Design Editor
About 34 years ago, two men moved into a basement apartment in a triplex at the end of a dirt road in Chapel Hill.
After turning on the light in the new kitchen, bees came out of the light fixtures. It was not until a beekeeper was called to retrieve the insects that they swarmed onto a tree, inspiring poet Jeffery Beam to write his collection of poems, “Life of the Bee.”
Sunday he will recite five of the 12 poems — along with others from a variety of authors — at a reading titled “Bee, I’m Expecting You” at the N.C. Botanical Garden as part of their Saving Our Pollinators program series.
“That event in the basement was the beginning of all of it,” Beam said. “My poetry is nature based, so all of it before that time and everything after has really been focused on the natural world. I was just primed, really, for an event like that to sort of grab my imagination.”
It was this passion for nature that persuaded Nancy Easterling, director of education for the garden, and other garden directors to reach out to Beam to perform the reading again.
“Jeffery, as a poet — his heart and soul is infused into this natural world of ours,” Easterling said. “He really understands the mission of the garden and how he can bring this poetry to the garden in an interesting way.”
This reading is one in a series of 29 events to help inform the public on the importance of pollinators and their preservation.