So okay there was this bee, see. He-she-it was a yellowjacket buzzing around the room when the Aspen Science Center’s “Science and Media Summit” was meeting on the campus of the Aspen Institute.

I’m not supposed to talk about what is going down behind closed doors during the summit, but no one is going to stop me from talking about the bee. What happened to the bee is on the record.

See, the best science journalists were sitting around a table with the best scientists and sundry technology hotshots at a summit that would produce a list of best practices for scientists and journalists when they try to talk with each other, but I wanted to see what they would do with the bee. I flinched when the bee came at me, and I figured a year ago–before the bee scare–I would not have hesitated to do the right thing and crush the sucker with my hardcopy of the summit scenarios on climage change, evolution, and Big Science.

But we live in a kinder, gentler world now when it comes to the environment, so I stayed my greenish hand and let the bee roam free. Bees, you see, have job one on the food chain–something about flowers–and now you kill a bee at your own risk: you’re screwing with the ecosystem, dude. Even so, I was surprised to see that after lunch the bee, like the flag, was still there, zapped to the window behind Robert Krulwich of ABC News.

Now Krulwich, in case you don’t know, is a very smart cookie, and he started doing something with the bee and his finger that I could not quite figure out. But then he took his program guide and started to patiently maneuver the bee down toward the open window in a way that would not crush the bee and throw a monkey wrench into the food chain.

Someone was saying something about some scientific thing, and here–thanks to Robert Krulwich–was science at work. The bee ankled the summit with nary a buzz.

I can’t tell you what they decided at the summit, but I can tell you this: all is right with the world, and dinner will be served at sevenish.