Instinct

 August 15, 2020

In only two days, they were drawing out comb. Thursday when I drove in the driveway, I could hear the buzzing, so I immediately began looking, and this time, the swarm had gathered where I was able to capture them and put them into an empty hive body. Honeybees are fascinating creatures. If a colony gets too crowded, they will raise a new queen which stays behind while the old queen leaves with perhaps half the colony. Given that a strong colony can consist of up to 100,000 bees, we’re talking a lot of bees in the swarm. When the queen lands, they gather around her in a protective ball that can fill a bushel basket. I set up a ladder in the back of my pickup truck, climbed up and shook the swarm into a styrofoam cooler, then into a new hive body. The ones that landed outside the hive body soon were marching into it, which meant I had the queen inside.

This evening, I checked on them, and they had already started making cells for the queen to lay her eggs. At the rate of one every ten seconds, by the end of goldenrod season, it should be strong enough to overwinter.

God’s creativity and imagination can be seen in Creation. My bees are carrying out the instincts God placed into them, which are quite unique and very different than the instincts of dogs and cats and jellyfish. They merely do what has been programmed into them. We humans are the only creatures who choose our actions. There are those who believe we too, are mere automatons, behaving inexorably according to instinct or biological programme, but in fact, God has given us free will—the ability to choose how we respond to the world and conditions in which we live. We are unique in all Creation in that we alone can and do rebel against God’s will. However, God in his mercy has provided a means of return—faith in the work of Jesus Christ, crucified for our sins, and risen to give us new life. I am grateful for my bees, but even more that my life is not circumscribed by the unwavering instinct that governs theirs. I am free in Jesus Christ to live by grace instead of necessity.