Illustrated fable mixing facts and fiction
Nightmare at the hotel for insects
Starts as a fairy tale, ends with deeper meanings.
A young bee got lost late in the evening. While flying around looking for her beehive, she came across a lone-traveling bee who offered shelter in her cave, under the soil of a pot in the garden of some remote apartment “up there in the 7th floor”. Lost but still with the hope of finding her home, the bee replied with a gentle negative, thinking to herself “I’m no leafcutter bee.” And kept flying around as the dusk turned in.
Soon it was dark. Coping with anxiety and fear like no other, when the night was imminent our bee protagonist decided to search a hotel for insects where to spend the night.
She was lucky to find a hotel so quickly, so she came in and approached the desk at the reception. A mantis, the concierge, welcomed her and asked if she had a reservation. The mantis rubbed its claws nervously, which the bee interpreted as hiding something terrible. Female mantises are, she remembered, famous for eating their males’ heads after mating. And the whole setting looked a bit terrifying, with weird drawings of incomplete animal-like shapes in the paintings hanging on the walls including one curious hybrid between bee, bug and ant.
Of course the bee had not booked. Yet the mantis-came-concierge told her not to worry: there was a room available. It was a comfy little nest inside a piece of a pine tree’s branch, with the enjoyable fragrance they offer. The bee accepted the room and spent the night there. Although she felt alone, far from her beehive, she was thankful that she didn’t have to spend the night in the dangers of the dark. And after a few minutes that felt like hours of fear, she fell asleep. In her dreams she remembered the claws of the mantis concierge, afraid it would get into the room and rip her apart. But she was so exhausted of her last hours flying around to find her home, that she could simply not wake up from her nightmare.
The next morning she finally woke up. She ran by the reception desk and dropped the coins that paid her stay, without talking to anybody, let alone the concierge, and not even making eye contact with the other guests or the hotel staff. The still young and vigorous bee didn’t even have breakfast, and just left. The morning was brightly sunny, so she could sharpen her compass and navigate back home with no problems other than deciding on a few turns here and there, as she began to remember places she had seen the previous day while flying around lost. The path wasn’t complicated, if the sun shone.
When she arrived to the home beehive, the queen, fellow workers and drones, all family and friends of her, welcomed her and partied together. It had been a single night, but that’s analogous to several months for a human, considering the short lifespans of bees.
Despite the joy of the celebration, the bee could never forget the trauma of being lost at the dusk that evening. She never again left the beehive without ample time of sunlight to return.
Weeks later, she was getting old but still remembered that feeling very sharply. Every time she talked to her family and friends, she would always came back to the same story and feelings, as if it all were just a never-ending bad memory. She sometimes wondered if accepting the leafcutter’s invitation would have made the whole thing different, resulting in a relaxed life now.
A few weeks more, and this creepy and sad story from her youth was now the only one left to tell. Now it was all about the traumatizing experience. Only on very rare occasions would she remember about the leafcutter’s invitation, bringing that “what if” feeling.
Within a few days, just nothing else went through her mind. And it eventually would all be left behind, until one day she opened up her eyes to a heaven of flowers shining ultraviolet.
Some facts and articles that inspired this story
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