The honey won’t make itself, and so to the fields heavy with flower
to pack pollen in the sacks of their legs
load their stomachs with sweet nectar. Bees sustain

the hive by taking flight and swarm that way too:
lone messenger, tremor, and soon the queen
is gone. Some will follow. Some will stay rooted

to the same honey-thick walls where a new queen
will be sent forth on her nuptial flight,
small force of nature—a breeze that parts

your hair or slides a scrap of paper through a crack in the floor. 
She will find the hive again after mating, grow
too fat to fly, lay eggs for years, and never again

feel the sting of sun or ripple of wind off a drone’s back.
Instead, she births emissaries, little heralds of drought or storm
to clean her with saliva they feed on far away fields.

There are ways we taste the places we cannot see 
or touch, ingest industry that isn’t ours.
	Drop the honey to your tongue. Taste this field.