REFLECTIONS FROM THE REARVIEW
  • Home
  • Hello and Welcome
  • Blog
  • Worth Repeating
  • My Book
  • FAQ

Silent Witness

8/4/2021

0 Comments

 
Picture
“The law of the Lord is perfect, converting the soul; the testimony of the Lord is sure, making wise the simple;
The statutes of the Lord are right, rejoicing the heart; the commandment of the Lord is pure, enlightening the eyes;
The fear of the Lord is clean, enduring forever; the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.
More to be desired are they than gold, Yea, than much fine gold;
Sweeter also than honey and the honeycomb. Moreover by them Your servant is warned,
And in keeping them there is great reward.”

Psalm 19:7-11


The Gospel is a deep well. I have pondered this mystery my whole life, up against the advice of the well-intentioned, the deep thoughts of philosophers, and the scholarship of the learned. Sometimes I have been best informed by what the Apostle Paul refers to in the first chapter of his letter to the Romans, the silent witness of nature. The most subtle things can speak loudly. 

“…what may be known about God is plain… because God has made it plain…. For since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities—his eternal power and divine nature—have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made…”
Romans 1:19-20


I am a child of the sixties. We were not sequestered in front of a device like the youth of today. We lived close by nature. There were woods all around, and farmer’s fields. I was out in God’s green earth from dawn to when the streetlights came on, barefoot from June to September and taking it all in. Somebody my own age has commented… running around all day like this, there were no fat kids. We all looked like the product of a third-world country, positively emaciated and never able to eat enough to keep up with our physical activity. Added to this preponderance of nature, my dad at one time was a teacher, teaching biology, chemistry and physics. It was not just a cerebral exercise. He really liked those things. They fascinated him because what they were could be seen in the daily functions of life all around us. Science lessons are not of a book. They are looking closely at the world we live in. 

One day when I was about eight, my dad came home with a very dramatic science lesson; a colony of bees in a screened box. Looking at them and hearing the angry buzz, we were terrified of what would happen if they escaped. Not to worry, my dad informed us. This would all calm down once he introduced the queen, kept temporarily separate in a tiny box and fed with sugar water. The queen bee would get the others into action doing what bees do by nature. Bees are creatures of routine. If you foster their natural habits, bees are your friend. It’s bee husbandry, one of the oldest forms of man co-opting nature. Its official term, is “apiary”, to be a bee keeper. And so despite the objections of my worried mother, a realtime real-life science experiment began in our own back yard. My dad was not a stranger to the apiary craft. His own dad was a bee keeper in addition to being master of many other household arts. It simply made good sense. Keep bees, and you will be kept in honey. You will also learn to wonder. 

And so, here is a short list of fun facts about bees. A longer version would fill a book. When you have a bee colony in your back yard, you get to see the secret life of bees play out. It is a miracle of nature, a tiny one, but profound nonetheless. 

The first thing to know about bees is that no one needs to tell them what to do. Man only benefits when he pays close attention and adapts to what is already happening. Bees operate by instinct, to support the life of the hive no matter what. Hence bees in the wild have made their nests in hollow trees, or wherever they sense a place high or hidden enough to discourage natural enemies. After all, everyone likes honey. ​
Women will be glad to know that at the centre of a bee house is the queen, and the entire colony serves her. When a queen hatches, the expression “queen bee” comes to full force because a queen will instinctively sting and kill any other hatching contenders to the throne. The queen is served by all the worker bees, who spend their time in organized group functions to build the nest, collect food, and rear the next generation of offspring. Each member of a hive has a specific task, and will do it without instruction. Male bees are called drones. Unlike their female counterparts, they have no stinger, but will buzz around any intruder in an attempt to disorient and intimidate them. A drone’s prime function is to procreate with the queen. 

