(I’m sharing an older version of an essay I’ve rewritten and woven into my upcoming memoir on disability and ecology The Body is a Doorway. Photograph is by Ilana Silber featuring Jamie Lozoff)
A razzle of citrus. Cut grass. Spike of bergamot crushed between dogteeth. Star-scent. Shiver-musk. Your antennae quiver with sparkling electrons. You hum and skim through oak trees, singing with your whole body until you reach it: the hollowed out oak trunk. The place your brothers and sister have been covering with a perfume called “home”.
Swarming bees locate a new hive and attract the rest of the colony through the use of a pheromone called Nasanov that includes such familiar terpenoids as geraniol, nerolic acid, and citral acid. Produced by glands placed parenthetically around a worker bee’s stinger, beekeepers have noted that the Nasanov pheromone can be detected by a naked human nose and smells of lemongrass.