MayBees and Butterflies: An Environmental Catastrophe I Guess We Just

Haven’t Decided?

By Michael J. Herman ©2023 Michael J. Herman All Rights Reserved

Where would we be without the humble Bumble Bee?

Poets would be silent.

Artists would be blank.

Children would be board.

I’m no radical, or revolutionary. I’m no bleeding heart or sappy sort. However, the blindness of humanity is astonishing as things veer off the rails.

Regardless of your political views, the fact is that the environment in which we as humans live on this planet is changing. It’s mutating beyond our ability to fix it and radically so.

It used to be that when March arrived, the rose bushes would begin to blossom, the smell of spring would be flush in the air, and I would scoop out 30-50 bees from my swimming pool every day. At that time I thought it was a lot. Now I think it was too few.

 I would dutifully save drowning bees and they’d dry in the sun on the pool deck before flying back to their hives. Quite honestly, it was annoying. And now, annoying or not, I wish they were here this year.

This is the second consecutive year with no bees to see well into April. In years past, there were dozens per day. Last year there were a handful, and so far this year, there are none.

April, and not a single bee? Not one?

Let’s move on.

It was the same in the month of March when we moved into our home. The garden was overflowing and abundant with giant, brilliantly colored, beautiful, joyous Monarch Butterflies. So many of them surrounded the house that my gardens resembled a kaleidoscope of flip-flapping blissful angels. Just watching them flutter caused a welling of elation and a flooring of dopamine. Their flurries made me wish I too could take flight. Their pastel colors pleased the eye and helped to forget all the trivial stresses with which we build out illusions.

The elation and joy gotten from the simple act of watching Monarchs dance creates an instant euphoric, joy-filled rush. And when it’s over, when they finish their dance, or when the season concludes sadness befalls even the most hardened of hearts.

This year, April had met its middle and not a single Monarch Butterfly.

Not a single one?

Is my landscaping poison?

No.

Has the contour of the lands or the winds upon which they travel changed?

No.

But something has changed.

In Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s poem he bemoans the gone of the butterfly.

Oh! pleasant, pleasant were the days,
The time, when, in our childish plays,
My sister Emmeline and I
Together chased the butterfly!

Childhood is made from memories. Without them, who are we as adults? No outdoors? No nature? No natural bliss? I shudder at the possibility, and yet, this very possibility is the reality for a new generation and for the ones to come. I never carried a net, and yet I have captured many butterflies. They are held in my memories of boyhood when skipping, climbing a tree, or falling down were all part the transition Springtime delivers.

I cannot imagine a childhood without a butterfly.

A childhood:

1977 Upstate New York.

My young days were filled with outdoors and nature. Walking through wooded lands, biking upon unpaved roads, climbing every tree with a branch, and swinging off the waterfall that filled the lake across the street from my house.

Trees, the occasional dear in the brush, and the pungent fragrance of springtime bursting everywhere. You couldn’t keep me indoors. And all around were the ever present butterflies.

Where did they go?

Where are they to be found?

A butterfly doesn’t make its home in a prison, or in Hanna Volakova’s Nazi Concentration Camp; and yet, here in my beautiful garden, where are you butterfly?

Times change and nothing stays the same, but to lose the butterfly and the buzz of the bumble bee is perhaps too much to tolerate and a clear sign that something in this environment has been perverted. Is it the environment? Or is it Technology’s cruel advancement of 5g radiation? Global-warming? Or simply the natural evolution that extinct species like dinosaurs, saber-toothed cats, or woolly mammoths?

If the bumble bees and monarch butterflies go, how long until it is our turn?

“Extinction is part of the natural order.” Stephen Falken “Movie: Wargames

Ok, I relent to progress. After all, what is a mere bumble bee or the insignificant butterfly? Really, who will even notice? But I wonder, what would Martin Niemöller add to his post of the Holocaust?

“First they came for the Socialists and I did not speak out. Because I was not a Socialist. Then they came for the Trade Unionists and I did not speak out. Because I was not a Trade Unionist. Then they came for the Jews and I did not speak out, because I’m not a Jew. Then they came for me and there was no one left to speak for me.” And now we’ve come for the butterfly.

So go the humble bumble bee and the majestic Monarch.

Who speaks for them and perhaps even more importantly, who will write their epitaph?

Michael J. Herman is actually a Bleeding Heart Liberal who cries for the beasts, the insects, the flora, the air, and the water. He always has and he always will.

You can read Michael’s bylines or reach Michael: TheMotivationalMinute.com,

on Substack, or at (818) 894-4610