A Beehive of Thoughts
The oven’s warmth had not evaporated from the slice of bread I held in my palm. Amber-colored syrup slowly oozed out of a bottle as I squeezed its middle. Watching that sweet, golden nectar travel over the lumpy surface pockmarked with rustic grains. The uneven air pockets embedded in the springy softness of the bread soaked up the work of a thousand bees swarming every flower near their hive. The stress of being up all night had depleted feel-good stores of dopamine from my brain. You see, in my line of work, I deal with “touch and go” plumbing emergencies of the heart. And the cold wintery morning made the sweetness of the honey and the softness of fresh warm bread even more appealing.
As I looked at a cartoonish caricature of a bee stamped on the bottle shaped like a bear — another beehive predator — those bulging compound eyes spoke to me. My lips were straining to feel the bulky rectangle full of sugar and carbohydrates enter and please the impatient taste buds. I paused. I was about to devour the lifetime’s work of a honeybee, a teaspoon sourced from hundreds of flowers, as it flew from flower to flower at 12 to 15 miles an hour, flapping its wings 12,000 times a minute. All that hard work for a minute of pleasing my taste buds. Google gave me the wisdom of Socrates to resolve my ethical dilemma.
What I read was not what I wanted to hear — that the bee has been reclaimed by existence, the honey has disappeared into the tiny crevices created by the rising yeast, and all that’s left to do is enjoy the experience of the sweetness of someone’s hard work. To Greek philosophers, honey was the food of their gods. The Muses, sister goddesses of art, poetry, and science, gave Homer, Plato, and other famous names the gift of eloquence by sending bees their way to plaster honey on their lips while they slept.
At that moment, I realized that a beehive full of bees is like a mind and its thoughts. Some similarities are unmistakable. A beekeeper would tell you that a typical beehive contains 60–80,000 bees, and a mystic says 60–80,000 thoughts course through an average human mind each day.
While bees travel far, as much as several miles from their hive, to forage, thoughts do the same. Eyes and the other senses provide “wings” to our thoughts which travel into the past and the future and bring back the sweetness of memories and imaginations. Like the bees, which always find their way back to their hive, thoughts return to us no matter how far they travel.
But there is one glaring difference. While honeybees don’t bring back anything that tastes bitter, our thoughts allow bitterness to enter our minds, and we don’t exercise our freedom to reject toxic thoughts. Just as the bees don’t stop flapping their wings as they hover over flowers, we must remain alert and conscious of what enters the mind, for that is what we will carry with us for the rest of the day and throughout our lifetime.
Honeybees rarely, if ever, use their stingers. If they do, they die. Similarly, we harbor the capacity to hurt another, but once we exercise that freedom to cause pain to someone else, a part of our humanity dies and is lost forever in that momentary expression of hatred. It’s hard to imagine a world without bees. Just ask farmers. Likewise, it is hard to imagine a mind without thoughts, but carrying a mind with only sweet thoughts is within reach.
