Lessons from Bees

These teachings are from the Creator and the bees and are meant to be shared. They have been expressed through Wop-misdawpinagjij-esk (Michelle Webb), of Mi’kmaq and Acadian French Ancestry, Crow Clan. Wop-misdawpinagjij-esk has had many teachers, including Mi'kmaw, Cree, Ojibway, Mide, Metis, and Lakota Elders. The following is a personal experience and interpretation. They are for you to understand and interpret through your own life experience moving forward.

Bees teach about unconditional love.

They pollinate plants to produce food for everyone and everything that can make use of plant material as food. They do not discriminate between races or decide who may be more deserving based upon any criteria. They pollinate the plants to make food for all. If there is enough varied vegetation close to home, they will try to make their rounds to visit all the plants in their seasons, following the plant’s life cycles. If there is only one kind of plant within their home territory, you can get special flavours like Clover Honey. In their visitations they drink some plant nectar to feed themselves and take nectar and pollen back to the hive to feed the colony’s young, when they hatch. They therefore teach us that planning ahead and taking care of each other is a good thing.

Bees also teach us to balance between what we give and what we receive.

In the process of going plant to plant, they carry extra pollen between plants that enables these plants to cross pollinate to make healthy vigorous seeds and thus fulfill their destiny. This can seem a bit self serving because it also ensures there will be plants for the bees to collect food from in the next year. But it actually reveals a healthy interdependence and highlights the meaning of the phrase “whatever I do to another, I ultimately do to myself.” In that Circle of Life we are asked to “love one another”, to love the Oneness of the Creator, (all things being made by the same Creator, yet each given an important yet separate purpose) and to love our other unconditionally and interdependently.

Bees teach us about respect, respecting needs and respecting the fulfillment of each other’s purpose and destiny.

If you interfere with a bee’s important work and especially if you hurt them, you are mostly likely to get stung. The pain lasts long enough for you to have plenty of time to think about what happened and why. At best you will understand the sacredness and importance of fulfilling one’s purpose and at the least you will think twice about messing with a bee. The black and yellow stripes will help to warn you off and remind you of the lesson the next time you see one. Bees, unlike wasps, can only sting once and then they die. This is a reminder that there are consequences to not living in harmony with our other, even when lessons need to be learned, there is a cost to all parties.

Bees teach us about commitment and work ethic, “sticking with it” till the job or purpose is done.

They take joy in fulfilling their purpose, they sing and dance and “stop to smell the flowers” so to speak. I like to think of the buzzing song as prayers of thanksgiving and cheers of encouragement for the plants. They, of course, must like to comment on a good meal as well. A lot of times we will say it unconsciously under our breathe, without realizing it ! Many of us like to say “hmm, hmm, hmm” when something tastes good. Are we imitating bees ?

Bees will also hum and dance to share their joy in finding an abundance of tasty nectar and pollen, attracting other bees to come share in the enjoyment and also in the labour of carrying that back to the hive. This reminds us of the importance of sharing both the good and the not so good things in life. By sharing, we can multiple our joy, as well as divide our burdens. And we help each other fulfill our own purposes in life on this planet.

Our reward for living interdependently and cooperatively is that bees will allow themselves to be soothed by smoke and a gentle handler and allow some of their honey to be taken for our use. It is good for us nutritionally, and medicinally, it can help our immune system. Eating locally produced honey can also help us to reduce our allergies to locally growing plants.

Bee Keepers have learned to build artificial hives that are easier to remove honey from, and less disruptive for the bees in their work to raise their young and refill the honeycomb again with honey, so the colony can survive the winter. It takes a lot of work to build a hive and comb and collect the pollen and nectar to make the honey. By not taking too much at a time we can ensure that bees can continue to exist and pollinate and make more honey to share.

At this time in history the world is out of balance. We humans are not paying attention to the rhythms of the natural world. We are not recognizing how they are being disrupted. The rhythms we rely on to survive. We were created last because everything else in creation needed to be in place, living in balance interdependently to create a suitable environment for us to live in. The rest of creation follows their purposes, they are hard wired to do what they are supposed to do. We are the weak link, we have free will and choice. Without us, the rest of creation would and could carry on quite nicely. Bees are showing us there is an imbalance. It is up to us to figure out where it is and change our ways, make different choices that will restore the balance. We need to understand that we need to live respectfully and interdependently with creation. We can no longer take more than we give. Bees are having a very hard time surviving right now due to disruption of habitat, pesticides, sicknesses and climate change. Numbers are plummeting. We do not fully know and understand them or their needs and therefore many more factors can be at play in the interdependent “Web of Life”, than we presently realize. We need to educate ourselves and we need to help them.

Did you know it takes about 100 visits by a bee or other pollinator to produce a perfectly round apple?

