Putting Down Roots

 

Putting Down Roots

Noel Laflin

7-14-21

There’s an old plum tree stump that really needs to be removed one of these days as I could use the space to plant something new in its place.

I was already to do just that earlier this spring when a colony of bumble bees decided to move into the rotting stump and call it home.

As I like bumble bees - and as the planet is in dire need of every bee available for the foreseeable future - the removal project is on hold. Come the fall, the queen will leave this space and set up headquarters elsewhere – or so I have noticed with other hives around here in the past.

But suppose she decides to stay in her new home, tired of the constant moving. It’s pretty nice in there by now, I suppose, as I have been watching the workers enlarge the holes in which they come and go, burrowing down old termite tunnels, enlarging them with each passing.  It almost makes me wish I had a teeny-tiny drone that could fly into one of the holes and investigate, sending back pictures. It would be like a scene from the old classic, “Fantastic Voyage;” only I wouldn’t be on a miniaturized mission to unclog a dying man’s artery.  No, I would just like to see what’s going on inside the old tree that used to provide us with so many plums, and for now, the bumble bees call home.

So, we’ll hold off on tree stump removal for now.

And maybe longer if the queen decides that our garden is a pretty nice place to call home, and put down roots of a different sort from the ones that were here earlier.