As we approached a certain tree with a low hanging branch that always ends up in Heidi's face -- which we had already broken off once to prevent an eye injury -- Heidi glanced up at it as if to say "I'd like to break it off higher". Instead, she exclaimed with a pitch of surprise "Our bees!"
Looking up in amazement, I saw what she was talking about. Our bees were swarming, and had clustered around the branch in a tight, glowing, golden orb about the size of a melon. I was struck with both awe and the urgent sense that something needed to be done immediately. Once bees swarm, they will only remain clustered together like that for a short time before finding a new hive to live in.
Bees usually swarm when their hive has become overpopulated. It is their way of multiplying and creating a new colony. Essentially, some of the worker bees decide that the hive has become too crowded and emit pheromones telling the queen that she needs to produce another queen. Once another queen egg has hatched, the workers then chase the original queen out of the hive.
She proceeds to find a branch somewhere nearby to land on. Then about 20-60% of the colony follows her, and clusters around her in a formation like the one we found. From their, the most experienced of the worker bees go out as scouts to find a suitable location for a new hive. Once a location has been established and agreed upon, the entire cluster of swarming bees leaves together at once to their new home.We wanted to gather up the bees before that happened. First, we were glad that they had swarmed to a branch on our property and not on a neighbor's. But we didn't want them leaving and creating a new hive in a neighbor's yard either. So we had to act quickly.
Our plans to go to church that morning were quickly set aside because the bees usually only cluster on a branch for a few hours before taking off again as quickly as they appeared on the branch. I called my friend and beekeeping mentor, Robert Pierce. He has kept bees for years and has dealt with swarming before. Thankfully he answered his phone and after a hearty laugh, said he'd be over shortly. After about an hour, he showed up with his beekeepers suit and a Styrofoam minnow box with holes in the lid. The video below shows some of the process of getting the bees off the branch and into the bucket, so they could be moved to a new hive of our choosing and not into a neighbor's yard. Of course, they could reject our choice altogether, but at least we would try.
The good thing is, when bees are swarming, they are very docile as they have no hive to protect -- and also because they are all full of honey they gorged to keep them going on their journey. So approaching them and handling them is very easy.
The whole process took about 30 minutes of shaking the bees off the branch, into the box. Since not all of the bees would land in the box, many would start flying all around and eventually settle on the branch again, because the queen's pheromones were on it. So we'd repeat the process until nearly all the bees were in the box.
After we had them in there, we went to my original hive to check on it. Thankfully, it was full happy bees, and full of wax and comb. We should have expanded the hive a couple weeks ago, and this likely would have prevented the swarm from occurring in the first place. But, it was still a pretty neat learning adventure. And, due to some unforeseen circumstances, we were unable to procure the supers (the smaller boxes where honey production occurs) needed to expand the hive. But now, we have to act quickly to get those together to prevent a second hive division.
One of the things that impresses me about bees so much is their single-minded devotion to the colony, and to their queen. They literally act as an organism and truly a single bee could not survive on it's own. In the book of Acts in the Bible, the early followers of Jesus after his resurrection truly shared all they had in common and lived as a unit, doing what was best for the community of believers. Because of their shared devotion to Christ and to one another, they were able to get amazing things accomplished, such as spreading the message around the entire Roman empire and beyond in a short time. In various places in the New Testament, this community of faith is called the Body of Christ, where each member is a vital piece to the whole. Is it not time to start praying how to get back to that pure, unadulterated Christianity?
It appears that the world has tried to emulate this in the various forms of government. While good in their intentions, it seems to me that all of these fall short of the ideals of the believers recorded in the Book of Acts in that they are not voluntary systems as was the early Christian community, and that they have sinful people - not Christ the governor -- as their rallying point. Most of these forms of government have - in many cases - worked hard to take God out of the picture, and do not retain the essential values of self-governance and of the personal putting away of evil ways.
No human government will ever be able to emulate what was experienced by those followers of Jesus or what can be experienced by his followers today or in times to come. True unity, true solidarity can only be found in Christ. Paul, in his letter to the Ephesians, wrote that one day we would all "come in the unity of the faith, and of the knowledge of the Son of God, unto a perfect man, unto the measure of the stature of the fulness of Christ." Ephesians 4:13.
And I'm not talking about the politicized Christ that is used these days by so many for people's selfish ambitions. I'm talking about the Christ that said others would recognize his disciples by the love they had for one another.
However, it is nonetheless true that when people make sacrifices for the survival and health for the rest of a community whether local or global, and put aside the self-centered ways that our current society seems to promote, amazing things can and do happen. I believe we all have a lot to learn from the bees about sacrifice, about putting others first, about working together to get things accomplished, about laying our lives on the line for something greater than ourselves. These bees literally will work themselves to death to keep the colony going. And in the circumstance where the hive needs to be defended against a predator, a bee will sting the enemy, and lose its own life. Only the queen can sting multiple times and survive.
I'm thankful that Heidi and I decided to take our morning walk and found the swarming cluster of bees. That swarm preached a sermon to us that clearly illustrated much needed principles for today's world, especially for followers of Jesus. A sermon about true solidarity, true unity and singleness of purpose. The Bible tells us that there is a day coming when God will be "all in all". Perhaps then, when all have submitted our lives under Christ, we will look back at the lessons in the bees and see that God had been trying to teach us something through his creation all along.
No comments:
Post a Comment