Malformed ones that you see that are shrunken on one side or so, were not pollinated fully to produce a round apple. Did you know that places like orchards and cranberry marshes presently have to hire bee keepers to set up hives in their orchards and marshes in order to try to ensure there are enough bees to pollinate their crops? They get paid by the pound of produce not by the apple, they and us, like the full round ones which weigh more individually and are tasty and not tough.

Did you also know that more bees are dying off than ever before, even those managed by experienced Bee Keepers, in part due to the above mentioned reasons?

That it is getting more difficult for Bee Keepers to successfully maintain a hive and enable it to reproduce itself for the next year and survive the winter? Did you know that some Keepers are having to focus only on raising bees, so that those raising bees for commercial pollinating and honey production can restock their dying hives? Can they ensure genetic diversity and vigor in our honey bee population with fewer hives to choose breeding stock from? The situation is dire enough that the Wildlife Federation is asking for us to mow less (less manicured lawns) and to encourage the growth of flowering plants that support pollinators. This is to ultimately maintain enough habitat, to ensure food production closer to our homes, so we can have access to it and afford it.

When I was young there were so many more wild bees around. I have only seen one bubble bee in the last, I do not know how many years ! I lived with Grandparents when I was young and used the same bedroom as my aunt had used growing up. I remember seeing bees outside the window under the tree and my Grandma has said that my aunt saw bees when she was young as well. Well an interesting thing occurred when I was in my 20’s and returned home from being away at college. A swarm of about 200-300 bees flew into the tree in front of the house that was built next door. The hive in the rafters of my Grandparent’s house (which was actually my Great-grandparent’s house) had decided to split in half and one half was in the neighbour’s tree trying to figure out where they were going to set up housekeeping next. We assumed that the old home had gotten too cramped or awkward for the number the colony had expanded into over the years. At that time there was lots of habitat and food to support them, the roadways were not too large and the area not very built up and of course my grandparents had a large yard with fruit and nut trees, vegetables and of course lots of flowerbeds.

A bee keeper was called in to assess the situation and was surprised at the size of the group of bees that had split off from the colony, quite shocked actually, as the tree was just humming like an electrical generating station ! It was the talk of the neighbourhood, but we had front row seats ! He advised everyone the bees would soon move from the tree and for everyone to close up their windows and garage doors etc to prevent them from trying to set up housekeeping in those places. He informed us the humming was them deliberating upon where they would be going next, as a group and that when they moved it would be best not to be in their way. With so many of them together, someone could get stung a lot, if they got in the bee’s way. Not only would they travel together when they moved next, he said they were discussing the situation amongst themselves and coming to consensus in their decision. Odd individuals were leaving the tree and returning, supposedly bringing information about locations etc back to the group to mull over in their deliberations. He told us he needed to work quickly but quietly before they swarmed again. We watched from inside, as he got the smoker going and hypnotized the bees. He spread a blanket around the base of the tree, did some kind of dance around the tree and then gave the tree a wack with a stick.

The bees fell off the tree and were gently rolled up into the blanket, which he put into the back of his hatchback and drove away. All done without wearing a suit for protection! Of course it was all like magic to us, but he was an experienced bee keeper and probably some kind of BEE WHISPERER as well. I would not feel comfortable to drive off with 200-300 bees in my car. One deer fly is enough to freak me out ! I do not know, but am curious to find out what happened with the bees after that. Was he going to set them up in some hives to add to his colonies, or park the car in the bush somewhere and wait for them to swarm to a new location out there? We were most curious to know how he got them out of the blanket and then the car without getting them upset ! This may sound like a wild imagination story, but it is true. The number of bees in the swarm was considered an unusually large swarm for any time, but the behavior of the bees and the actions of the bee keeper are all accurate. Perhaps because it was unusual and dramatic, I have been able to remember the details. I feel very fortunate to have been able to experience it and learn from it. The bee keeper told us the colony must be huge, since they more or less divide in half. When they decide they need to split the hive, they allow a second queen to be born and individual bees decide who will stay and who will go with the new queen. This along with coming to consensus on where they will set up the new hive shows great intelligence and successful means of governance. Individual input is valued, as worker bees come back to the group with information like size and location of possible new sites. And the group decides together what is best for the group. They work together to help the group survive. They must be successful, since they have been doing this for millennia ! I am sure there is much more to be learned from studying bees !

By the way, according to the bee keeper, the 400-600 bees living in the rafters of the old house could have made about 600 lbs of honey after all the years of successfully living there. The bee keepers eyes shone when he told me this ! I think it was a bee keepers dream to get to see that much honey in one place at once. This was quickly followed by the realization that the only way to get at the honey was sometime in the future when the house would be torn down !

~ Nmu'ltes M

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