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Yesterday I went and took approximately one gazillion photographs at three New Orleans cemeteries; Lafayette No. 2, and St. Joseph’s No. 1 and 2. If you’re not familiar with these cemeteries, and I wasn’t until I started taking the bus everywhere after I destroyed the wheel on my Corolla, they’re kiiiiinnd of in the hood. The 21oo and 22oo blocks of Washington Ave., to be exact. Anyway, I took a ton of pictures and Instagrammed a good lot of them. But that’s not what this post concerns. This post concerns bees!
Yes, bees! While walking through Lafayette No. 2, the most ruinous of the group, I stopped in front of a particularly toppled tomb. Cemeteries are always quiet, even if smack in the middle of hoodish neighborhood like these, but this quiet was different. There was this low, ghost-in-the-machine sort of humming. I looked more closely at the toppled tomb. There were hundreds of honeybees. Honeybees are fat furry (I know, getting super technical here). That’s how I knew they were honey as opposed to African killer bees which are longer, more like a hornet and look more killer. I have no fear or allergy of honey bees. They won’t hurt you unless you’re trying to hurt them, and even then, their stings aren’t nearly as bad as a hornet. Farm girl!
I investigated.
Bees doing bee things on a tomb.
Two things went through my mind as I was marveling at the bees. One: How could I get the honey out of the comb inside the tomb (“tombcomb”) without the undead coming after me? and Two: Were these “bees” really just the Buggers from Ender’s Game finally set free and allowed to regenerate? Okay, I’ll admit; both thoughts are a little…odd? Let’s tackle them one by one.
First, graverobbing the honey. You know I would have snatched that honey (See my previous shenanigans in which I may or may not have stolen radioactive material, transported it to New Orleans and then thought it was glowing on my mantle and freaked out.) if I could have done so without damaging the tomb or disturbing the dead. And I’m like 73% sure there’s some King Tut’s tomb curse thing that applies to tomb honey.
Anyway, I’m sure I won’t ever do it, but I started thinking of all these fantastic ideas surrounding my bootleg/zombie-freegan honey. In fact, Susan and I started brainstorming some awesome names, including:
- Spook-Bee Honey
- St. Louis Sweet
- Voodoo Honey
- Rebirth Honey
- Honey of the Damned
- TombComb Honey
- Haunted Hood Honey
- Graveyard Gold
- Bee Burial
Can you imagine the marketing potential? The puns! It’s honey made from people! (Not really, I know how the circle of life works, folks.) The bees were neat! Let’s look at more pictures!
Bees in a Tomb II
Bees in a Tomb III
More Bees – Faraway
Alright, I nkow the pictures look pretty much the same, but you guys; it’s bees! coming out of a tomb! It’s like the next installment of Indiana Jones or National Treasure meets the Secret Life of Bees or at least a helluva episode of Murder, She Wrote. Sigh. Fine.
The second nerdy thought came about because I’ve been reading a lot of Orson Scott Card, particularly Ender’s Game. If you don’t know who I’m talking about, first of all you’re too cool for me, the bee’s knees if you will (har-dee-har), and second here’s the basic rundown:
Little kids go to starfighting school to learn to save the earth from aliens, specifically Buggers. Buggers have no individuality and instead operate as one “hive-mind”. Earthlings, particularly Ender, win and destroy the Buggers, save a queen. Ender is charged with saving the queen, because they’re sorry and didn’t mean to attack us, and one day placing her in a suitable environment in which the Bugger species can be resurrected. Phew!
So…what if the bees in the tomb are actually Buggers and they’re resurrecting (repopulating)? Maybe the tomb is their Garden of Eden, or rather, Garden of Beeden.
Shit just got real. Red pill, y’all. Red pill.
Anyway, that’s what I thought about when I was taking pictures of bees at the cemetery yesterday. Maybe I had heatstroke?
Visit the cemeteries! Look at the bees! Try to go when it’s not as hot outside!
More Information:
All routes lose their novelty when driven daily, some when driven even weekly. Everyone knows that we drive in familiar places much like our cars would if they had an autopilot. We stop “seeing” anything around us. Our mind simply remembers our surroundings from all of the previous times it has “seen” the red house on the corner, and the sugar cane field over there. It is easy to miss something with our mind working this way. The I-10 corridor between Baton Rouge and New Orleans lost its freshness for me quite a while ago. Now that I am back in Idaho, it is much easier for me to connect with my first thoughts about the road; it must be that I don’t see it everyday any longer. I am not lulled into a trance as my jeep drives over the rhythmically placed slabs of concrete road sections.
On a normal day (think of a time before the storms, think of heavy commuter traffic flying from to and from the suburbs) traffic screams down the expressway, with heavy forest, swampland; I’m really not sure what all grows there; it is simply the greenest, densest spread of deep dark green growing things I have ever seen, closing in on the road from either side. The growth is so thick that it is impossible to separate the individual growing things from one another. The freeway is literally carved from the growth, intruding on the growth. The power of the plants is almost scary; it is easy to imagine the plants taking over the minute people stop using this path. The only breaks in the overpowering green, aside from the interstate, are the narrow, groomed areas surrounding gas pipelines and powelines gliding off into the green.
Years ago, before Louisiana, I would wonder at the stories on the evening news featuring a pair of brothers or a little girl going missing, only to be discovered three days later in the woods, a quarter mile from their home. Why didn’t they find them as soon as they went missing? I would wonder. Here, in the West (at least the high desert portion) you can literally see miles in any direction. It is impossible to get lost in the woods that close to home. Green; that is how people can go missing and bodies can be buried literally in their own back yard with no one noticing the body for sometimes years.
Not only is there more vegetation in general in Louisiana, everything is a different color. The green of the plants is different; the brown of the earth is different; everything looks different. With my sheltered view of the world, I assumed that plants were plants, dirt was dirt, people were people and bugs were bugs (that is another story all of its own) anywhere you went. Louisiana taught be differently. The dirt has a red tinge in Louisiana, though not as red as the dirt in Tyler, Texas, which seems to rust before your eyes because of the earth’s incredible red color. In Idaho, it is a soothing gray brown. Plants in Louisiana are green, very green. In Idaho, plants are healthy, getting enough water, but still aren’t as bright; they seem to have a brown quality to them even when completely saturated.
So where am I going with this? I don’t know. I was thinking about the road between Baton Rouge and New Orleans, and how often I used to travel it at break-neck speeds until I forgot what it looked like. Now the wonder that I first experience when driving the route is coming back to me a bit, and I wanted to write about it. That is all there is to it.
