Melissa Bees – Pollinating the Earth with Gardens and Hives
My honey-gatherer tells me you are at it again, attempting to control women and their fertility and I feel compelled to write to point out the error of your ways and advise a change of course.
As the mother of the thousands upon thousands of children in my colony I’m no reckless, childless, free-roaming femeNazi lobbing bombs of criticism at you from the outside. On the contrary, I’m in the reproductive thick of it, laying 2,000 eggs a day with the help of my daughters just to keep our hive alive. Together the females of our colony decide which eggs are fertilized and which are not-depending on the needs of our community, making room to receive with graciousness and preparedness an increase or decrease of population in accordance with the times of natural abundance or lack. In the human community it seems this is not so: you require women to conceive, then withhold support from them; you encourage expansion when it is inadvisable given dwindling resources and the mass extinctions of the plants and animals on which you rely.
Like human mothers, 95% of child-rearing and everyday living tasks rest squarely on the shoulders of the female members of the hive, while the drones (males) laze around drinking our hard-earned honey, waiting for their chance to mate with a Queen-activities you yourselves I’m sure are familiar with. While the drones’ sole purpose in life is to mate, ours is chiefly concerned with the maintenance of life and well-being of future generations, work we apply ourselves to with unequaled diligence and passion, whether through the generative act of motherhood or the creative arts. We, the female denizens of colony and hive decide who is to be or not; and what is to be or not. To hear my honey-gatherer speak of human drones deciding such things, in all-male council no less, is utterly laughable and conceivably dangerous.
We regulate our fertility in another way; as the Queen my body is particularly equipped as a container for both egg and sperm, and as an egg is released I decide whether or not it is fertilized to create a male or female of our species. This ensures that the reproductive cycle, child-rearing and honey storage is kept in fine balance to assure our survival through a harsh winter or unfavorable season. It is a skill our human female contemporaries too mastered years ago, yet seem to have forgotten or had trained out of them, and now only exercise in small part through the use of contraceptives.
To make contraception more difficult to obtain, more expensive or an un-insurable medical benefit, or even suggest a trans-vaginal ultrasound before receiving an abortion is to deny human women their intrinsic and inalienable rights as keepers of their sacred body-temples. You have heard the saying ‘Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned’ have you not? Unwelcome penetrations of womb and hive will be equally met with sting, and hopefully this letter will serve as advance warning, along with the rising hum of perturbed feminine voices.
My recommendation, sirs, is that you take heed of our example and step out of the way of attempting to control women’s fertility. For the part of the story I have not yet shared with you, is that come autumn (which I hear is your election season) all males are eliminated from the hive; all drones are forcibly removed by the female workers. We simply don’t have the honey, or the patience, to keep you.
Yours truly,
The Queen