consider the bees

It seems appropriate that this, the first, entry on the Holy Cross grounds blog should feature our bees and be published on St. Benedict’s Day. The bee is a potent symbol of monastic life bearing many spiritual lessons, and our bees also live at the heart of what we’re trying to do with our monastery grounds.

Yesterday, due to the hard work of our two bee colonies, the support of all who have donated to the beekeeping fund, and the volunteer efforts of many who have helped to plant pollinator-friendly flowers on our grounds, we harvested fifty pounds of honey. Taking a look at the numbers gives you a sense of what exactly we’re talking about here. Our fifty pounds of honey comes in 65 little bear bottles (soon available for sale in our gift shop) and represents approximately 150,000 flowers foraged since the early spring. And all that from just two colonies.

To harvest the honey, our beekeepers suited up and headed into the bee yard where we removed the top box (called a ‘super’–and let me tell you, it was super-heavy with honey) from each colony. We took the supers inside where we uncapped the frames using a serrated knife, after which we slotted the uncapped frames into the honey extractor. Using centrifugal force the extractor draws the honey out of the frames, through a spout, and into a filter that removes wax and other debris from the hive. Then we filled our bear bottles from the spout on the filtered bucket.

What’s amazing is how distinct the honey itself is. Even from frame to frame we noticed a difference in taste. The honey from some frames was light and floral, from others rich and fruity, all depending on which flowers had been harvested and when to fill that particular frame. (Notice the difference in the color of the comb on the frames in the picture below.)

Brother John joined our regular beekeepers Brother Bernard, Brother Will, and Yanick Savain in the harvest. As we were working John asked Bernard about the importance of individual bees to the colony. Bernard told him that the entire colony is really one organism, even though it may contain as many as 40,000 individual bees. The spiritual significance of this statement struck me. What a gorgeous metaphor for the Body of Christ.

Particularly as we face into our country’s racism, violence, and ideological division, laid bare by all the killings this last week, it’s important that we begin to see that we are already one body, a body with Christ’s heart as its heart, pumping the blood of life, even to the furthest extremity. To speak of me or you, of us or them, is as silly as to talk of the life of one bee. Violence toward anyone is really violence toward ourselves.

Many of us understand this concept intellectually, but we rarely get it at the heart level. I am convinced that our difficulty understanding our unity with one another arises primarily out of our difficulty seeing our own fundamental wholeness and unity. We think of wholeness as something that will happen one day when we’ve reached some kind of longed-for perfection. Not so. Wholeness underlies the entire creation. It already is in this very moment, and we all already have it and are it. We all already, right now, are one with God in Christ, which means we are all already one with one another in Christ.

We would do well to consider the bees of the hive, how they work with one heart and one mind, never doubting their unity. The good news of Christ is that the reign of God is now, within and among us. The table is laid, and it’s loaded down with honey. All we have to do is taste.

Happy feast day.

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