The other night a bear broke through the barbed wire surrounding their hives and ate 30 pounds of our friend’s honey. As that winter-starved “Pooh” scooped up all that golden goodness, he probably didn’t pause to ponder how all that “hunny” would improve his immune system, kill any harmful bacteria and promote healthy tissue growth. When he had had his fill, he turned his sticky snout toward the bird feeders.
Some people see sacred geometry in bee work. Each cell is an exact 60˚hexagon perfectly positioned. Like snowflakes and Stars of David. When we burn candles made of bees wax, we may, as people long before us did, sense something cosmic melting. The bees have shared with us, as Sue Monk Kidd put it, a portion of their secret life.
Ask any old Celtic beekeeper and you’ll learn they all talk to their bees. And they listen to them. Bees, they say, come from the “otherworld” and can share starry wisdom with us mortals. Because of the queen, who can lay up to 2,000 eggs a day, bees are connected to Venus, the planet of love. They know how to share, build community and support one another. Valuable insights for us all.
She unifies the hive and when she’s gone, they all suffer from “queenlessness,” as Sue Monk Kidd points out. They lose their zest for doing the waggle dance. Collecting pollen holds no allure. They die. And when they die, our crops wither for lack of cross-pollination. Everything comes down to bees, it seems.
These two honeybees (drawn by Joel Speerstra for Hunab Ku) were crafted around 1700 B.C.E. and discovered in the royal Minoan cemetery. Sucking on a single drop of honey, they can be seen in the Heraklion Museum on Crete.
Ancients knew the importance of bees. Some people spent decades searching for a land of “milk and honey.” Demeter was the “Pure Mother Bee,” and Artemis, often called "The Great She-Bear," gathered the Melissai around her—her priestess worker bees. Her priests were called the Essenes or the drones. Egyptian kings were venerated, through Her as “One of the Bees” and when people died, they “fell into the honey pot.”
Rumi said, “We are bees, and our body is a honeycomb. We made the body, cell by cell we made it.” Perhaps, then, cell by cell we can heal it. It also seems likely that we’re summoned to make a beeline to the center of whatever we call our community-hive, to repair it, nourish it and keep it healthy by truly "Bee-ing there."
After I posted this, several readers pointed out Olivia Judson's guest column in April 28, 2009 New York Times:
http://judson.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/04/28/guest-column-lets-hear-it-for-the-bees/?8ty&emc=ty
She's an evolutionary biologist and you'll learn a great deal, not only about bees, but also the "time clock" of flowers. Fascinating! As Laura Baring-Gould pointed out in an e mail to me, it's more "fire/nectar for our hive."
Posted by: Karen Speerstra | April 30, 2009 at 02:52 AM