Peter Finch of Cedar Cottage Community Garden sent us this beautiful guest post to help us get to know our busy and friendly co-species the bees. If we didn’t have bees we wouldn’t have us it’s that simple. Peter Finch is one of the founders of the lovely forest garden under the skytrain and is training to become a local bee-keeper.

FEAR OF…..WHAT EXACTLY?

I am standing chest-high in wild meadow flowers in full bloom. Wonderful deep red, blue, indigo, pink, orange and white–fragrant in the still, warm air–and teeming with activity. Bees of all sizes are at work on the flowers, inches away from my face. A prickly sensation on my left arm alerts me to the arrival of a very large bumble bee stopping to catch her breath. I can feel the vibration, yet her wings aren’t moving; her abdomen pulses as if she is panting. She tentatively extends her tongue and tastes my arm, then launches back into the air again.

“Aren’t you afraid?” asks a woman standing on the nearby roadway. I realize she has been watching me for a few minutes. “No, of course not,” I reply. Yet in my mind I’m thinking “Well, actually, at some level I’m terrified–it’s like the sparks from a forge. The thought of burning my hands scares me, but I can understand the fascination of watching a blacksmith at work.”

Primal reactions are overcome by curiousity, distraction, knowledge, or any combination thereof.