I live in a townhouse in a row of townhouses facing another row of townhouses. Between the two rows is a stretch of grass, spotted here and there with trees and shrubbery, and a pathway leading in and out.
One day this spring I arrived home to find a family clustered around the near end of the pathway, looking and pointing at the overhang of a tree above. “Look,” they said to me, “a beehive.”
I looked up into the branches directly over us. I first saw a honeycomb, off-white and oblong and about six inches wide by nine inches long. Then I noticed the dark blob next to it. The hive must have been at least a foot in length. Bees covered its surface and buzzed about it in their buzzy frenzies. Fascinating, that never once had I encountered a bee on the path, despite the proximity of the traffic to their home. Respectful fellows, I thought.
After that, I made it habit to glance up at the beehive anytime I was near. But a week later, I looked up and saw only destruction. Someone had lain waste to the home of the bees. The honeycomb had split open, revealing the hectagonal artwork within, and only fragments of the hive remained in the tree.
A quick look about me found the bulk of the hive in a shrub alongside the pathway, along with the rest of the ruined honeycomb. It wasn’t a hive anymore, so much as a lump of hive pieces. It was dripping with what I could only assume was water from a powerful hose commissioned for use by the homeowners’ association.
There were dozens if not hundreds of bees laying black and silent and dead in the bushes with the remains of their home. Still now it looks like a mass graveyard, a killing field.