Being a Bee

And other natural problems

Spiders Are Spinners and To Be a Bee by Ellsworth Rosen, illustrated by Teco Slagboom

Bees and spiders are interesting because, in its own way, all nature is interesting. The nature of small things, beetling about, flying around. I will tell you a little more, if I may, of encounters with spiders. We all encounter spiders. We see them around. But these spiders, perhaps you will agree, did more than just that. They were friends, in a way, friends of the moment. Thrown together by circumstance: that’s what we were. I’ll tell you a little more about each of them.

I don’t remember the first time I was scared by a spider, but I imagine I must have been very young. Spiders, when you first see them, move so fast. That’s what I must have thought, as a child. They move so fast and they walk over your hands and face fast, too. But I have no more specific memories of spiders from that age.

What I remember later is innumerable moments of seeing spider-silk trailing in long streams down from ceilings or lights. Sometimes, the thread would have nothing on it. But on occasion, it would be being spun by a spider, a spider rappelling or abseiling down from the roof or from the arm of a chair or from a dining-room table. I would watch these performances. Sometimes, if I were feeling intrigued, I would take a pen or a wooden ruler and I would cut the thread as the spider spun down on it like an acrobat performing corde lisse.

Never, at least that I remember, did the spider and thread fall. They never fell like the baby and the cradle from the treetop. No, the thread would be stickier than all that, and it would adhere to the ruler or the pen that I used to sever the silk, and the spider would then be involuntarily transported by me to wherever I decided to put it down. And I always did put it down quite gently.

Aside from that, I don’t remember much on the question of spiders from my early childhood.

But I do remember a spider that I found in a room of a house I lived in once with my family. I remember the immensity of this spider. It was a big, hefty thing, with legs that shot out in all directions. And it was fast-moving. Its legs were bent, as if with elasticity, like an Olympic pole-vaulter on the final approach, about to spring. By this time, I’d been cultivating a hatred of seeing people kill insects. I don’t know why. Perhaps I identified with the insects too much.

But as I went off, looking for a glass to catch the spider beneath, I had a problem. I could not find one big enough, one with an immense enough aperture. It took quite a bit of looking; and then quite a bit more looking, after I’d secured glass, to find paper stiff enough to contain this monster, so I could save its life and restore it to the outside world.

When I finally did creep closer and closer to this spider, I feared it would leap away and I’d have to hunt it. Rats do this when pursued. As I have learnt.

Often I had to hunt flies whose lives I wanted to spare. They’d hide behind curtains or disappear behind sofas. They’d whack into the only window panes that didn’t open as I tried to shoo them out of a window that did. Flies were not cooperative. But this spider was.

I thought it was a spider big man, ready to leap. But perhaps its size was deceptive. It’s possible it was just a portly gentleman unwilling to be perturbed. Although it ran around a little, this spider let me trap it. Only then did it go crazy, rearing up on hind (if spiders can have hind) legs and smacking the glass with its limbs. I believe, although I wouldn’t swear to it, that the glass moved.

Eventually, after I had taken some photographs, I picked up the glass and piece-of-stiff-paper combination, and walked with no small trepidation out to the sliding doors. I may have put the glass and paper combo down to slide the doors open. I may have asked someone else to do it. But the doors did their job. They slid open and stayed open. And then, in a single motion, I pulled the stiff paper off the lid of the glass (now helpfully inverted) and gave the glass a bit of a shake. The spider flew out of the aperture, out into the darkness, arcing towards the gravel.

And you’ll have to believe me on this, readers, when I say that this spider was so big, so massive, that when it landed on the gravel I heard the sound of its impact. It skittered away, I’m sure, off to have yet more fascinating big spider adventures.

I have less interesting stories about bees. Whether I have ever been stung by one is a question for the scientists. I suppose I must have been. And I have a vague, but surprisingly bright and piercing, memory of terrible pain from a sting. But that might have been from nettles of wasps, neither of whom I liked as a child.

Mostly, bees bonk against windows, a little like flies, and if they’re very big, they sound like lawnmowers, especially if they’re expiring noisily inside or behind a metal wastepaper basket in a holiday chalet in rural England. And I would know.

These books are very charming. They’re illustrated with artistry and wit. I enjoyed them very much and would recommend them with pleasure, if you asked.