The centre of the universe exists somewhere on Hunter St. in Peterborough, Ontario. In my heart I know this to be true.

Not because of the confluence of ley lines on which it allegedly sits, nor the fact it near perfectly bisects Peternorough East-to-West, implicitly delineating North from South. That Hunter Street can be attributed such biblical importance it owes not to the number of churches it homes but to the fact that the two blocks of Hunter between Water and Aylmer streets represent—in microcosm—the breadth of all which defines Peterborough.

From its narrow storefronts; to its poster-ladden signposts; to the security cameras forever eyeing the go-ers by where it intersects with George St; to the frequent human excrement and puke on its side walks; Hunter Street presents a quintessential vision of Peterborough, and in it, the indomitable fortitude of human spirit.

One can think of it as something of a tapestry, collectively woven by the oddballs and creative types who frequent her cafés, bars, and cluttered local interest stores. Certainly this is the narrative many persons of such description seem to have embraced. Be it a strange cultural relic like the film Peterborough Time or a podcast which takes its name from the street’s central intersection, the very idea of Hunter St. is one locals seem keen to evangelize.

Thus, as Hunter St. persists, this relationship tightens, knotting upon itself. Artists move into her relatively low-rent loft apartments; said artists patronize her bars where they down liquid inspiration; and in turn feel compelled to venerate the oasis in the culture desert which Hunter St. to them represents. Soon enough—quite in spite of most city councillors' best efforts—the street is the beating heart of a vibrant arts & culture scene.

Otherwise said: It’s the kind of place which inspires people to do things. 

Such things include the Annual (so has it been declared) Bee Parade, which took place on the afternoon of July 31st. If you were on Hunter St. anytime in the past month you might have seen one of the appropriately bee-sized posters hung up at the Only and environs which declared it “a Protest for the Preservation of Pollinators?” and urged participants to meet “near Commerce Building Parking Lot?” at 4:30 PM.

You may also have seen said poster on the Instagram page of Pretty Titty, local band, though I imagine many’s first true exposure to the Bee Parade was watching in bemusement from their stopped cars as a man in Hi-Vis and a bee helmet shepherded several dozen people and also a coffin across the George and Hunter intersection. But, then, I’m getting ahead of myself.

In either case, a chance encounter with such a poster (or the event it advertised) likely inspires many questions from both the passively disinterested vacating the Only’s premises and seasoned journos alike, namely: “What the fuck?” “Why?” and “Who’s running this damn thing?”

There are a number of ways to answer these questions, though perhaps none of the answers are so interesting as the answering itself. What I’m saying is that there are stories, and then there are STORIES, reader, and the Bee Parade is one STORY-and-a-half.

So let’s set the scene: It starts, as such things do, at The Only Café. 

June 21st is a Saturday, though the crowd is remarkably thin as I walk in just after 7:00 PM. Liv Stocco is sitting at the bar, with a handful of people who I'll come to consider “the People's Commissariat of the Bee Parade.”

I say “Hey,” as one does, and she asks me “Do you want to come to the Bee Parade?”

“The what, sorry?” I ask, bemused.

“The Bee Parade,” Isobel Root, behind the counter, supplies. “Just imagine: hundreds of people, dressed up as bees, storming Hunter Street. It's political.”

I nod. “Oh I'm sure.”

One can likely contest the actual number of great ideas which apocryphal contends were first scrawled on the back of a napkin, but the Peterborough Bee Parade is not one of them; right then and there Liv shows me one of those skinny cocktail napkins with “BEE PARADE” printed in block capital Sharpie® letters.

“You should cover this,” Isobel tells me. I agree.

Four weeks later, it’s the end of July, and I’m standing in the parking lot of the Commerce Building watching Isobel climb into a coffin. She’s dressed in a yellow dress, a white lace ruff and a yellow bicycle helmet with a crown glued to it.

She’s the Queen Bee, and the queen, apparently, is dead—or at the very least soon to be.

“We took a poll, and everyone said that they would be really happy if I was the one they saw dead in a coffin,” she says. “I'm number one dead girl.”

