Peon Bees or Worker Bees, what would you call them?

I love the honeybee because of its irreplaceable link in the chain of life, just as I appreciate that the scientific principle of cell wall integrity enables a world of diverse and beautiful forms instead of a vast pool of primordial pea soup covering the earth's surface.

That's not to say I don't like pea soup, provided it can be eaten with a spoon and not a fork.

Today, as I browsed NPR's online web site, I was amused listening to There's A Fly In My Urinal. In this story, I found out that the men's (Need I really say men's when I speak of urinals?) urinals in Schiphol, the Netherlands, have small etchings of a fly, one per urinal, embedded in the porcelain. There is a practical reason for this, although some urinals are designed as objets d'art.

These designs are not a trademark like the Izod alligator. They are there for a psychological reason. It seems that men need to aim for something. Without a specific goal or target, things can get messy.

In their radio program, NPR does not use the word piss. They say pee so as not to offend the sensibilities of their listeners. As an example of piss, I offer pissoir, a word taken from the French. It means a public urinal. Lots of Americans would prefer not to pronounce this word, probably because it relates to a bodily function, an uncomfortable subject for some.

Consider the Middle English word Pes meaning something like this or that. Imagine having to read out the conjugation of this word:

Case Masc. Fem. Neut.

Nominative pes peos pis

Genitive pisses pisse pisses

The Latin word pes means foot in English.There is also the expression the fly on the wall. Can he hear you? Aren't you glad that fly can't see you? He can't, can he?

P.S. Don't forget to button your fly. Straighten up and fly right.

Maybe men are just trying to clean things up by washing the fly away.

If there is such a strong impetus of the male toward a goal, maybe a psychologist or even a team of psychologists could figure out a way to use this instinct to engineer a striving for world peace, target date 2011.

It seems that possibly, deep in the primeval cave known as the mind of man, there is an urge to keep things down by, well, by pissing on them. There is an expression to that effect.

The same action can be found in the animal kingdom in regards to scent-marking territorial turf.

Of course, this doesn't apply to any of the men I know. None of them live in man-caves formerly inhabited by bears who fled in terror, so there is no reason for them to be offended at the suggestion that some men are primitives.

It turns out that the genus Apis from the "tribe" Apini, known mostly as the bee, is also found in urinals. One source dates its origin as far back as Victorian times. By this, I mean the urinal with the bee in it, not the bee itself. Apis also means a sacred bull. Language can be so confusing.

An online picture of a urinal disguised as a large flower, maybe a poppy, tulip, or calla lily only complicates the subject, because flowers are supposed to draw bees. That will give the bees something at which to aim.

In the end, one must ask if men and boys are around, is your garden safe? How safe are the bees?