The dunes of the Province Lands were in full bloom. It was May, and the tops of the sandy hills were crested pink with Rosa rugosa. Beach plum, covered in fluffy white blooms, settled in the dips and lowlands like snowdrifts left in the melting days after a blizzard. The air was buzzing with bees gathering nectar and pollen with absolute devotion in the warm, bountiful days of late spring.
They weren’t all honeybees. Each morning of my week-long stay in Zara’s shack — one of the dune shacks cared for by the Peaked Hill Trust — I woke to the sounds of the carpenter bees emerging from the round holes they had drilled in the shack’s cedar trim. The sun would rise and warm the siding, telling the bees the day had begun, and they would go out into the world to be bees. I took my coffee out and sat in the cool sand by a large, dense grove of beach plums to watch the bees and to be human.
Every spur of the purple stems of the beach plum closest to the house was crowned with delicate white and pink-tinged flowers. The bees — those living in the shack and others from the fields and woods of the dunes — swarmed the blossoms so that each branch was a vibrating, living thing of flower and bee.
I watched one plump bee crawl through the branches. She moved efficiently, stopping at each flower to gather the sugar and protein it offered, thousands of years of experience in her legs. She paused for a moment to sip nectar and collect pollen, amassing it in gold nuggets on her body and hind legs. Once full, she flew away, her pollen-dusted body carried on mica and lace wings.
When the bee does its work, it moves from flower to flower, gathering food for itself and, as it does, also collecting and spreading the genetic material of the beach plum in a wider range than wind alone might do.
The flower wants the bee to visit as many other flowers as it can, so in each flower is just a tiny sip of nectar and a dash of pollen. The bee must visit many blooms — and often. For the bee, that’s all that matters today; meanwhile, the flower’s purpose is to spread its pollen through the dunes. Each is completely dedicated to its own pursuit. And each is appealing to the needs of the other to fulfill its own objective. What a funny trick they play on one another, I thought.
As the bee flew off, my eye was drawn to the dunes beyond. I saw them filled with the flowers of the beach plums. So many for the bees to visit, and so many bees to visit them. Seeing this, my idea of the individual softened and a broader mutualistic system became clear. Both these organisms, the bee and the beach plum, are expressions of the same thing: a profound, balanced system of life.
In the late summer, pollinated flowers will turn into sugar-filled plums, and this mutualistic balance will express itself again. Through its roots, the beach plum will draw water to fill the plums to ripeness. A bird, unrooted, will land on a purple stem and pluck a plum. It will eat, and it will fly; sugar given in exchange for wings. The seeds, those little embers of life, will pass though the bird and, somewhere along its flight, a nitrogen-rich deposit will be dropped, carrying the seeds to new dunes.
Another beach plum will grow. It will flower. The bees will come in the spring with their vibrating wings and fuzzy bodies. They will gather and spread pollen. More plums will grow and again be carried by wings.
