Welcome to Emergence Magazine's podcast.

I'm Emanuel Vaughn Lee, host of this show, an executive editor of Emergence Magazine,

located on the unseated ancestral lands of the Coast Miwok people in present-day Marin County.

Each week, we feature interviews, stories, poetry, and author-narrated essays, exploring the threads connecting

ecology, culture, and spirituality. Referred to as sacred tears of a god, emissaries for the ancestors,

messenger carriers to the afterlife, bees have, for thousands upon thousands of

years, resided at the heart of our cultural practices, straddling life and death, the human

and the transcendent. Emergent from this relationship, and perhaps something of a lost

tradition now, is the folk practice of telling the bees,

where beekeepers would relay the news of a death in the family to each of their hives,

oftentimes draping them in the black cloths of mourning.

In this essay, Emily Polk wonders if, beyond merely receiving human grief, bees can share in it,

feeling pain, sadness, and sorrow themselves.

She meets with a famous Yemeni beekeeper in downtown Oakland, California, a man who cannot

only speak with great intergenerational knowledge about bees,

but can speak for them,

as well as scientists from around the globe studying bee behavior and cognition.

And she embarks on a journey into the profound connections

between humans and these tiny living beings.

How bees make our lives possible, exhibit emotional capacities akin to our own, and continue, despite the harm we cause them, to offer us lessons in generosity, adaptation, and the enduring spirit of survival.

I drive under the highway overpass at 30th Street, past two women in hijabs walking swiftly,

a Chinese man with his bike waiting at a bus stop, an exotic market promising cheap groceries,

...