Georgia Riordan
The Bumbley Jar
My daughter keeps a jar of bees in the bathroom. She caught them all herself. I’m not entirely sure how my five-year-old managed to convince twenty-some honeybees into a glass jar without being stung even once, but now they live on the shelf above the toilet. Every trip she makes to the bathroom, she pulls her squatty-potty-step-stool over to the front of the commode so she can wave hi to her bee friends. I don’t have many friends who would enjoy such frequent visitation, but the bees never seem agitated. They simply bumble around their glass prison, occasionally colliding into themselves or the wall.
It’s a little unnerving to use the bathroom beside a constant hum of honeybees.
I’ve never been a fan of bees. One of my friends growing up had been severely allergic, and though she always had an EPIPen in her overalls pocket or her star-shaped backpack, she died from a bee sting in second grade. She collapsed on the dodgeball field and the adults couldn’t get to her in time. I don’t think second graders should be allowed to die. I don’t think something as small as a bee should be a killer. Although there’s some satisfaction to her death: both she and her killer died within minutes of each other.
My daughter, however, finds all bee types wonderful. She’s obsessed with their stripes and their sounds and their fascination with flowers. Her bedroom is decorated floor to ceiling with a garden theme. She has bee-print everything—leggings, socks, underwear, blankets, pillowcases, even a few of her stuffies are decorated with little embroidered flowers and bumbles. My mother used to say that it was because my daughter was meant to be born in spring. I think she’s just going through a phase. A phase that’s lasted seventy-five percent of her lifetime, sure, but hopefully one she’ll outgrow.
When she first appeared with the jar of bees, she carried them around with her like she used to carry her baby blanket. My mother always got a raspy laugh out of my miniature trailing around with a jar of bees bigger than her head. My daughter would blow little breaths into the top of the jar, smiling as the bees moved away from her goldfish-and-apple-juice breath. Then she’d give my mother a turn and the bees would all crowd themselves towards the lid, much to my daughter’s jealousy. To compete with the bees’s unusual attraction to my mother, my daughter would have tea time with them, play dolls with them, even go to sleep with them on her nightstand. I don’t know whether she keeps track of the bees’ names. She mostly just calls the swarm her ‘bumbley jar.’ She wouldn’t leave the house without her bumbles. I used to seatbelt the jar into the backseat with her, listening to the bees try to match the hum of the car engine and longing for the days of her incorporeal imaginary friends.
I had to put my foot down at the funeral. For eight weeks, she had been carrying that goddamn jar of bees with her everywhere but school—her kindergarten teacher, thank god, had explained to her very gently that the other kids were scared of the bees, even if she wasn’t. I couldn’t bear taking a jar of bees—miraculously still alive bees, not a single one missing—to my mother’s funeral. It was too much. My daughter screamed like she was being burned alive when I told her the jar had to stay home. “But my bumbles love Grandma!” she shrieked, throwing herself on the floor in protest. It took both my sister and me to end the tantrum.
“Just let her bring the bees, Nic,” my sister said, but I was adamant. It wasn’t cute anymore. My sister, in her wonderful single-auntie way, managed to convince my daughter that the jar could be seen from heaven atop our bathroom shelf, and so there the bumbley jar went. I decided I’d release them after the funeral. My daughter couldn’t see the shelf unless she climbed up. She would never know.
After the service, and after everyone had finally left the house, I crept upstairs to the bathroom, thinking my daughter was still downstairs with my sister. But she was on the floor, her little hands smudging the sides of the bumbley jar, desperately huffing into the holed lid. I sat down with her. “What are we doing?” I asked.
“Making sure I’m not sick,” she said plainly. She blew another gust of air into the lid. The bees moved away from her, carelessly moving to the bottom of the jar. She looked up at me, her eyes the same soft brown as my mother’s. “They told Grandma she was sick.”
I remembered, suddenly, an old wives’ tale my mother often told us when she gardened. After my sister and I had witnessed our friend’s bee-sting death, we cowered away from the creatures, huddled in the sweat-and-dirt corner of our mother’s plot. Our mother tried to ease our fears. Bees can smell sickness, she used to say. They’re drawn to it. They’ll leave you alone if you smell healthy. I wondered when she’d shared this information with my little one.“Let me try,” I said to my daughter, and she handed over the jar.
I held the jar at an arm’s length, debating. I could take the jar outside now and smash it, releasing whatever bees survived the glass. Maybe they’d swarm me. Maybe they’d just fly away, unbothered, off to some flower or fruit that would feed them better than my daughter did. I looked at my daughter, who was watching me expectantly, her little eyebrows furrowed with impatience. I exhaled slowly into the jar. The bees all moved away from my breath, almost comically, like they smelled something they didn’t like. My daughter let out a whew. “Oh, good, Mommy,” she said. “You won’t die like Grandma.”
So the bees live in the bathroom now. Sometimes I mix a little water and sugar together and funnel it in through the holes. They seem to like it. We only check for ‘sickness’ once a week. It’s like a ritual: I bring the jar down and my daughter and I take turns blowing air into the bumbley jar. The bees fly away from us, we laugh in relief, the jar goes back above the toilet until next week.
But sometimes, after I’ve put her to bed, I grab hold of the bumbley jar and slowly breathe into it in weak, scared breaths.