I first noticed them late into the second week of my summer tennis camp. I was fifteen, and even I felt like an old man from all the running around in the past ten days. I slouched over the picnic table and got out my PB and J sandwich. I took a few bites, and examined the soggy texture of the bread. Suddenly, something colorful caught my eye. I looked up.

Tied to the top of the lunch tent was what looked like a cute, little plastic house. I mulled
over the structure with the wad of peanut-butter and jelly sandwich stuck roof of my mouth, and
saw that the house contained two different parts. The roof was made of hard, yellow plastic, while
the bottom was a clear container. It was not empty, though. There was something stuck to the
bottom of the container. The stuff seemed gluey, reminded me of the texture of the PB and J stuck
to my teeth. The amber jelly appeared to be encasing something, a multitude of unmoving, little,
black beads, like a kaleidoscope. I suddenly jerked my head up, spotting a flicker of wings at the
top of the house. A little creature struggled to push his way towards the top of the roof, slipping
and sliding on the shiny plastic. Suddenly, his wing broke and the little creature lost his grip,
falling into the jello on its back, his body convulsed with writhing as he flailed his legs in the air
until they stopped moving. My jaw went slack.

“This is a massacre,” I said out loud. I heard giggling from the corner table. Grace and
Taylor, the two senior girl counselors, whispered to each other, “A massacre!” in mockery loud
enough for me to have heard. They dismissed my astonishment, too wrapped up in their own lives.
Mark, the camp director, then wryly remarked,
“Like the new addition to the camp, Warren?” He surveys the four bee traps on each corner
of the tent.

“Yeah you know, we should have just gotten these traps at the beginning of camp. You
guys like it out here now- no bees right?” he said, chuckling to himself.
“I know it’s nice. Now, you can sit out here and eat your lunch in peace without having to
keep swatting.” He smirked at his own ingenuity. Mark was even worse than the senior girl
counselors. He took pride in his routine destructive schemes.

Most of the kids didn’t even notice the new bee traps. The little girls were particularly
unmoved. They didn’t even hear me over the talk about how much money their mothers had given
them for the snack bar, and how they planned to spend it, gladly forking over fistfuls of cash to
Mark, who snatched it cooing, “What can I get you?” In fear of what a sting might do to their tans,
they locked themselves in the locker room and filled up on the swedish fish, ice cream bars, and
other junk food they’ve blown a morning’s worth of money on, cradling their new Iphone7s in
hand. I laughed at them.

“What’s so scary about a couple of bees?” I asked.
One girl retorted, “Warren, you’d be doing the same thing if there were bees around you.”

Not true. My family values are rooted in kind treatment for living things, large and small,
animate and inanimate. It’s an almost Buddhist-like devotion in nature. In addition to feeding our
own pets, we feed outside raccoons and possums. At home, we let the swallows nest in our barn
every year. We don’t disturb the bee colonies which coexist on the side of our house. This value
also applies to the insect world. One summer at our cabin in West Virginia, we tried to save a
wounded moth by feeding it sugar water (Alas, it didn’t work). We rescue caterpillars on walks by
moving them to the side of the trail. Our attitude even extends to vegetation. We stop to pick up
broken off flowers that other people have picked and dropped; we put them in water in order to
revive them. My rules are grounded in a sense of environmental justice, which springs from the
core family values I was raised in. All living things matter.

What was happening here was wrong according to my morals. As the bee’s only defense, I
struggled in a sea of opposition. Although I knew it was against camp rules, I felt bound to defend
the bees. I felt a certain responsibility for them. These creatures deserved respect and care, and I
could not neglect their suffering. While I had little control over the bees’ fate in these
circumstances, to have been passive would not be a solution. I was determined to take some sort of
action. It seemed like I was following my own set of rules, by breaking the camp ones. But it was
myself who I had to confront, even if that meant isolation from the camp itself.

Some days after I found the bee containers, I asked permission to go to the bathroom from
one of our counselors during our tennis warm-up. From there, I saw the flicker of yellow, the bees
that were living, trying to escape. I had one problem: the trap was suspended from a canopy
several feet off the ground. It was high enough that I had to stand on the stone wall in order to even
reach the top. I pulled myself onto the wall while I steadied myself. I slowly balanced and reached
out to grab the lid, twisting it hard to yank it open. The lid didn’t budge. I heard voices from the
bathrooms. I could feel the sweat on my palms. I gripped it with the bottom of my T-shirt, yanking
hard, and finally forced the lid off. The swarm of bees zoomed out of the container, flying in all
directions at once. I looked up and was hopeful for them. I felt a sense of good, calm resolution,
wash over me, sending chills through my wet shirt, soaked with sweat.

And I came to understand something: rules are really nothing more than artifacts of
arbitrary context. There is no such thing as a single set of applicable rules because they are open to
interpretation based on one’s own set of values. It sounds dangerous, but I’m not advocating
anarchy. Democracy, the foundation of this country, obviates this danger by applying the principle
of majority rules. In this case, the wishes of Mark and the values of the other camp counselors
prevailed. But the only way to right one’s conscience is for one to to think for themselves.
Come lunchtime, the discovery was instantaneous for the whole camp. One girl pointed it
out, “Mark, one of the bee traps fell down.” The kids all gathered to peer over at the container,
huddled and frowning at the sight. I took another bite of my PB and J sandwich to hide my own
ingenious smile.