Honey for the Wise
Eat
honey, my son, for it is good;
honey
from the comb is sweet to your taste.
Know
also that wisdom is like honey for you;
If
you find it, there is a future hope for you,
and
your hope will not be cut off.
Proverbs
24:13-14
My
brother, who works at an apiary, recently acquired a couple of
beehives for himself that he showed us over the weekend.
A
beehive is a fascinating thing, all those hundreds of bees tending to
their duties: guarding the eggs, feeding the larvae, grooming the
queen, fanning the entrance to the hive, collecting nectar to make
honey. All busily doing exactly what they were created to do.
Which
becomes all the more intriguing when you learn about the life cycle
of a bee. Bees collect nectar from flowers to produce honey, which
is what will sustain them through the winter when there are no
flowers. During the summer months, a bee lives for 28 - 35 days;
only those bees hatched in late September or October will survive
over the winter. In that one month of life, a honey bee, flying 15 miles an hour,
visiting 50 to 100 flowers per trip, will produce about 1/12 of a
teaspoon of honey. To produce one pound of honey, a whole hive of
bees must fly over
55 000 miles and visit two million flowers. Which
is an astonishing amount of work for a future most of the bees will
not see.*
And
for us, “wisdom is like honey.” Wisdom, gained through the hard
work of living, of doing what we were created to do. Sweet and good
to taste. Hard-won sustenance. The farther we fly, the more
metaphorical flowers we visit, the greater the wisdom. In the grand
scheme of things, our life span is as brief as a honey bee's, but for
us there is "a future hope, a hope that will not be cut off."
“The
fear of the LORD is the beginning of wisdom....” Proverbs 9:10a
