A Metaphor: Growth, not Grievance.

They were both busy, you see. Wings blurring, legs twitching, antennae tuned to the frequency of purpose. The flies, bless them, swarmed with the devotion of unpaid interns in a collapsing bureaucracy. The bumblebees, meanwhile, moved like fat dancers on a secret mission of grace. All effort. All focus. One camp scavenging through rot like it was a career path. The other? Serenading the blooms of life with the hum of unspoken poetry.

Now, to the casual observer, they might look similar. Both airborne. Both industrious. Both buzzing like something had upset their subscription to inner peace. But the comparison ends the moment you step closer.

The flies, forever finding tragedy in the compost heap, were drawn to the fetid, the festering, the failed. They could locate a metaphorical corpse in a cathedral. And they’d live-tweet its decomposition, complete with charts, outrage, and a Change.org petition to ban lilies.

They don’t mean harm, the flies. Not really. They’re just convinced that to be informed is to be miserable. That outrage is a civic duty. That smiling in public is like farting during a eulogy: technically harmless, but unforgivable. They call it vigilance. Others might call it doomscrolling with wings.

For them, joy is suspicious. Beauty? A distraction. Optimism? A gateway drug to ignorance. Flies believe that if you’re not ankle-deep in decay, you’re part of the cover-up. And if you are paying attention, you should be shouting, sweating, and preferably foaming at the mandibles.

Flies Miss What Bees Know

The bumblebees, on the other hand, don’t shout. They don’t hashtag. They don’t launch petitions against daffodils for underrepresentation. They don’t audit rose petals for unconscious bias. They just get on with it. Pollinating futures. Gathering sweetness. Floating from daisy to dahlia like drunken philosophers who’ve remembered the meaning of life but mislaid the vocabulary.

They aren’t ignoring the world’s problems; they’re just preoccupied with feeding it. Theirs is a form of activism too—just not the kind that performs well in outrage metrics. You won’t find them on panels, but you’ll find them in gardens, humming a low-frequency hymn to continuity.

And naturally, this infuriates the flies.

“Why aren’t you commenting on the rising mould levels?” buzz the flies.
“Why won’t you condemn the chrysanthemums for their privilege?”
“Why won’t you acknowledge the stench beneath the petals?”

The bees bumble politely on.

It’s not that they’re above the fray. It’s just that they’ve mastered the ancient art of not giving their energy to every passing stink. They are, in their own quiet way, fluent in the economy of effort. And some arguments, frankly, aren’t worth the wingbeats.

Flies Don’t Create—They Critique

The flies accuse them of ‘floral exceptionalism’. Of ‘nectar privilege’. Of hiding behind pollen to avoid responsibility. The bees decline to respond. Not out of disdain, but because they’re mid-choreography—performing an eight-step interpretive waggle-dance to direct a colleague to the lavender bush.

The flies host symposia on decomposition. They convene panels on the ethics of petals. They publish op-eds titled ‘Why Tulips Is a Tool of the Patriarchy’ and moderate forums with usernames like @DecayMatters and @WokeOnMould.

The bees? They keep pollinating. Because when you’re engaged in the act of creation—of propagation, of connection, of beauty—you rarely pause to explain your palette to critics who specialise in compost. You don’t measure joy in decibels. You measure it in fruit. That’s the real divide: flies analyse. Bees alchemise.

Now, to be fair, the flies have their place. Decay is part of the cycle. Someone has to break things down. But the job of decomposition is not the same as the calling of cultivation. And when flies demand that bees validate their fascination with filth, something’s gone off.

It’s like asking the sun to cast longer shadows so the pessimists don’t feel left out. Or blaming a candle for not lighting the entire sewer system. Or calling a sunrise elitist. The bees aren’t naïve. They just don’t confuse noise with nuance. Or motion with meaning. They know what the flies don’t: that light doesn’t argue with darkness. It just shines.

So, here’s the bit the flies can’t grasp:

Beauty doesn’t hold press conferences. It blooms.

The bumblebees get on with all of it. They fly focussed, unfazed, with grace and grit.

They don’t explain why flowers don’t smell like shit.