The Ardent Swarm

by Yamen Manai

What was easier to hijack than democracy? Like most things in the world of men, democracy was principally a question of money, and the prince had plenty.

The villagers were completely discombobulated. Most of them hadn’t even chosen their spouses, and now they were meant to choose who would govern them.

Wild queens are more resistant and more vivacious than their domesticated cousins, and the generations they beget strengthen hives against scourge and disease.

Like many other scourges that flourished hand in hand with lucrative trades, the Varroa took advantage of the commerce in bees, now just another commodity, to legally cross borders. This leech passed through customs astride domesticated European bees, the Apis mellifera, which were imported into the country en masse because they were more docile and better producers than the North African intermissa, their bad-tempered local cousins, who had never encountered the parasite.

The newly introduced acarids found themselves ferried to wherever flowers bloomed, easily jumping from one forager bee to another, contaminating the intermissa; it only took two decades for the Varroa to strike every hive in the country. As with every curse, the victim was also the vehicle for conquest and expansion.

“What you lose in strength, you gain in clear-sightedness. The trick is to reach the age of wisdom while you’re still strong enough to do things.”

‘God blesses the man of good deeds, and men bless the man of many sheep!’

Of the bear it is said that when he goes to a beehive for honey and the bees begin to sting him, he forgets about the honey and concentrates on revenge; and, because he wishes to revenge himself on all the bees that sting him, he succeeds in revenging himself upon none of them. Whereupon his anger turns into rage and he throws himself on the ground helplessly clawing the air with his paws. Leonardo da Vinci Bestiary

Once again, man, in search of land, gave the plague to his fellow man in the folds of his offerings.

She felt like they were worshipping a God of hate and punishment, while hers was one of love and mercy.

The religious competencies of its ministers didn’t solve a single economic or social problem, and in many respects, the situation worsened. The country remained mired in poverty and its young people in unemployment, while the violence of a fringe of radicals and their hate-filled discourse proliferated with the leaders’ complacency. Within the dream of prosperity and tolerance, nothing remained of fragile democracy but the illusory right to talk shit.

“Like our bees that have to coexist with the giant hornets, we are a people who must coexist with the flaws in the earth—earthquakes, tsunamis, volcanic eruptions—and with war, the flaw of human nature. We know that our archipelago is fragile, that our existence is fragile, and that the survivors must always rebuild. We are a people well versed in catastrophes, Professor. The ‘other’ is none other than ourselves, a survivor and a partner.