By Jason Gutierrez

Sticky, sweet, raw. The Urban Bee Lab’s inaugural Urban Waggle fundraiser hosted Boston’s brightest performers for an evening of honey-saturated stories at Somerville’s Arts at the Armory. The event’s namesake “waggle” dance performed by honey bees to signal nearby food, water, and safety. To the hive, the figure eight motion symbolizes hope, excitement and life.

Storytelling does the same for us.

Sharing a memory, be it sugar-coated or distasteful, can be a cathartic experience for the speaker and audience alike. More than a synopsis of yester days, storytelling reminds us what it means to love, laugh, hurt. To be human.

Buzzing about our lives, we move along intricately constructed paths, brush shoulders with one another, share spaces, smiles, moments. We preserve these memories and pass them to friends, cashiers, and strangers on planes, pollinating the world with our collective joy, ache, and the triumph of seeing another day.

The Urban Bee Lab is a 501(c)(3) non-profit on a mission to improve bee health, enhancing initiatives related to food security, climate change, natural disaster mitigation, and ecological preservation. Visit https://urbanbeelab.org/ to learn more.