Seven of Swords

On the Seven of Swords a man tiptoes away from a camp of bright tents, carrying five swords in his arms and looking back over his shoulder with a little grin. Two swords stay stuck in the ground behind him. It's the card of stealth, cunning, and getting away with it, or thinking you have.

Sphecodes are cuckoo bees. They don't gather pollen for their own young. A female slips into another bee's nest and lays an egg in a single brood cell that the owner has stocked with pollen for her own child. It takes about two minutes. The host's egg or larva is killed, by the intruder or later by her larva, and the young cuckoo eats the pollen store. Sphecodes monilicornis has fourteen known host species, more than half of them social bees. The species is a generalist, but each individual female keeps to one kind of host, like a cuckoo bird that always picks the same kind of nest. Across the genus, cuckoo bees have switched to new host lineages as many as seventeen times.

An aside. In April 2019, in Taiwan, a doctor removed four live sweat bees from the eye of a woman who had been weeding at her relatives' graves during Qingming, the festival when families clean and tend the graves of their dead. They weren't cuckoo bees, and they weren't parasites, just tiny sweat-drinkers. She was sent home and expected to make a full recovery.

Here's the riddle. Look at the swords the thief leaves behind. He takes five and leaves two, enough that no one notices right away. The cuckoo leaves the whole nest standing and takes only one cell. The best thefts look like nothing happened. And the bees in the eye at Qingming are the honest version of the Seven: something small got in, did no lasting harm, and was carefully removed.

When the Seven appears, check your stores. Are you living on someone else's pollen? Is someone living on yours? Cunning has its place, but every quiet theft takes something that was meant for somebody's child.