An Ark of Bees

Sometimes when science and art and the work of everyday life intersect within a single subject, the results can be enlightening, revelatory, and even breathtaking. For me, it started with a morsel from everyday life described in one of July’s Earthbeat posts.

It was the title which first captivated me: “Oblivion and Salvation in the Ark of the Honeybees”. “Oblivion” seemed scary, but “salvation” was reassuring; “ark” promised a blessing I thought we all need now, and “honeybees”, too, with all their sweetness and even their stings.

Author, Steven Salido Fisher, took us with him to two hives he has cultivated in a weedy, litter-filled city garden in Chicago. For him, caring for the bees is a hobby, a refuge, and a mission. This day, he noted the two separate colonies he tends would not be able to survive on their own. For them to flourish, he knew he must facilitate their merger – no mean task. Each has two territorial queens ready to destroy each other and, if necessary, the colony as well, and each has a distinctive odor to tell friend from enemy. If the merger was to be successful, Fisher says, it must be done delicately with slow introductions and gentle mingling.

He had to start with the nasty process of killing one queen which he did quite unsentimentally:
“I am no St. Francis of Assisi. I do not tell the bees to praise and love their Creator. I give no sermon on pardon where there is injury, my hands raw and throbbing from sacrificial bee stings.
‘Do what you must,’ I confide in them instead. If they do not, they will not survive.

Now for the fascinating mechanics of merger: He put a piece of newspaper on top of one hive and placed the other hive on top of the newspaper. He had once worked as a translator at a Catholic Worker House in Texas and theirs were the only newspapers he had. How appropriate a medium, however, to entice bees from above and below to tear and claw through social-justice oriented writing to accomplish the saving task of combining their diverse odors into one. Instead of a barricade keeping the bees apart, the newspaper had become “a threshold where they learn to belong to each other.”

He was still not sure the combined hive will survive, but in the meantime, he saw it as an ark, not only for the bees, but for himself: “My worries swim in news reports of natural disasters and human-caused catastrophes. The beehive is a lifeboat — my faith held together by nails and carpenter’s glue — with thousands of buzzing lives aboard.”

This is our world, too. As I read, I wondered: How does my faith – our faith – hold it together? What ark will we erect and, by excluding no one, how will we come to see we belong to each other?

If we go a step further and apply his already apt metaphor to gender discrimination in the Church, how will we merge new with old? Will we have to “kill off” Holy Mother the Church, the “queen” of the hive or can we keep tearing and clawing from above and below (our side being “above”, of course!) at dried-out proclamations and dicta and weary – and wearying – words until we somehow come to see how we can fit together and enrich each other?

Steven Salido Fisher would certainly cheer us on. In the post, he noted that one honeybee produces only a single tablespoon of honey in her lifetime. Yet she – and he – and, by implication, us – should still be undaunted. In fact, he seemed to be speaking for all of us in our own special mission when he said:
“Like them, I am going to concentrate on putting something sweet into the world, not as an act of denial nor as an act of hope, but as an act of nature that is worth the labor of a lifetime.”

That’s probably enough inspiration for one post, but I cannot resist adding Emily Dickinson’s in one of my favorite poems: To make a prairie it takes a clover and one bee, —

To make a prairie it takes a clover and one bee, —
One clover, and a bee,
And revery.
The revery alone will do
If bees are few.