Catching A Bee In A Box: Epilogue

(This is a story I told here before, but it didn't have a proper ending. It finally came to an end this week, which I've added in an epilogue.)

Catching a bug in a box is something anyone can do, but catching a bee is the kind of thing you can only do when there aren't adults watching your every move.

They won't let you try because, they say, You'll get stung, but Isabella didn't get stung which makes everyone think adults don't know what they're talking about, or that Isabella is a kind of super kid, or that grown-ups have a bad habit of speaking their worries as truth instead of what they are: farfetched anti-hopes.

The bee was crawling through the dust. Isabella got the bug box and carefully scooped the bee into it, quickly screwing on the lid. You could almost hear everyone's hearts beating while she did it. That's how to catch a bee so you don't get stung.

She let all the kids hold it so we could see it up close, tap on the plastic, and view it through the magnifier on the top. We showed it to everyone because everyone needs to see a bee in a box, even the little kids who don't even care how dangerous it is to have a bee this close to you.

See? See it? See the bee? We need to find some honey so we can feed it. That's what bees eat. Do we have any honey Teacher Tom? I know, let's pick a little flower and stick the stem through one of the air holes.

Maybe it'll eat that. I don't know. Maybe. It'll have to eat something or it will die. Hey, let's take it into the bushes and hang it from a branch. That's what we ought to do with the bee Isabella caught in a box when the grown-ups weren't looking. Then we'll check on it tomorrow.

Epilogue

Teacher Tom didn't want to wait until tomorrow, so he climbed up in the bushes to look for the bee in the box that we hung from a branch, but he couldn't find it. He asked us where it was, but none of us knew. When he told us it would die if we don't let it go, we looked for it too, but finally decided one of the little kids must have taken it. We asked them, but they just wanted to dig in the sand or play in the boat.

The summer ended and when fall came we were different kids, except for some of the little ones who didn't remember anything about the bee Isabella caught in the box. The leaves have all fallen from the bushes now and winter is almost here. Mason found the box that had been hidden by leaves and hung it around his neck like a necklace. He didn't know there was a bee in there. Teacher Tom said, "Hey, there's a dead bee in that box." Some of us wanted to look at it. Some of us didn't think it looked like a bee and said, "That isn't a bee."

Teacher Tom said, yes it was a bee. He asked, "What should we do with it?" No one knew. He suggested that we bury it in the ground, but no one wanted to do that. Then Nina said we should hang it back where Mason found it because "That's its home." So that's what we did.

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