May 30,  2023

It’s understandable that the Bible uses the imagery it does in order to foster industriousness, but I wish the ancient authors had chosen just a bit differently. The text in question is Proverbs 6:6, which I shall quote from the good old King James Version because it has a certain ring to it.

“Go to the ant, thou sluggard!”

Sometimes Elizabethan English captures the nuance better than modern speech. In my mind I can see the author waving his hand in a disdainful dismissal, eyes half-closed as he looks down his nose at the lazy lout at his feet. I have no reason to surmise this posture, but it seems to fit. The writer continues:

“Consider her ways and be wise, Which, having no captain, Overseer or ruler, Provides her supplies in the summer, And gathers her food in the harvest.”

In our culture, the ant isn’t particularly admired; our way of saying it would be more along the line of being “busy as a bee.” As a hobbyist beekeeper (“beek” if you prefer slang, or “apiculturalist” if you want to sound more professional), I prefer the imagery of the bee as a model of industrious and coordinated activity. 

The honeybee is an amazing creature. Scientists actually consider the entire colony to be the organism. Apart from her sisters and the queen, a honeybee will quickly die. If the queen dies, if she hasn’t laid fertilized eggs within the last three days, the colony will not be able to raise a new queen and will die. In her lifetime a single honeybee will produce only about 1/12 of a teaspoon of honey, but a strong colony (60,000-90,000 bees) can produce more than a hundred pounds of the golden nectar, and will collectively fly over 90,000 miles for about two pounds, or about a quart of honey. I could go on and on…

Yesterday I was called to get a swarm of bees from a tree in the front yard our our local Baptist pastor. I shook them into a pail, dumped them into a hive box which had four top bars of comb, and placed the box on top of my horizontal hive. This afternoon, I transferred the top bars to the horizontal hive beneath it. Overnight, the bees had built comb the size of my hand to the bottom of the hive cover.  

This presents me with a bit of a conundrum. On the one hand, “busy as a bee” is a good thing. Laziness is not a virtue. But tonight Linda and I were talking about hearing from God, and I said it’s my observation that we are too busy to hear much from him. We have many good things that “need to be done,” but get so busy doing them that our time for God becomes an afterthought. If Linda is anything, she is a devoted mother and grandmother; she posed the question of how can she love God more than her children and grandchildren? My response was what Jesus said: “Where our treasure is, there will our heart be also.” If we invested in God as much as we invest in our children, we would value him as we value them. 

So for me, the question is, “What do I need to adjust in my life so I am not allowing busyness to overshadow my time with God?” How do I learn from my bees to be about the business of the Gospel the way they are about the business of the colony, without shortchanging God himself? I think the answer lies in considering my purpose. The bee is singlemindedly busy for the survival of the colony, which is in effect, an extension of the queen herself. Am I willing to be singleminded in my devotion for the Church, which is the extension, the Body of Christ himself? The Scriptures and my bees challenge me tonight.