Honey, Occur!, and Heaven

Honey bees swarm. They leave their hive with a queen and half the worker bees and land in a temporary spot until the designated bee scouts find a permanent home. The lifespan of a worker bee in the early summer is somewhere between four to six weeks. The queen, she can live four years or more. So it is very important that the bees find a new home soon after they swarm. The workers must build new honeycomb, the queen must lay her eggs, and the new generation of bees must hatch before the workers go to bee heaven. That is not much time.

On May 23rd, one of my bee hives swarmed with two queens. We captured one of the clusters, but the second, smaller one was out of reach 35 feet up in a tree. I figured they would fly off in a day or two, but they never did. For the past several weeks I have spent a considerable amount of time coaxing, praying, encouraging, yelling, setting baited hive boxes, all to no avail. The bees weren't moving. As I mark the days on the calendar, I know that time is running out for this little colony. Today is June 20th. I love those bees and I am worried.

My Grandma Barton never left the house without getting dressed up. Whether going to the grocery store, the doctor's office, or the gas station, she would put on a nice shirt, often her bright red jacket, and her white or navy blue polyester slacks. On special occasions, she would put a dab of Avon's Occur! perfume behind an ear, a drop on a wrist. Occur! was Grandma's scent. It entered a room and announced her presence seconds before she would slowly and confidently walk in. Grandma was Occur!, Occur! was Grandma.

At her funeral, I stood next to Grandma's casket checking one last time that she looked beautiful, well as beautiful as one can look in death. I had brought her bottle of Occur!, and put a dab behind her ear and one on her wrist. My Dad gently reminded me Grandma was dead and the perfume wouldn't work because she had no body heat. He was right. She didn't smell like Grandma at all. Not to be deterred, I put a few drops on the light bulb in the lamp next to her casket and Grandma's scent drifted up and over the crowd of mourners. Grandma had arrived.

Every once in awhile, I may be sitting in my car or watching TV and the scent of Occur! will enter the room. Grandma, coming to visit. I tell her what is going on in my life, how much I miss her. I ask her about Grandpa and all my other relatives in Heaven. And just as mysteriously as it appeared, the scent vanishes.

Today my friend Cathy and I were out in her front yard, marveling at several big beautiful hickory trees. All of a sudden, the smell of honey swirled in the air, enveloping me so completely for a moment I thought I had been transported into a hive. "Cathy, do you smell honey?" I asked her. She took a deep sniff. "Oh my gosh, I do! Where is it coming from?" she said. We looked around, thinking maybe there was a bee hive up in a nearby tree, but found nothing. And just as mysteriously as it appeared, the scent vanished. A thought crossed my mind.

When I got home from my visit with Cathy, one of the first things I did was to go look for the bees up in the tree. They were gone.