right here and a flask of olive oil also made from right here. Talk about “taking-in” Italy,literally! Could we be eating any closer to the earth and air we’re living upon and in? 
Today's Food for Thought 

Strufoli: Italian Honey Ball Fritters (click on it for recipe)

These are golden balls of dough drizzled with honey and best served warm, typically served at Christmas time in Italy but a treat whenever in need. 

Thinking of Atwood's book and its dire futuristic urban setting, and of my own more fortunate urban upbringing, I offer you this painting of what I've entitled  Tenement Bees. I intended it as a tribute to bees who go on doing their bee-ing even in settings that offer little or may set circumstances against them.

Today's Painting 

Tenement Bees, painting by Janet Strayer

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