“Jordan Romaine built the coffin,” Liv tells me later. “Jordan fucking Romaine. I was like, ‘Hey, Jordan, will you build me a coffin,’ and he built it in like three days…he has a full-time fucking job and a wife and children, and he built this coffin for us because I was like, ‘Hey, will you build me a coffin?’”

As she unloads gear from the back of a Toyota Sienna, Liv explains to me the parade’s itinerary. The procession will run down Water towards Hunter Street, crossing Hunter and then George to the one-way pedestrian area, whereupon the Queen Bee will be placed in the coffin.

“Then we’ll carry her down to the Only,” Liv explains. “The coffin will be set on the patio. The musicians will filter in, and Joel will give a five to eight minute speech.” 

Finally, local dancer Bill Coleman will dance on the patio, after which Liv says “we're going to shuffle into the Only and there will be a sing-along bee song, and $5 pints.”

I ask if the pints will be bee-patterned, and she asks “Are you fucking with me?”

To one side of the parking lot, a five-piece band is warming up. The Examiner’s Sebastian Johnston-Lindsay asks whether this is a jazz funeral for the bees.

“Yeah, that's why there's music,” Isobel agrees. “But all I had to focus on was looking good. That's kind of what my job has been. Like, as Queen Bee be someone that the other bees want to make love to.”

The funeral appears to contain some sort of metaphor. While Sebastian further probes the relationship between the Queen and her brood, Isobel tells us that there may be as little as 50 years of arable farming left in North America.

The theme of man’s relationship to nature pervades the parade. Pro-pollinator protesters sport signs which say “WE R NEXT,” and “WE HAVE NO FOOD FOR THOUGHT.” Two participants unfurl a large banner which reads “GOODBYE, SWEET BEES!”

And then we’re off as a man in a rubber-ducky bucket hat declares that “the time has come for the Pollinators Parade!” 

“Some of you will say ‘Parades are only for heroes who die for our country,’ but I say it’s time to have a parade for the pollinators who give this world flowers!” he shouts, waving a baton that appears to be several lengths of cardboard tubing wrapped in Hi-Vis tape. 

Liv points to Jamie Muir, whom she declares parade marshall, and the fifty-some attendees adorned in bee hats and black-and-yellow stripes follow him down the alleyway outside Watson & Lou.

Soon the bees spill out onto the Water Street sidewalk, much to the delight and confusion of onlookers and passers-by. At the Hunter Street intersection, cars honk in approval(?) as dozens cross the street while the horn band strikes up a threnody.

It’s at this point that the parade experiences a schism. The Bee Parade has no permit to uphold traffic, and so Jamie holds up the remaining bees on the other side of the street. 

Divided, the procession sweeps down the twin shores of Hunter. On the other side of George St, the Queen’s entourage unceremoniously jaywalk Hunter to reconvene with the rest of the hive. 

Now safely within the pedestrian zone, the real pageantry begins. The pallbearers lay down the coffins as pollinators congregate around the Queen, who clambers into the coffin, a bouquet of flowers in hand, before Liv announces to those assembled that “THE QUEEN IS DEAD!”

“The Queen is Dead!” comes the canon reply, and the parade again sets off down Hunter towards the Only. The minute we arrive, some protesters already have pints in hand.

Upon our arrival, however, the Only presents a twofold problem. First: cars obstruct the means of access to the patio where the Queen’s wake is to be held. Second: there is the matter of negotiating the narrow archway to the back of the patio with coffin-bearers standing two astride.

The pallbearers decide instead to simply hoist the casket over the fence, set it on one of the picnic tables out front, and have the Queen get out and walk to her final resting place out back.

There, marchers mass around the back table while patio patrons look on in bemusement—just another day at the Only Cafe. Isobel, for the record, is now back in the coffin.

“Does anyone know what came before the Cambrian period, from which bees emerged?” Joel Davenport asks, having taken on the role of pastor delivering a eulogy to a rapt congregation. There is a moment of anticipatory silence.

“Before the Cambrian period came the Pre-Cambrian period,” he announces. In the background, musician Benj Rowland scores the statement with the buzz of his hurdy-gurdy. 

The Pre-Cambrian, Joel explains, is from when flowers emerged, and bees developed complex eyes so that they could see said flowers for their sustenance. “If you believe in evolution,” he concludes, “we owe our sight to bees. We owe our life and our faculty of vision to bees.”

