Sharing the nifty

Tonight was the (nearly) monthly meeting of the La Crosse Area Beekeepers Association. Now, to understand beekeepers, you have to understand that when they congregate, they are (in my experience) a very tight team. To watch a small handful of couples put up and take down the county fair exhibit, for instance, is to watch a small hive in action: Out of seeming chaos comes order.

But that has its downside. There were a few new faces at the table tonight: One a cousin of a current member, and others souls brave enough to walk into a meeting full of people they didn't know. There have been new faces at previous meetings that did not reappear. That's understandable (to a degree): You don't have to scratch much beyond the surface to reach the decidedly unromantic aspects of disease and parasites and neighbors obsessed with golf-course-calibre lawns. Not to mention the vigilance and know-how and ability to roll with Mother Nature's sucker-punches that literally takes years to develop.

But that's not to suggest that we don't have (ample) room for improvement. And one of the long-timers (my husband and me being but greenhorns of six years, you understand) kicked the "New Business" door wide open just as it was swinging shut by merely by asking why the demonstration portion of the meeting had seemingly fallen by the wayside. He was absolutely spot-on in that. Now, it crushes my inner bibliophile to write this, but there are, in fact, many, many things that simply cannot be learned from books. Even books with really good pictures. Wrangling thousands of tiny six-legged livestock most especially ranks among them.

But what happened in the wake of that suggestion darned near raised my hackles. You could feel the electricity go through the room at the prospect. Within minutes, the Secretary had dug out years' worth of group calendars, and was ticking off a list of past presentations. Ideas were batted back and forth (occasionally refined), the new faces were put on the spot to articulate exactly what they wanted to know. And, I fancy, each of us with bees was taken back to that moment when we stood with the hive equipment in front of us, wondering how we were supposed to transfer this package of insects from their tidy little box into their new home...and wondering still more how in Mordor we'd ever mistaken this for a Good Idea.

That's not to say that there isn't some ulterior motive in the enthusiasm. With all that evolution and globalization and human short-sightedness are bringing these days, a hidebound beekeeper is an out-of-business beekeeper. So I'm not surprised that I've seen presentations that were, frankly, kind of grueling for the presenter--more from the Wall O' Questions that came their way than from the natural fear of public speaking. But these folks have done this often enough to realize that it's a pittance to pay for their chance to tap others' curiosity and tinkering and--perhaps most of all--passion.

Maybe you don't care about honeybees or pollinators in general--although I seriously cannot grok why you wouldn't. But, doubtless. there's something in this world whose mere mention will capture your undivided attention--and never more so than when you can share it. Alas (for me), it's been awhile since I've seen that level of electricity in a crowd, large or small. So I wanted to share. Because the world needs all of that it can get. You know what I'm talking about: Don't waste any opportunity to help make more of it.