From: Chuck Norton
To All:

>Today, at 10:39 EST (January 16, 2003), three shiny black bee
>astronauts (Arizona carpenter bees, Xylocopa c. arizonensis)  were
>launched from Pad 39-A into orbit on the STS-107 mission onboard the
>U.S. Space Shuttle Columbia. The human and pollinator astronauts
>will land.....

It has been a long time custom in Europe and parts of America to "Tell The
Bees" of a beekeepers death.  There were in space seven beekeepers who
tended their bees and now have departed from this Earth: The Crew OF
Columbia. As beekeepers of this wonderful planet Earth, let us take a
minute to go to our own hives and Tell the Bees.

Telling the Bees

Here is the place; right over the hill
    Runs the path I took;
You can see the gap in the old wall still,
    And the stepping-stones in the shallow brook.

There is the house, with the gate red-barred,
    And the poplars tall;
And the barn's brown length, and the cattle yard,
   And the white horns tossing above the wall.

There are the beehives ranged in the sun;
   And down by the Brink
Of the brook are her poor flowers, weed-o'errun,
   Pansy and daffodil, rose and pink.

A year has gone, as the tortoise goes,
   Heavy and slow;
And the same rose blows, and the same sun glows,
   And the same brook sings of a year ago.

There's the same sweet clover-smell in the breeze;
   And the June sun warm
Tangles his wings of fire in the trees,
   Setting as then, over Fernside farm.

I mind me how with a lover's care
   From my Sunday Coat
I brushed of the burrs, and smoothed my hair,
   And cooled at the brookside my brow and throat.

Since we parted, a month had passed,-
   To love, a year;
Down through the beeches I looked at last
   On the little red gate and the well-seep near.

I can see it all now,- the slantwise rain
   Of light through the leaves,
The sundown's blaze on her window-pane,
   The bloom of her roses under the eves.

Just the same as a month before,-
   The house and the trees,
The barn's brown gable, the vine by the door,-
   Nothing changed but the hives of bees.

Before them, under the garden wall,
   Forward and back,
Went drearily singing the chore-girl small,
   Draping each hive with a shred of black.

Trembling, I listened: the summer sun
   Had the chill of snow;
For I knew she was telling the bees of one
   Gone on the journey we all must go!

Then I said to myself, 'My Mary weeps
   For the dead to-day:
Haply her blind old grandsire sleeps
   The fret and pain of his age away.'

But her dog whined low; on the doorway sill,
   With his cane to his chin,
The old man sat; and the chore-girl still
   Sang to the bees stealing out and in.

And the song she was singing ever since
   In my ear sounds on:-
'Stay at home, pretty bees, fly not hence!
   Mistress Mary is dead and gone!

        John Greenleaf Whittier
        1807-1892