We have installed two colonies of Italian bees in a clearing beyond the apple orchard. They have settled into the hives, and, with a single-mindedness that is funny and impressive, go about the business of their miraculous, strange little universe. I watch them with almost parental affection--the buzzing, teeming clockwork, the workers cleaning cells, guarding the front door, foraging for nectar; the short, fat drones, fatherless and stingless and indolent, swaggering about, hoping to get lucky with a virgin queen.
The analogies between keeping bees and raising adolescents are interesting. Both form highly developed societies that seem an alienated parody of...