A Real Story for Real Kids
When I was little, it was a good thing to read books to kids about make-believe things, and sometimes really scary things. But sometimes we got scared about things that we shouldn’t be afraid of, like bees. As I think about it now, I think it would have been good to have lots of stories about things we shouldn’t be afraid of, like bees!
We also read books about scary people, like old witches that eat children, and stuff like that. Well now that I’m nearing the age of an old witch, I think that was supposed to be just make-believe. Even more important, I think the children today should hear stories about all the wonderful things that people can learn when they get older, and that they’re not scary at all.
It was the spring of 2020 when I turned 65 and everyone had to stay home because of a pandemic. That’s when I first learned how wonderful carpenter bees can be. It all started when I found a little bee dying outside my back door. You can read about that in my post named, “Bee Well.”
I did a lot of reading and learned about that kind of bee and how some people say they’re bad and some people say they’re good. I learned how to help my little bee get well so that she could fly away and take care of the flowers in my yard and lay her eggs so that new bees could be hatched next spring. I also learned that I had neighbors who were afraid of their carpenter bees, and afraid that their homes would be eaten up and ruined.
What I learned is that bees like to live in plain wood. They don’t like it painted because that would mean it belongs to whoever painted it, and bees don’t paint. No, carpenter bees like plain wood that’s not painted so they can build their nests and come back to the same place year after year. As the wood gets older, the bees can even tell that their whole family lived in that same old wood, so they can always find their way home.
Well today, I discovered a new thing about my new bee friends.
To beeeee continued!