A hive seeks its own equilibrium. If a hive grows too large, the queen will take half the hive with her and establish a colony elsewhere. This instinctively occurs just a few days prior to the new queen hatching to rule the old hive. Bees are not messy. They will never deficate inside the hive. A hive also maintains a constant temperature. If a hive becomes too hot in the summer, the bees will fan it with their wings in order to cool things off to a constant of 95°F, the perfect atmosphere to foster honey production. A hive is also extremely clean. If an intruder such as a mouse enters, the bees will sting it, pick the bones clean, and hermetically seal the remains behind a barrier of beeswax so as to contain pathogens. 
Picture
When a beekeeper makes an artificial bee home for domestication, he builds according to bee behaviour. He plants man-made wooden frames in the bee house, separated by a space of 3/8 of an inch. If you leave less space, the bees instinctively fill in the gap with wax. Sufficient space means they will form their honeycomb on the frames you have provided as they would in nature. You have only to remove the frames to harvest the honey. Fun fact, if you sight along that edge of hexagonal rows, it is as if someone snapped an invisible chalkline for construction. Bees instinctively know how to produce this to a uniform size in perfect mathematical order. There will be perfect engineering and no off-kilter hexagons despite the notion that nature is random and wild. 
Picture
Honey itself is a miracle. It is pure glucose without any impurities. This means that honey is the one food that will never rot. Desiccated but intact honey has been discovered in the tombs of the Pharaohs. Bees will travel a circuit of about two miles (3.2 km) when foraging for pollen to make honey. They are indispensable to the biosphere because their circuit allows for cross fertilization of flowering plants. The pollen is stuffed into receptacles on their hind legs, and a bee can carry about half its own weight in pollen. The bees store flower nectar in their stomachs and pass it from one worker to the next until the water within it diminishes. At this point, the nectar becomes honey, which is stored in the cells of the honeycomb. Honey is domesticated according to taste. It will take on the flavour of whatever is most abundant in nearby fields. 
​Despite the bad rap sugar gets today, honey is considered to be very beneficial to your health, filled with many natural ingredients that will boost your immune system. Honey also has antiseptic properties. In ancient times it was applied to wounds and is effective in treating boils, burns and non-healing ulcers. Its natural antigens kill bacteria, and its thick consistency draws swelling from inflamed wounds by osmosis. Bacteria will migrate also from a wound into nearby honey because the sugar is an easy food source. Most famous is Manuka Honey which is expensive because of its famous antiseptic qualities. Made with pollen from Manuka trees, this honey contains Methylglyoxal which is on its own a cytotoxic substance.

Why bees attack some people and not others is another mystery. Like humans, bees see light in combinations of red, green and blue. Bees are very sensitive to colour so as to spot out flowers. They naturally approach things which on the yellow and blue end of the spectrum so if you avoid these colours, you will have better luck on a family picnic. Bees are also very sensitive to body chemistry which releases any pheromone that might indicate aggression. This might explain beekeepers who can calmly work in a hive without any protective clothing. Bees are easily roused. It just takes one angry bee to quickly encourage the others into a dangerous swarm. Most people who have been stung will remember the stinger, still pulsating and driving home its poison before your mother removed it with tweezers. The stinger is torn out of the bee’s belly, which means the bee will die. The Greeks have an ancient story whereby bees pleased the god Jupiter with a present of honey and asked in return for a stinger to protect themselves. Jupiter granted the wish, but balanced the equation by ensuring that use of the stinger will also kill the bee.

Our own bee adventure came to an end when I was watching my dad harvest honey, and the colony suddenly decided to attack me. Most people will survive such an attack. I did, although I looked somewhat like a Goodyear blimp that had been in a fight for about a week. The neighbours were also complaining because the bees would sun themselves on bedsheets hung out on the clothesline to dry, and they would cover the sheets with their bright yellow poop. 

Bees are presently endangered. Their numbers have been diminished drastically by crop pesticides which disturb a bee’s homing instinct. The bee will fly around disoriented until it finally drops down dead. There is however a resurgence of bees far away from the country in urban settings. It has become popular to locate a hive of bees on top of skyscrapers. They. go about their business high above the crowds, doing what bees must do. Bees located in downtown Toronto fly over to Toronto Island where they gather their pollen from the abundance of Linden trees there. 

