The thing about the shape of a bee, which might be why it is often drawn curved around a flower with the black head bowed over the thorax and the knees tucked in lovely and benign as a comma, lucent wings arching from stripes furred to catch pollen blurring with light, is that the shape of the bee is like the honey it makes, sweet, healing, golden-lit from within such that a bee fallen dead on the rug or balled along the base of a window frame still holds the comma shape, and while it may be that
bees like to sleep with other bees holding their feet
it is not how we think of bees, sleeping like new babies, we think of bees at work, laboring, and maybe that is the thing, right there, the thing that persists in their own minds, too, how bees think of themselves, abuzz in the hive keeping away invaders or tidying the chambers or collecting some pollen, working
