The translation was done by computer.
Preliminary Clarifications to the Trilogy.
Davo
Tao of the Wise Bee.
Dedicated to my grandfather — Nikolai.
As long as I can remember, my grandfather always had an apiary. When he started, I don’t know, but judging by his experience, by his attitude towards bees, he had been doing this for decades.
His apiary was located about 70 kilometers from his house. In a village with a hard-to-pronounce name. In the garden of his good friend.
When the spring season started, grandfather always went to the apiary early in the morning once a week, driving his car. On such days, grandma, uncles, and aunts quietly went about their business, but towards evening, everyone gradually became restless.
At some point, for some reason, the grandmother silently opened the gate and left it open.
When a real late summer warm evening arrived, everyone gathered in the yard by the porch. They discussed something, but their voices became more and more worried.
(There was no mobile phone service at that time. Just regular phones in some houses. That’s all.)
But suddenly, first the headlights appeared from around the corner, and then a car. It drove tiredly into the yard, all dusty and very hot.
(There has never been a time when the headlights did not appear around a bend.)
Grandfather came out. He was also all dusty and very tired. But at that moment there was always some special sparkle in his eyes. This light in the grandfather’s eyes was always there, despite the enormous fatigue.
Grandma was in the kitchen quickly setting dinner, but Grandpa didn’t hurry inside. He talked to everyone at the porch for quite a long time.
That’s about what happened every week.
But sometimes (2 or 3 times a season) grandfather got out of the car and told everyone that he had decided to pump honey next week.
What did that mean? We assembled a team of 4-5 people, prepared equipment, large pots, cans and much more, and set off in two cars for the whole day to do quite heavy work in the heat of the sun.
When I was in the 2nd grade during the summer holidays, once again announcing to everyone that it was time to extract honey, my grandfather pulled me to him, hugged me and said that I was already an adult, and that this time they would also take me to the apiary.
All week I was filled with polar feelings. On the one hand, I was proud. After all, I was the first of all the grandchildren to be taken on such a serious job. But at the same time, I was overcome by a terrible fear of bees in such large numbers.
It was a bright sunny day. This is excellent weather for working in the apiary.
We arrived at the place. The owner of the house provided us with his shed. Having at least some kind of room is very important when pumping honey.
There were windows in this shed. They had glass, but each one was missing one glass. The door was made of rough planks with huge gaps. I also counted 3 large holes in the walls of the barn.
All this worried me very much. But my grandfather didn’t pay any attention to all these «problems». My mother, noticing my fear, tried to fix all this as much as possible — she covered the door with something, and did something with the windows without glass too. But it is clear that the holes remained.
Grandfather was the main one. He opened the hives, selected the necessary frames and handed them to my father. My father put them in a pre-prepared box with a lid and brought them to our shed. My mother used a special fork to open the honeycombs and pass the frames to me.
I had to work on the honey extractor (insert frames into it, turn the handle and pull out frames) and in no case lag behind, so as not to disrupt the rhythm of the work of the entire team.
Although my grandfather shook the bees whenever possible, and my father used some kind of brush to remove the bees from the frame and only then put them in a box, but in any case there were quite a lot of bees on the frame. That’s how they got into our barn.
At first I whined and whined. My mother tried to calm me down with persuasion, but in vain. When my father came in again, he understood everything by the amount of accumulated frames. He growled at me and ran on to grandfather. Злой рык отца помог, но только на 5 минут.
Later, everyone stopped paying attention to my whining – they were not up to it. They just pushed me around, demanding that I keep up with the limits. Very soon, I realized the seriousness of the situation and practically stopped reacting to the bees flying around.
Having calmed down, I gradually began to look at everything with different eyes. I began to observe everything that was happening around me.
The whole apiary was buzzing. Crazy bees were flying everywhere. But most of all there were bees around our little shed. Especially by the door.
I noticed that every time the door was opened, at least one bee managed to fly inside. I was trying to trace their path inside the barn. After making 2-3 circles, they would sit on something with honey. After sitting for a while (probably gobbling up honey), they took off, made 2-3 circles again, rested against the bright sunny glass and buzzed there endlessly until they fell down, completely exhausted. By evening, quite a large number of dead bees had accumulated below the windows.
There were, of course, other scenarios, but for most of the bees that flew inside, everything happened roughly like this.
But during the day, I definitely saw several times how some bees managed to find THEIR WAY OUT OF the BARN.
By evening, we finally finished work, packed everything up and loaded it into the cars, sat down to have a snack and rest a little before the trip home. Then my grandfather asked me to tell him about my impressions of the day. After all, I found myself in such circumstances for the first time, so I should have new impressions that I had never experienced before. I told him in detail my observations of bees. He listened with great attention and then asked: what conclusions can be drawn from this? And I explained to my grandfather everything I had thought of that day.
Conclusions of a 9-year-old boy (unchanged). Please don’t judge harshly.
There is a large mass of bees. Each of them has the most important goal — to find delicious honey. And the more, the better. Information came in – where there is a lot of honey. And everyone flew there. They arrived. It turns out that the honey is inside some strange barn. Everyone starts looking for a way to get inside. And a small percentage of bees succeed.
It can be concluded that the vast majority of bees have an average level of «intelligence». But this level is not enough to find a way to get inside. They were left hungry. They had wasted their time and energy all day flying around the barn. Tomorrow morning they will have to fly far into the field again and search with difficulty for a little honey.
But there is a very small fraction of bees that are a SLIGHTLY smarter than the average bee. They have managed to find a way to get inside. They got a lot of honey. They seem to be doing well. But by evening, most of the SLIGHTLY «smart» bees die.
But even among smart bees, there is a small percentage of «WISE» bees who were able to find a way in, eat honey, and then find a way out.
It turns out that it is better to be just an ordinary bee than to be a “slightly smart” bee. A small excess of intelligence leads to negative results.
We won’t talk about «wise» bees. Everything is clear here.
P.S.
I didn’t tell my grandfather about this then.
The fact is that on that day, my mother opened the windows several times during the day so that the bees buzzing near the glass could fly out.
In human life it is called luck, fortune, jackpot, GOD’S BLESSING.
