Buzz Laurie FOX Pessemier Acrylic on canvas 10.5 x 16 inches
ARTNOTES: BUZZ
Christine, Canaille’s mistress, was talking to a most
unusual man in the garden when we arrived early on Monday. He had eyeballs so large, I could barely see
any whites; his eyebrows were completely shaggy and encircled the top of his
eyes; he was round. He was as taken with
me as I was with him, and came over at once to introduce himself. He was the beekeeper at the hives at the
Luxembourg Gardens.
Blair and I have painted the hives, and the bees innumerable
times. There is a collection of antique hives,
and there are new, beeswaxed teak boxes with copper roofs which seem to please
their occupants.
We sang our praises
of the bees and hives to the beekeeper.
I asked how the bees were doing.
In fact, he told us his bees were among the healthiest and most prolific
in all of France. Why? No pesticides.
We discussed the
current nemesis of bees: colony
collapse. There was no sign of that
here. “Because of industrial farming,
insecticides and pesticides are now integrated in the seed: at levels 2,500 times that of “crop dusting” –
the former method for eliminating pests.
Bees are fragile creatures – they have to remember where they are, how
to get back to the hive and how to direct the other bees to the flowers –
that’s too much to do when their bodies are compromised by pesticides.”
As he related this story, he buzzed with passion. “Here, in the gardens, we replace our queens
every 2-3 years; in America, queens are replaced 2 or 3 times each year.” Life is hard for the industrial bee, even if
you are royalty.
At Tuesday’s open air market, the flower man had exemplary specimens: we settled on 18 pale pink and pale green
roses and a meat-colored chrysanthemum (in retrospect, perhaps we should have
visited the butcher first). He had other
equally beautiful flowers: multi-colored
anemones, carnations and cyclamen. He
had a wizened look: a painfully thin
nose, wire rim glasses and he was smoking home made cigarettes. He worked slowly, wrapping each purchase. He was
the antithesis of the bee man, but perhaps just a drone instead of a royal bee.
Or he could have been a wasp.
While walking by St Sulpice on Saturday, two honeybees
seemed to be engaged in a fight, one pursuing the other, first here, then
there. They were flying at what seemed to be the purported 20 miles an hour a bee can
achieve, not carrying pollen (Someone
once told me you can outrun a bee, but anyone who has stepped near a nest knows
that is not true). After lunch with friends we walked back and
found the two splattered on the sidewalk, engaged in a fatal embrace. I wondered if they were bees from the
Luxembourg Gardens.