Watching bees will fill you with natural wonder, marvelling that their instinctive behaviour is predictable and uniform wherever bees may thrive. People might conclude that the existence of such a thing as bees can only be an act of God. Human beings even in the age of robotics cannot produce anything close to what bees have been doing routinely since the dawn of time, speaking silent witness of the wonders of nature. 

As long as mankind has existed, part of his quest has been to come to terms with his maker. The question where did I come from, and where am I going eventually comes to all. The best of minds like Saint Thomas Aquinas have tried to lay out an orderly explanation for things of the heavens and have failed. Saint Thomas wrote an enormous sum of all theology which he ultimately abandoned unfinished when he dreamed of trying to empty the ocean with a teaspoon. He capitulated to wonder, saying “All I have written is as straw!”

I cannot pretend to explain the wonders of the world, only that I too see them and know that there are mysteries beyond me, that I will someday know, just as I am known. What’s the buzz? Sometimes silent witness can speak volumes. 
0 Comments



Leave a Reply.

    UNCOMMON
    ​THOUGHTS

    ...about common things. 
    ​

    Categories

    All
    Accidental Story
    Activist
    A Display Of His Splendour
    Adjusting The Recipe
    Ad Man
    A Flannery O'Connor Moment
    After The Tiger
    A High Christology
    A Little Bit Redneck
    All About Widgets
    Allah Wallahi
    All I Got
    Al Low Vs The Man
    All Roads
    All Saints
    Almost
    A Long List Of Thank Yous
    Amazing Grace
    A Month Of Sundays
    And A Little Child Shall Lead Them
    And Make It Beautiful
    An Offer You Can’t Refuse
    An Officer And A Gentleman
    Antique
    A Pile Of Wood And A Plan
    Are We There Yet?
    Artifact
    As Simple As Sunshine
    A Tale Of Two Crosses
    At Hand
    Attending To Beauty
    At War
    Baby Boom
    Bad-Ass Outlaw
    Bad Faith
    Badlands
    Bad Math
    Baked Boiled Or Fried?
    Balcony Lady
    Barcode
    Beautiful By Design
    Beauty For Ashes
    Beauty On Purpose
    Being Different
    Being Human
    Belial
    Beneficence
    Best For Last
    Better Mousetrap
    Betty Toop
    Beware Of God
    Beware Of Men Who Cry
    Big Buts Of The Bible
    Bit Part
    Blessed Are The Pew Warmers
    Bound For Beauty
    Brazier
    British Invasion
    Bronte Oak
    Bucket List
    But If Not
    But Is It Sandable
    But Is It True?
    Buyer Beware
    Call To Prayer
    Camp Of The Unknown God
    Cant
    Carlton The Delivery Man
    Car Wash
    Chaos
    Cherry Picking
    Cherry Top
    Civil Disobedience
    Class Monitors And Safety Patrols
    Click Bait
    Clothing Optional
    Cloud Of Witnesses
    Colour Blind
    Coming To My Senses
    Contra Mundum
    Couldn't Not
    Counting The Cost
    Covid Cut
    Crazy
    Creed
    Crooked Made Straight
    Crucified Man
    Curated
    Curse Of Adam
    Damascus Road
    Dangerous
    Dangerous Chemicals Of My Youth
    Data Overload
    Day Of The Dead
    Deliver Us From Evil
    Deposit Of Faith
    Dieu Et Mon Droit
    Different Drum
    Distressed
    Dog House
    Doing Church
    Doing The Lord's Work
    Doing The Math
    Do It Yourself
    Dominion
    Dominus Vobiscum
    Do-Over
