I sat on the wooden porch watching the oregano come to flower. Really, it was the bees that helped me notice the small delicate flowers that coloured the plant with their sweet mauve colour. There were more than a hundred native bees buzzing in the still and fragrant air that held the oregano plant and its moist ground in a warm summer embrace.
There must have been at least 15 species of bees working on the plant at any warm moment during the hot summer days that it flowered. When I looked at the plant it seemed very busy and noisy with the thoughtless hum of bees. Some bees looked as if they were from the same hive and were nearly identical. Other bees looked very different from each other and were much smaller or coloured differently.
For the week of warm days that the plant flowered and the bees were busy visiting its flowers they did not fight or struggle in any way among or between themselves. There was usually only one bee per flowerering frond and that was the first bee to get there. That bee would visit each floweret of a frond one-by-one without any disturbance from other bees until it moved on to another frond. Once a bee moved on to a different flowered frond another bee would take its place immediately. I never saw any fighting between the different species of bees even though the bush seemed very busy and quite noisy from the buzzing of a wide variety of very different bees.
Even though the bees all seemed to be competing for the same resource (nectar) of the flowers there seemed to be a polite order to their harvest efforts. I considered what I had learned in school about the importance of survival of the fittest and the competition for limited resources among animals and felt entirely confused after watching the bees work their way through the garden's sweet summer flowers. Then I remembered how our fine human brains always found clever ways to explain the success of an animal's strategy to survive as a species. Sometimes it is uncomfortable to believe what we see rather than to embrace the models that have been handed down to us through generations of teachers. Each of us encouraged to use our minds to defend or elaborate on a pre-existing theory that was never ours to start with.
There must have been at least 15 species of bees working on the plant at any warm moment during the hot summer days that it flowered. When I looked at the plant it seemed very busy and noisy with the thoughtless hum of bees. Some bees looked as if they were from the same hive and were nearly identical. Other bees looked very different from each other and were much smaller or coloured differently.
For the week of warm days that the plant flowered and the bees were busy visiting its flowers they did not fight or struggle in any way among or between themselves. There was usually only one bee per flowerering frond and that was the first bee to get there. That bee would visit each floweret of a frond one-by-one without any disturbance from other bees until it moved on to another frond. Once a bee moved on to a different flowered frond another bee would take its place immediately. I never saw any fighting between the different species of bees even though the bush seemed very busy and quite noisy from the buzzing of a wide variety of very different bees.
Even though the bees all seemed to be competing for the same resource (nectar) of the flowers there seemed to be a polite order to their harvest efforts. I considered what I had learned in school about the importance of survival of the fittest and the competition for limited resources among animals and felt entirely confused after watching the bees work their way through the garden's sweet summer flowers. Then I remembered how our fine human brains always found clever ways to explain the success of an animal's strategy to survive as a species. Sometimes it is uncomfortable to believe what we see rather than to embrace the models that have been handed down to us through generations of teachers. Each of us encouraged to use our minds to defend or elaborate on a pre-existing theory that was never ours to start with.
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