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“open your hand, lady of seeds that are days,
the day is immortal, it rises and grows,
it has just been born, its birth never ends,
each day is a birth, each dawn is a birth
and I am dawning, we are all dawning,
the sun dawns with the face of the sun”
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-Octavio Paz, from Piedra De Sol (Sunstone) © 1957, translated by Eliot Weinberger
The sun has reached its longest, standing still and high and full at sunset here in Devon. Everywhere the hedgerow flowers and grasses are spiraling upward. Tasseled, pollened, petals at their softest height. The green is maturing into birth. The moon has reached its monthly fullest too. We’ve been bathed these last days in an especially bright sky. Everything feels illuminated—and that’s not necessarily an easy feeling.
But I’ve been thinking about how inside my new hive, the little baby bees growing in their wax cells are bathed in royal jelly: a moon-white, shining manna that I’ve come to call “hive-milk.” After a few days, the nurse bees start to feed them other things, but the flow of royal jelly continues, swirling from special glands in young nurse bees (to be a nurse is the first role of a newly hatched bee; she emerges with these glands in place, like tiny apian milk ducts that produce their elixir from her nutrient-rich diet of pollen) to surround every newly laid egg, and to feed the adult Queen, who moves around the comb in spiral-like motions, laying up to 2,000 eggs a day.