Six Arrows Farm Update

“How doth the little busy bee

Improve each shining hour?”  - Isaac Watts

Ben “suited up” and cleaned our bee hives with Charlie yesterday in preparation for the two new swarms we just picked up.  I attended the operation with camera in tow to capture the process of establishing the hives.

A few dead bees from last year still clung rigidly to the frames and some leftover honey dripped lazily from a crack in a corner.  Last year’s leaves and dirt, the workers and the yield, mingled and languished in sordid decay around the base of both hives.  The whole picture would have cut a terribly melancholy figure if the steady punctuated hum the of the waiting swarms hadn’t added a distinct element of urgency.  Thousands of bees caught up together in a teeming net can make a respectable quantity of buzz.  A few solitary workers had escaped the general trap and were settled along the lid and around the outside of the net droning on a slightly different note than their kin and already sporting tell-tale bulging pockets at the knees. Charlie and I made a timely retreat to a safe distance just before Ben released the bees, since we aren’t sure how “bee-immune” we are and weren’t inclined to find out with a confused and over-crowded swarm.

Amazing to me is the passionate desire of the bee to work.  They do it to survive, but there is no “bare minimum” of labor for the intense little reapers.  They all work as one with rapidity, skill, and voracity.  Bees not only do what they must, they love to do it, eating up the space between flower and hive with a high-pitched song.  The glory of God is made evident in the bee.  But someone else said it better than I in the words of a child; which is what one tends to feel like after hearing the first thing about bees.  I will let her tell you:

“Now, here’s something to remember about a bee itself – say a worker bee, because it would be the one that would carry the pollen.  …a worker bee has got two stomachs, a little one more inside for itself, and a way bigger one more on the outside for the hive.  Back on its abdomen every worker bee has got four pockets to secrete wax, and every worker has got baskets on its legs to gather pollen in, besides the nectar that they carry in their stomach for the hive.  …  Every one of them is covered with hair that is long for a bee and it is soft and fine and when the workers go down into Mr. Male Iris to get nectar for their two stomachs and to fill their pollen baskets, the hair all over them fills with the pollen, too, and it is the law, because of God, that when any bee starts out to gather nectar and pollen, it never mixes one flower with another.  You can see it now, can’t you?  When  the worker bee gets the pollen from Mr. Iris all over his hair and then goes on to get pollen from Miss Iris, the hair is going to scatter the pollen for her, that’s going to make the good seed come, ‘cause the bees do the flower’s courting for them.  That’s a reason besides honey as to why bees are so useful.”

“One time I asked the Bee Master if I couldn’t see God and if I couldn’t touch Him, how was I going to know that He was here.  And he said, ‘Because of the hair on a bee.’   So that’s one of the ways you can know.

Then there are a lot of ways you find out about God on account of how He made Queen bees.”

“The way a Queen comes to be a Queen, is this way: In a little cell all fixed up for it, the Queen bee of a hive puts an egg and she tells the workers, ‘I want this egg to be a Queen.’  The workers get busy and make the royal jelly.  That’s another thing the people who write the bee books haven’t figured out.  They don’t know just what royal jelly is or how it is made.  But the workers know.  God showed ‘em how when He made ‘em.”

“…the new Queen goes to the door and she walks out of it backward.  She goes away a little piece and she comes back to it three or four times.  God told her to do that so she would be mighty sure when she came home from the first long flight she has ever made she would know her own door.”

“[The Bee Master] says the only name for that Master Mind is God.  He doesn’t see any use in trying to dodge God and side-step Him and call Him ‘The Spirit of the Hive’ and Instink and Nature and things like that.  He says a great scientist, one of the best, almost went crazy trying to do that very thing.  His name was Charles Darwin, and the Bee Master says C.D. would have been a heap better…if he’d been willing to put God in where He belongs.  He says when God does anything ‘with such care, and puts so much thought in it, and deals out such splendid justice’ as there is in a beehive, that a wise man will just take off his hat and lift his eyes to the sky and very politely he will say, ‘Just God.’”

~from The Keeper of the Bees by Gene Stratton-Porter

I concur with the “Bee Master” more ever day. 

The bunches of onions are banked in rows, sleeping until warmth and light and rain pour coax them to life.  Herb pots in the greenhouse are supplied with sturdy little plants reaching eagerly for the sun, beautiful in form and casting savory aromas.  If you want to hear a good sermon on the nature of God on the farm, all you have to do is step outside the door into His world and listen.

With Gene Stratton Porter “I say, ‘Just God!’”

Craig, Karen and The Six Arrows