    Do Something!
    Dreaming And Doing
    Edifice
    Egging Armour Hill
    English Leather
    Ensign
    Even As I Am Known
    Even Me
    Even Stranger Things
    Exiles
    Experience Wanted
    Faithful Servant
    Fallow Season
    Family Bible
    Family Business
    Feeling It
    Fellowship Of The Brush
    Field Of Faith
    First World Chair
    Fit As You Go
    Five Minutes
    Fixing The Machine
    Flawed People
    Flock Of Angels
    Follow The Money
    For A Season
    For A Time Such As This
    Fortissimo!
    Forward
    French Horn
    From A Distance
    Frozen Man
    Funny Words
    Gateway
    Genetic Lottery
    Gifting
    God Calling...
    God Save The Queen
    Going In!
    Gone But Not Forgotten
    Gone Fishing
    Good Bones
    Good God Almighty
    Good Government
    Good Luck Skippy
    Gott Mit Uns
    Greatest Is Love
    Great Reset
    Grocery - A Short Story
    Gross Anatomy
    Grunt
    Haka!
    Hammer And Tong
    Hammer Time
    Hands And Eyes
    Hands On
    Happy Rooster
    Hardwired
    Hearing Voices
    Heavy LIfting
    Hello My Juan
    Helping God Show Off
    Hidden In The Secret Place
    Hid In My Heart
    High Dudgeon
    History Bites
    Hockey Tape And Rubber Bands
    Hodge Podge
    Holy Disorder
    Holy Father
    Home Economics
    Hymn Stories
    I AM
    I Cannot Help You
    I Could Be Wrong
    I Dare You
    Idiots
    If You Build It
    If You Get There Before I Do
    If You Go I'll Go
    Im Khalil
    Impossibly Cute
    In A Strange Land
    Incarnation
    In Code
    Incomplete
    Individual
    Influencer
    In My Own Time
    Inner FIfteen Year Old
    In Praise Of Culture
    In Praise Of The Middle
    In The Details
    In The Spirit
    In The Usual Manner
    Invader
    It's All A Stage
    I Will Remember
    Jackass
    Je Me Souviens
    John Henry
    Judge Not
    Jurisprudence
    Just A Few Words
    Just Have Faith
    Justice
    Just In Our Own Time
    Just Like God
    Keep Calm And...
    Keeper
    Keeping House
    Keeping On Keeping On
    KJV
    Knock Yourself Out
    Kumbaya
    Kybo
    Lamentations
    Lawn Nazi
    Lemonade
    Less Is More
    Lessons In Empathy
    Let Me Count The Ways
    Let's Go RIde A BIke
    Licking The Spoon
    Like A Flint
    Linked In
    Little Boxes
    Liturgy
    Lo And Behold
    Logos
    LOL
    Looking Back On The Forward Looking
    Looking For Some Real Good News
    Lord Jesus It’s A FIRE
    Lorem Ipsum Dolor
    Lost And Found
    Lost In Translation
    Luck Of The Stable
    Made To Dance
    Madonna
    Magical
    Make A Baby Laugh
    Make It Nice
    Maker
    Maker’s Mark
    Manifest
    Manwich
    Ma-pitom
    Marbles In Spring
    Measure Of A Man
    Meat Power
    Memory Box
    Men In Loincloths
    Men's Barber Shop
    Messiah
    Middle Ground
    Middleman
    Mistakes All In
    Montreal Spice
    More
    Morse Code
    Mosh Pit
    Moving Parts
    Mr. Good Enough
    Mr. Resolve
    My Neighbour
    Mystery Of The Cheshire Cat
    Myth Of Sisyphus
    My Wife The Movie Star
    Name Calling
    Natural
    Needed Time
    Neighbour
    New Day
    New Wine
    Next To Godliness
    Next Year Country
    No Fancy Diagram Needed
    No King But Caesar
    None Deserving
    North Of Ground Level
    Nothing Particularly Important
    Nothing Personal
    Not Waiting For Godot
