‘Don’t just look to your own interests. Consider the interests of others’ – Philippians 2:4
I recently spent some time in a community garden watching bees and butterflies. Pollinators are amazing to observe, and I filmed several video clips and took even more pictures as they drank nectar from flowers. One thing the pandemic era has taught me is to appreciate the simple things. Enjoying God, the company of family and friends, and the beauty of the earth are pretty much all I need these days to be content, so spending an hour or so with my daughter and mother-in-law in the garden watching bees and butterflies was a kind of bliss.
It wasn’t long after this experience that I serendipitously read an entry concerning bees in Peter Wohlleben’s, The Inner Life of Animals. Bees are fascinating creatures, necessary for the health of our planet, but also capable of teaching lessons. One such lessons struck me as I read Wohlleben’s discussion of how bees stay cool in the summer and warm in the winter. In the summer months, the intense activity among bees can raise hive temperatures considerably, which could prove fatal to the colony, but bees have found ways to stay cool. Worker bees bring water into the hive to cool things down, and the fluttering of wings produces breezes. In such ways, the hive is climate controlled, and the bees don’t overcook.
In the winter, warming measures are undertaken. If it gets cold enough, the bees of a colony will huddle together in ball. The queen, who must be protected at all costs, is of course placed in the center of the ball where it is warmest. Moving out from the center, the temperature of course drops, placing the bees at the outer rim in peril of freezing to death, except for one thing: the bees take turns. They take shifts on the ball’s surface, allowing each crew to take a turn closer to the center and warm up before returning to duty on the outer edge. In this way, the colony, and each bee within it, has a chance to survive the winter.
One wonders what motivates bees to look out for one another in this fashion. Perhaps it is too much to suggest they care for one another (then again, perhaps they do). It seems more likely that they simply understand that the success of the hive depends on the success of each bee. If they lose even a single member of the colony, the ability to stay warm collectively is diminished. Essentially, bees know that they need each other. Each individual bee therefore considers the interests of the others along with their own. Each bee knows that unless they look out for the other members of the colony, no one will make it. It is of course natural for bees to feel this way; they are inherently collectivists, not individualists. They don’t live their lives in terms of ‘me’ and ‘I’ but ‘we’ and ‘us.’ They value one another’s contributions to the collective, and are willing to sacrifice, in this case, a little bit of warmth, for the sake of saving the whole.
I could run in a thousand directions on this, most of which would produce controversy. This would only prove the point of this post, but honestly, I’m just too tired to deal with it at the moment (I’m on vacation). Suffice it to say that we humans could learn from bees. It breaks my heart, and makes me more than a little frustrated, that some people (I won’t say most, although I confess, I’m tempted these days) can’t seem to understand that we need to look out for each other. They can’t seem to understand that each one of us has value, and that we need to look, not just to our own interests but to the interests of others. They can’t seem to understand that if we don’t look out for one another, say, by taking a shot in the arm or wearing a mask (okay, I just went in one of those potentially controversial directions), we will all be impacted detrimentally. They can’t seem to understand that we should be willing to make sacrifices, for the sake of saving both the vulnerable among us and our society as a whole.
Perhaps bees are just programmed to act the way they do. Perhaps they don’t think nearly as much about their behavior as I have suggested. But to my way of thinking, that only makes things worse. We human beings have been gifted with the ultimate grace: we have been made in the image of God (Genesis 1:27). We have the ability to reason, to think things through, to feel compassion for others, to experience community, to love. Those of us who claim to be Christian claim not only these extraordinary graces, but the power of God to activate them fully. How sad then, when we neglect our birthright and ignore the gifts we have been given, when we, instead of considering the needs of others, choose to only, and shortsightedly, consider our own.
I leave it to you, reader, to consider the myriad of circumstances to which this lesson may apply. Like I said, I could take this in a thousand directions. All I choose to say in closing is this: its time we started acting a little more like the bees.
It’s time we all got a little bee sense.
Under Christ’s Mercy,
Brent