Beach House, Spring 2024

Provincetown Independent | BEACH / HOUSE | Spring 2024 | 3
ON THE LANDSCAPE
The Bee and the Beach Plum
By Kai Potter
The dunes of the Province Lands were in full
bloom. It was May, and the tops of the sandy
hills were crested pink with Rosa rugosa.
Beach plum, covered in fluffy white blooms, settled
in the dips and lowlands like snowdrifts left in the
melting days after a blizzard. The air was buzzing
with bees gathering nectar and pollen with absolute
devotion in the warm, bountiful days of late
spring.
They weren’t all honeybees. Each morning of
my week- long stay in Zara’s shack — one of the
dune shacks cared for by the Peaked Hill Trust — I
woke to the sounds of the carpenter bees emerging
from the round holes they had drilled in the shack’s
cedar trim. The sun would rise and warm the siding,
telling the bees the day had begun,
and they would go out into the
world to be bees. I took my coffee out
and sat in the cool sand by a large,
dense grove of beach plums to watch
the bees and to be human.
Every spur of the purple stems
of the beach plum closest to the
house was crowned with delicate
white and pink- tinged flowers. The
bees — those living in the shack and
others from the fields and woods of
the dunes — swarmed the blossoms
so that each branch was a vibrating,
living thing of flower and bee.
I watched one plump bee crawl
through the branches. She moved
efficiently, stopping at each flower
to gather the sugar and protein
it offered, thousands of years of
experience in her legs. She paused
for a moment to sip nectar and collect pollen, amassing it in gold nuggets on her
body and hind legs. Once full, she flew away, her pollen- dusted body carried on
mica and lace wings.
When the bee does its work, it moves from flower to
flower, gathering food for itself and, as it does, also collecting
and spreading the genetic material of the beach
plum in a wider range than wind alone might do.
The flower wants the bee to visit as many other flowers
as it can, so in each flower is just a tiny sip of nectar
and a dash of pollen. The bee must visit many blooms —
and often. For the bee, that’s all that matters today;
meanwhile, the flower’s purpose is to spread its pollen
through the dunes. Each is completely dedicated to its
own pursuit. And each is appealing to the needs of the
other to fulfill its own objective. What a funny trick they
play on one another, I thought.
As the bee flew off, my eye was drawn to the dunes
beyond. I saw them filled with the flowers of the
beach plums. So many for the bees to visit, and
so many bees to visit them. Seeing this, my idea
of the individual softened and a broader mutualistic
system became clear. Both these organisms,
the bee and the beach plum, are expressions of
the same thing: a profound, balanced system of
life.
In the late summer, pollinated flowers will
turn into sugar-filled plums, and this mutualistic
balance will express itself again. Through its
roots, the beach plum will draw water to fill the
plums to ripeness. A bird, unrooted, will land on
a purple stem and pluck a plum. It will eat, and it
will fly; sugar given in exchange for wings. The
seeds, those little embers of life, will pass though
the bird and, somewhere along its flight, a nitrogen-rich
deposit will be dropped, carrying the
seeds to new dunes.
Another beach plum will grow. It will flower.
The bees will come in the spring with their vibrating
wings and fuzzy bodies. They will gather
and spread pollen. More plums will grow and
again be carried by wings. And life will expand.
Clockwise from top right: Dense stands of beach plum
(Prunus maritima) in bloom on the dune below Zara’s
shack. Rafts of beach plums cover the dunes in May.
A Heliopsis or false sunflower. Wild asters. Some beach
plum flowers are tinged pink rather than white. The
stamens hold the pollen out from the blossom for the
bee to brush against as it reaches the nectar. A bee
nestled in a Rosa rugosa flower. (Beach plum photos
by Kai Potter)