Bee Lore

My brain ticked fast to work out what was going on, but it did not come up with an answer!  The only similar experience I had ever had like this was a few years before.  I was getting off a bus with a load of other people in (what was then called) Rhodesia in Africa.  The sun had dimmed like this and all the birds and insects in the nearby forest went silent – yet the sky was cloudless.  I had been a little more prepared on that occasion.  Someone had told me a week beforehand that a partial eclipse of the sun was going to take place on that day at 1.20pm in the afternoon – in the heat of the African day.  I had actually forgotten the prediction in the interim – but remembered as soon as I felt the dramatic drop in the mid-day heat.  I connected the ideas pretty quickly and once I explained the phenomenon to those around me, we all felt better.  There was a scientific explanation!  The most vivid memory was at the height of the partial eclipse – when the sun had made tens of thousands of crescent-shaped moons on the ground.  The leaves from the forest had acted like pinhole cameras – letting through just enough light to create a collage of tiny moon shapes.  Fifteen minutes later things were back to normal and all the birds and insects were back chattering at their normal volume of forest babble.  But now was different.  There were no birds and insects going silent……and in any case there was a lot more noise than before – not less.  Nor had there been any predictions of eclipses of the sun in the last few weeks.  I had studied science.  I needed to know what was going on!  But this time I could could find no easy explanation.