05/10/2026
Welcome to the Queens🐝
As we celebrate all Mothers let us not forget our Mother 🌎 and all her creatures💚
Once, beneath the earth, the queens were dreaming.
They had been sleeping since autumn, curled in hollows of soil and leaf-rot, their bodies folded small and still. All through winter they slept—through snow and frost and the long silence when the world forgot what green was. They dreamed of summer. They dreamed of flowers they had known and flowers not yet born. They dreamed in the language of pollen and light.
Above them, the world turned slowly back toward warmth.
The earth softened. The first shoots broke through. The air changed its smell from stone and ice to mud and possibility. And deep in her dark chamber, each queen began to feel the pull.
It was not sound that woke her. Not light. It was something older—a stirring in her blood, a memory written into her wings. The world was calling. The flowers were beginning. It was time.
One by one, the queens emerged.
They pushed their way up through soil that had held them all winter, shaking dirt from their fur, unfolding wings that had been pressed tight for months. They were large—larger than any bee you will see all summer—and covered in thick, soft fur: gold and black, russet and cream, bright as pollen, dark as earth.
They were hungry.
All winter they had lived on the fat stored in their bodies, burning it slowly to stay alive through the cold. Now they needed nectar. They needed strength. So they flew low over the waking world, searching.
The early flowers knew to wait for them.
Crocuses opened their purple mouths. Willow catkins hung soft and silver. Dandelions spread their suns across the grass. The queens moved from bloom to bloom, their tongues long and eager, drinking the first sweetness of the year. They were loud as they worked—low, resonant hums that sounded less like insects and more like small bells ringing underground.
And as they fed, they began to remember their purpose.
Each queen carried within her the blueprint of a world. Not the world of soil and sky, but a smaller world—a hive. A place of wax and warmth and the hum of many wings working as one. She had been a daughter once, born into such a world. Now she would build her own.
She flew low, zigzagging over the ground, searching. She needed a place hidden and safe. An old mouse nest. A tangle of grass. A crack in a stone wall. Somewhere she could begin.
When she found it, she crawled inside and sat very still.
This was the loneliest part. The queen was alone in a way she had never been before and would never be again. No workers to feed her. No daughters to keep her warm. Just herself, and the future folded inside her body like a secret.
She began to build.
From glands in her abdomen, she secreted wax—small, pale cups that would hold her first eggs. She shaped them carefully, then filled each one with a golden egg no bigger than a grain of rice. These would become her daughters. Her workers. The first threads of the world she was weaving.
She sat on the eggs to keep them warm. She left only to forage, flying out into the spring air to gather more nectar, more pollen, then hurrying back to cover her fragile brood. She was building an empire from nothing. She was conjuring a summer that did not yet exist.
And all across the waking world, other queens were doing the same.
In gardens and meadows, along roadsides and forest edges, the queens emerged from the soil like royalty returning from exile. They flew with purpose. They built with certainty. They carried the future in their bodies and the memory of a thousand summers in their wings.
That is why, in May, if you see a large bee flying low and slow across the grass, you should stop and watch.
That is a queen. She has survived the winter alone. She is searching for a kingdom.
And if you are very quiet, you can almost hear the hum of the hive she is beginning to dream into being.
