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By: Stephen Bishop
The streams have crossed. For once in the last month, my ability to generate enough mental brainpower to write has exceeded my son’s ability to mentally exhaust me. Four-year-old boys seem to have an infinite energy supply, or maybe they just have a superhuman ability to siphon the energy from all the adults in their proximity.
I’m in awe of the brainpower that my son generates for his imagination. I asked my wife why it is that kids have such incredible imaginations while most adults these days have about as much imagination as a turnip. She said it has something to do with responsibilities, bills and social media. I was thinking it had something to do with the ants invading the house.
Truly, it is hard to be imaginative when you’re in the midst of a territorial conflict with arthropods. The ants established a beachhead along the doorjamb of the back porch and then made an excursion onto the porch to raze and pillage the cat food dish. Thomas was the first to spot the enemy, and he quickly reported back their movements to high command, “Mom! Mom! There are a hundred ants eating Bunty’s cat food.” Thomas still struggles with numbers — the true number was closer to a gazillion ants eating Bunty’s cat food, but other than that minor detail the report proved accurate, and soon high command had given me simple orders to defend our sovereign territory by any means necessary. “Kill them,” she said.
As a happily-married man, I no longer bother to ponder the moral implications of my wife’s orders and spent little time reflecting on the suffering I was about to rain down on that column of invading ants. And, let’s face it, as a battle-hardened beekeeper I have killed a lot of bugs in my day. I have accidentally squashed thousands of bees, rolled a few queens, killed countless varroa mites and gleefully smashed small hive beetles with a hive tool (talk about morally bankrupt).
But all’s fair in love and beekeeping. To keep one arthropod alive we’ve got to be fanatical about killing another. It’s a strange world we live in. But I reckon our ability to wrestle with (if not rationalize) the moral implications of our actions is what really separates us from the arthropods. I doubt varroa mites ponder deeply the repercussions of their blood-sucking habits or feel much guilt when they cause a colony of bees to collapse. Which makes me wonder why I should feel any guilt for killing them?
But sometimes in a moment of weakness, I do feel a slight tinge of guilt for killing something that is just trying to exist, even if varroa’s very existence is at cross-purposes to my desire to build a sideline beekeeping empire and sell honey to the local masses, to one day quit my day-job and live on the bounty of the bees. Sometimes I even feel a little remorse for the critter — I’m thinking it’s a racoon? — that is knocking my hive-top bucket feeders off my hives at night. If I ever catch it, I’m not sure what I’ll do with it — should I off it, or maybe I should just relocate it to the general vicinity of my least favorite county commissioner?
Needless to say, if you’ve made it this far, these are the thoughts of a sleep-deprived and mentally exhausted father of a four-year-old boy. Obviously I’m not thinking clearly. In fact, I was actually thinking of giving my four-year-old son some unsupervised play-time so I could try to stow away and finish writing this article—and then he asked me if he could climb inside the chimney, so I will stop now and leave the moral quandaries of beekeeping for another day.
