Posted on FB by Brooke Medicine Eagle (author unknown) followed by a comment:
SOMETHING LOVELY:
My dad has bees.Today I went to his house and he showed me all of the honey he had gotten from the hives. He took the lid off of a 5 gallon bucket full of honey and on top of the honey there were 3 little bees, struggling. They were covered in sticky honey and drowning. I asked him if we could help them and he said he was sure they wouldn't survive. Casualties of honey collection I suppose.
I asked him again if we could at least get them out and kill them quickly, after all he was the one who taught me to put a suffering animal (or bug) out of its misery. He finally conceded and scooped the bees out of the bucket. He put them in an empty Chobani yogurt container and put the plastic container outside.
Because he had disrupted the hive with the earlier honey collection, there were bees flying all over outside.
We put the 3 little bees in the container on a bench and left them to their fate. My dad called me out a little while later to show me what was happening. These three little bees were surrounded by all of their sisters (all of the bees are females) and they were cleaning the sticky nearly dead bees, helping them to get all of the honey off of their bodies. We came back a short time later and there was only one little bee left in the container. She was still being tended to by her sisters.
When it was time for me to leave we checked one last time and all three of the bees had been cleaned off enough to fly away and the container was empty.
Those three little bees lived because they were surrounded by family and friends who would not give up on them, family and friends who refused to let them drown in their own stickiness and resolved to help until the last little bee could be set free.
Bee Sisters. Bee Peers. Bee Teammates.
We could all learn a thing or two from these bees.
Bee kind always.~
~author unknown
Here are some thoughts (me):When I was little and was drinking the kool aid, that is to say, when I was being programmed to live in a world where people were the only creatures with souls and animals functioned by instinct alone, at least I had a conscience that questioned that programming that essentially allowed us to do pretty much anything we wanted with insects and animals, because they were secondary creations, along with the plant world. It was kind of like we were taught that we were the bosses of creation (stewards), but watch out because it's a jungle out there. Oh yes, everything was in its own category or class or phyla. There were good germs and bad germs. There were good people and bad people. Good people go to the "good place", bad people go to the "bad place". Science held all the answers worth asking. Making money (capitalism) is good. Being rich is the main goal in life but money can't by love, so, as far as finding love goes, I was on my own. Nobody gave me any good information about finding love. That about covers all the pillars of my early education. It took about 30 years for me to deconstruct that edifice. It was made of bricks of.bullshit .
This little story about the bee is beautiful isn't it? What if my biology teacher had assigned that story to us in 7th grade and asked us what it says about the nature of bees. You know, it occurs to me that it is remarkable that I even had a biology class in 7th grade, where we were dissecting frogs and preparing slides so we could peer at the cells in a lettuce leaf.
Which is worse, being taught that insects are nothing but intricate little living machines run by instinct or little or nothing at all. The jury is out on that I guess.
