Honey for the Wise

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

* Why do bees make honey?