If the patio patrons weren’t already confused at their suddenly being swarmed by dozens of people dressed as insects the sudden appearance of Bill Coleman likely doesn’t help things.

Dressed in what appears to be a brown deer onesie covered in zip-ties, he emerges from the back patio gate—the spitting image of some monstrous pagan effigy—writhing and contorting himself in impressionist dance whilst Rowland belts out an acoustic rendition of “Creep” by Radiohead on the accordion.

As Rowland reaches the end of the song, Coleman peels off the onesie to reveal a red t-shirt which has been eerily bleeding through the zip-tie lacerations. Everyone applauds, and about half those attending file into the Only for the sing-along (or maybe the pints). The Queen Bee climbs out of her coffin and sets about getting ready for her shift in an hour’s time.

As people mill around the patio, I ask cafe manager Scarlett Ackhurst what she thinks of all this. 

“I just think Liv is brilliant,” she tells me. “Absolutely brilliant in every way. She pulled it off, and she's brought all these people in. I'm just very proud of her.”

“'She’s been spray painting bee helmets in my garden for days,” Scarlett reveals. 

I ask whether she had any idea the event would draw such a crowd, and she replies that she always believed.

“Why wouldn't you want to go to a bee parade hosted by Liv and then have a beer at the Only?” she says. “That sounds like a great afternoon.”

What’s remarkable to me is how well-attended the event is. In my time covering events in Peterborough, demonstrations of arguably much greater importance have failed to attract the same attention as the Bee Parade. Moreover, what events beside the municipal can claim to have received coverage from almost every news outlet in Peterborough?

That’s what’s significant about the Bee Parade to me. It’s as if this superficially silly event has transcended its own absurdity to become a veritable cultural moment; a pure distillation of the restlessness of the masses.

Because for all that it is abjectly silly, we’re all treating it very seriously. I mean hell, you should see the cameras people are shooting it on. The anxieties the Bee Parade channels about the existential climate catastrophe facing our world are not unfounded, and though the rhetoric skews light-hearted, there’s a certain solemnity which pervades the proceedings.

For all the absurdity of the image of fifty people dressed as bees marching down Hunter Street, the fact that they carry a coffin asks us to confront something deeper, something real, something inevitable: Death.

After the event multiple people engage me in thoughtful conversations about the importance of ecology and our interdependence on the environment. Liv, Joel, and Isobel all admit to having done hours of research in preparation for their parts of the events.

In a way, is the Bee Parade not Peterborough’s own March on the Pentagon? That it captured the hearts and minds of so many regardless of age, gender, or any other bitter division must surely mean something. 

To coordinate such a mass of people as would be necessary to construct all of the props, costumes, and—yes, indeed—coffins for such an event is no small feat of logistics. In the epic tradition of commitment to the bit, being this silly requires taking it seriously to a certain extent. Despite its seeming irreverence, the Bee Parade gets to the heart of something Real.

To take a page from the Beat Poets, this is what it must mean to levitate the Pentagon—not to literally accomplish the impossible, but to collectively orient a group of like minded individuals in spite of it.

However, when I and the Examiner correspondent catch up with Liv, she tells us it’s hardly that serious.

“Someone brought me a bee hat months ago,” she says. “And it looked good on everyone. It was hilarious.” 

From there, she and a friend began speculating about the possibility of rallying between 40 and 60 people to walk down Hunter Street wearing said bee hats, and from there the idea gained momentum. 

“Joel got involved—he overheard, and he was like, ‘We gotta!’ And then someone else was like, ‘We gotta!’” she says. “It's like, me saying to Benj one day, ‘I'm thinking of doing this’ and he's like, ‘Yeah, fuck it, I’ll bring the hurdy-gurdy down!’ Charlie Glasspool was like, ‘Yeah, fuck it, I'll play the trumpet!’ And then Bill was like, ‘Yeah, I'll dance’.”

“The inspiration is, like, doing fun, silly shit for no reason,” she says. “People are like, ‘Why'd you do it?’ It's like: Because it's fun and people wanted to do it. These are all talented fucking people that are like, ‘Yeah, whatever. Let's just do that because it's fun and silly and it gets people out’.”