    No Wonder
    Oak
    Obsessive
    Offended
    Oh Jerusalem
    Old Growth
    Old White Men
    On Adult Admission
    One Coffee At A Time
    One Smart Farmer
    One Thing
    On Richard Rohr
    On The Lam
    On Writing Clearly
    Ordinary Time
    Orwell For Our Times
    Out Of Egypt
    Over And Again
    Paint Over That
    Paper Boy
    Particularity
    Particularity Of Place
    Particulate Matter
    Part Of The Tradition
    Pater Noster
    Patina
    Pea Game
    Pelagian
    Perfect
    Perfect Crime
    Perfect Ride
    Philosemite
    Pilate's Dilemma
    Pinky Swear
    Place At The Table
    Playing Favourites
    Pop-a-corn!
    Potato War
    Preaching Parrot
    Predators
    Prepper
    Prince
    Print Shop
    Prisoner
    Promises Promises
    Proof Text
    Psalm 1
    Psalm 19
    Psalter
    Put Away The Books
    Putting Up The Lights
    Rainbow
    Recognition
    Red Haired Step Child
    Reduce Reuse Recycle
    Resin
    Restoration
    Resurrection
    Retro
    Rosemary And The Drug Dealers
    Sad Face
    Sandwich
    Say My Name
    Scars
    Scrooge's Bedsheets
    Second Naiveté
    Seeing Red
    Seven Sixty-Five
    Shouting From The Areopagus
    Shrove Tuesday
    Silent Witness
    Slippery Slope
    Small-c
    Small Graces
    Sock Monkeys
    Someone To Watch Over Me
    Song For The Lowly
    Sore Afraid
    Special Language Store
    Squat
    Squeeze Gently
    Starting With What Is True
    Status Quo
    Still True
    Street Food
    String Too Short To Be Saved
    Strongman
    Sufficient To The Day
    Superstar
    Take A Punch
    Takedown
    Talking Head
    Talking Your Parents Down From The Ledge
    Telling The Story
    Thanksgiving
    The Bliss Of Ignorance
    The Church Invisible
    The Crossing King
    The Evil Day
    The General
    The Great Mystery
    The Harrowing Of Hell
    The Joys Of Hash
    The Man Who Was Always Right
    The Other Place
    The Place Beyond Knowing
    The Quickening
    The REAL Jesus
    The Reason For The Season
    Therefore Choose Life
    The Rules
    The Secret History
    The Stand That Wouldn't Stand
    The Table-ness Of A Table
    The Way
    This Is My Body
    This Is The PLACE
    Though One Be Raised From The Dead
    Thoughts On Sixty
    Three Jews And A Gentile
    Thrice Wise
    Throwing The Spaghetti Against The Wall
    Timeless
    Time Vs Time
    Time Warp
    Tim Falladay
    Tims No More
    Tin Hat
    Tonto And Me
    Touching Stones
    Trevor’s Super Bad Day
    Trick Key
    Tubafore!
    Unbelievable
    Under A Bush? HELL NO!
    Uninvited
    Unlikely Saint
    Unmedicated
    Unspectacular
    Use Gently
    U-Turn
    Value Added
    Veni Vidi
    Virge 'n Mary
    WASP
    Watching Paint Dry
    Wayside Chapel
    Weaker Sex (?)
    We Stand On Guard For Thee
    We Were Waiting
    What Are You Prepared To DO?
    What Doesn't Kill You
    What Lazarus Knew
    Wheat Gum
    When Cows Fly
    When Odd Becomes Interesting
    Where Art Comes From
    While You Were Sleeping
    Why I Still Like Cowboys
    Witness
    Woke
    Wood Show
    Words
    Words... The Right Tool
    Worthy Adversary
    Worthy Is The Lamb
    You And Me And Rob

    RSS Feed

Contact Us

    Subscribe Today!

Submit
Picture
  • Home
  • Hello and Welcome
  • Blog
  • Worth Repeating
  • My Book
  • FAQ