I have been sharing thoughts on bitachon, the trait of trusting God. In responding to a comment on my last posting, I wrote: “I am incapacitated when it comes time to saying anything about God, except that it seems utterly inconceivable to me that this world – which gives me the ability to communicate ideas to you by banging the ends of my fingers on a machine located thousands of kilometres from you, among other things – was the result of the chance bumping up of molecules in the mud millions of years ago.”
That sense I have that the natural world in its complexity, order and variety seems to have “Creator” written all over it was only heightened by a visit I made this past week to an exhibit at the Royal Ontario Museum called “Bees: a story of survival.”
The show was all about bees, largely from a bee’s-eye view of the world. It brought to mind Ralph Waldo Emerson’s poem Humble-Bee, a paean to bees, that includes the memorable lines:
Wiser far than human seer,
Yellow-breeched philosopher!
To be accurate, however, we have to acknowledge that sometimes those philosophical insects change their wardrobe. Those yellow breeches are not to be found on the official bee of Toronto (!), for example, which is a metallic green variety.
Emerson’s “yellow-breeched philosopher” showed up in the show in a remarkable range of colours, from brilliant metallic greens and blues to black, brown, red, orange, yellow and white. Again, just citing Toronto because it is where I happen to be, there are 300 species of bee in this city, a tiny slice of the 25,000 species of bees that have been identified around the world, so far.
And “around the world” is accurate. The only places on earth where bees are not found is Antarctica and the high Arctic.
I went to see that show with awareness that Rav Yerucham Levovitz was renowned for his fascination with the natural world. In his book Da’at Chochmah u’Mussar (vol. I, p. 97) he recalled:
Once, when I was in a zoo of animals and birds, I grasped many things which I never would have grasped otherwise – and yet all of that is as nothing compared to what we can discern from the great zoo that is the whole of creation.
And on that topic, there is an older source, the Talmud (Eruvin 100b), that says:
Even if the Torah had not been given, we would have learned modesty from the cat, [which covers its excrement], and that stealing [is objectionable] from the ant, [which does not take the food of another ant], and forbidden relations from the dove, [which is monogamous], and proper relations from the rooster, which [first] appeases [the hen] and then mates [with it].
Although no one (including the Noah story), seems very interested in insects, there is no doubt that bees are an extraordinarily revealing element of that creation. The more we look into the world of bees , the more astonished we become.
Just look at the honeycombs many bees build. With neither ruler nor pencil, bees create cells that are precisely symmetrical hexagons. The cells share walls, thereby conserving wax while creating efficient storage. Marvel at their ability!
Honeybees are able to navigate in flight by combining visual landmarks, the position of the sun and their internal sense of direction. They can learn to recognize the appearance of landmarks along a route—trees, buildings, hedges and patterns in the landscape. They use remembered views to determine what direction to fly next.
Worker bees regulate conditions in the hive by fanning their wings to move air, helping regulate temperature and humidity and assisting with water evaporation during cooling.
Bees rely on sensory organs to detect odours and navigate, and they use specialized structures on their legs to clean their antennae. This helps keep their sensory organs in good working condition.
To my knowledge, Rav Yerucham never commented on bees, but if he had, here are some Mussar lessons he might have taken:
1. Yirat ha’romemut
Not so much a lesson as a treasured experience, the encounter with bees in the remarkable details of their complex lives swept me away into deep awareness of the infinite creativity and wonder to be found in the natural world. It was a small step – or maybe no step at all – to awe and reverence for the Source of all that gave rise to this wonder.
2. Precision in the smallest things
A bee’s work consists of myriad small acts: gathering pollen, shaping wax, tending larvae and maintaining the hive. This resonates with Rav Yerucham’s teaching that spiritual practice is built more from small details than grand deeds.
3. Fulfilling one’s distinctive purpose
A bee’s role depends on its place in the colony and its stage of life. There are drones and queens, worker bees and others. The same can seen to be true of us as well, as each person has distinctive capacities and responsibilities to discover and develop that are relevant to their particular context and stage of life.
4. Turning knowledge into instinct
Bees do not merely possess information about flowers and navigation; their learning shapes their behaviour. Rav Yerucham emphasized that what we learn about life must penetrate deeply enough to become part of our own lived nature, rather than remaining an intellectual abstraction.
5. Serving something larger than myself
A bee gathering nectar and serving in other ways contributes to the colony’s survival. The work it does is not selfish but a contribution to the larger good. This echoes with Rav Yerucham’s emphasis on nosei be’ol im chaveiro: bearing the burden with one’s fellow that he placed at the centre of spiritual practice.
What other lessons can you see that we can learn from bees or, for that matter,from any creature in “the great zoo that is the whole of creation”?
Alan
Dear Alan,
How wonderful that you had this experience which resulted in "awe" of the Creator! I will take your question about what else can be learned from bees as a challenge in memory as I think back to the time, while up in the mountains of SW Virginia, I decided I wanted to be a beekeeper. I took classes, met with experienced bee keepers, even a holistic beekeeper to learn how to avoid some of the tactics that I thought was not "fair" to the bees that other beekeepers did as a matter of "well, that's the way we've always done it" mentality. So here are some lessons I learned from bees that I took personally:
1. When the conditions are not right, bees ABSCOND. We had gone down the mountain to get our first bees and then drove them back up the mountain to where their lovely new hives were. There I learned about what is called honey-flow- when the flowering trees and plants have not yet put on sufficient flowers (no flowers, no nectar). The bees knew what I did not know and they left, bye bye money). The lesson to me became that I should be very careful about rushing investments and what worked one place, might not work in another.
2. I learned that a foraging honey bee will not sting because when they sting, the stinger stays inside you and when you swipe them away, their insides pull out killing them. What I learned was that there is no reason to fear a foraging honey bee and the life lesson is that when people are busy trying to make a living they are less likely to take the time to pick a fight.
3. I learned that a circle of cinnamon around the hive, replaced after each rain, can be a barrier to thieving ants. That if infestation is small that powered sugar effective to dust the bees with so that they will remove scale or mites by a process of mutual grooming. From these organic tricks I learned that before I head for the chemicals to research a more natural approach. This includes taking pharmaceuticals before trying a holistic approach.
4. This last thing I learned that I want to share with you is about the bears. Bears might like honey but they don't really go after the honey. They go after the larva which is a source of protein, and once they learned what's in those white boxes, it hard to keep bees without diligence and an electric fence. Since we didn't stay there full time, leaving the hives for the bees to fend for themselves reminds me of the Jewish wisdom which asks the question, Who should we blame? The rat or the hole? We left the opportunity for the bear (the hole). The bear was going to do what a bear does (like a rat). This lessons pulls me to RESPONSIBILITY on my own part to constantly challenge myself in a situation and determine if I left a hole.