Cabbage palm June

Fiction. Sabal palmetto is the state tree. This bloom week is told as a story.

June in Orlando is already a furnace.

The cabbage palms do not care. They throw their flower stalks anyway, long branched things the color of old bone, packed with cream florets. The smell is not perfume. It is pollen and nectar and a faint rankness, like a wet dog that has been useful.

The first scout found the nearest palm on a Tuesday, two lots over, in a strip of sand the county calls a park. She came home heavy. She danced a short, fierce map. The hive emptied a portion of its foragers into that heading and kept emptying them for days.

A cabbage palm in bloom is a loud machine.

Stand under one and you hear it. Bees, wasps, flies, beetles. The cream heads crawl. The fans of the palm clack in the I-4 wind even this far from the interstate. Heat comes up from the asphalt and the sand. Afternoon rain is a rumor until it is not.

The foragers worked the florets like a line with no line. Land. Probe. Shift. The nectar is thin and there is a lot of it. That is the bargain of a mast year, or a mast week, which is what this is. One tree can feed a yard of hives if the weather holds.

It held through Thursday.

On Friday the wall of rain came at three, same as always, and the bees raced it, and the palm hissed in the wet, and then the sun returned and the cream was still there, dripping, open, paying.

A nurse at the comb took load after load. The cells filled. The smell of the hive shifted toward palm, which is a smell you would not bottle and would still be glad of in January when the Bidens is thin and the citrus is a memory.

People walked under the tree and complained about bees. The bees did not complain about people. They had a week. They used it.

By the next Wednesday the cream was going off. Florets browned. The loudness dropped by half, then by more. A scout still checked the stalks. She came home with less. The dance got shorter, then stopped being worth the floor.

The hive did not mourn the palm. It moved the map. Spanish needles in a vacant lot. A lime in a side yard that had a few late flowers. Water from the saucer, because June is thirst as much as it is bloom.

The cabbage palm stood in the park with its spent stalks, looking like a broom that had worked. It would fruit later, black drupes the raccoons would argue over. That was not the bees' business.

Their business had been six days of cream and noise and a landing board that never dried.

In Orlando the big flows are not polite. They arrive, they deafen a tree, they quit. The colony that was there, and fast, and unsentimental, keeps the stores. The colony that waited for a nicer flower keeps less.

The scout, on the seventh morning, passed the palm on her way to the lot. She did not land. The job had moved.