A New Stage in Our Life Cycle

A New Stage in Our Life Cycle
Nurse bees

As I've been gathering edible flowers for our wholesale partners from one week to the next, I'm in the good company of honey bees.  Honey bees typically travel no further than 3 miles from their hive.  So these could be domesticated bees from the hives down the farm lane, or they could be wild bees which set nest in the preserved Indiana bat habitat we see from the veg field.  Did you know that all foraging honey bees are females?  They're worker bees, who have graduated from one task to the next in the hive as they mature, ending their life as a forager bee.  They don't set a very good example for our over-ambitious Americanan culture...in their final role they collect nectar and water until their hearts give out.  In a way their demise is all too familiar to us here in the States: they work themselves to death.  In this case, their motives are more aligned with our immigrant ancestors who were working for survival purposes, not to sock away more and live bigger.

I learned about this honeybee career trajectory from an incredibly experienced and curious beekeeper when I first started farming.  And I was absolutely awestruck by the astounding organization of these bitty creatures.  When first hatched from their cell, they begin with the rather unspecialized and trivial task of cleaning out their cell and then maintaining others.  As their bodies mature, various glands develop enough to produce food for the hive, a much more sophisticated vocation.  And so on and so forth until their flight muscles and stinging mechanism have evolved and they cross the threshold into working outside of the hive.  Can you imagine the sensations of exiting the hive?  I wonder what the shock of the sun and the open air feel like to them.  Maybe they pause their agenda and revel in it.  In the coming years when we unleash a colony into our vacant hive boxes, I'll take my breaks in the beeyard to marvel at their comings and goings.

No doubt I am lucky to be in the bees' company.  Their activity in the garden is a sweet reminder of the less regimented but inevitable metamorphosis of our human lives.  Just as one phase seems long-lived and perpetual really, a door to the next phase is unlocked.  Just in the last week there were two instances when a person in my life who is dear to me commented off-the-cuff that a time for x, y or z to play out will come.  Just like my friends buzzing around me in the fields of aster and fall grasses, these people were reminding me in my own language of the thresholds yet to be crossed.  

It's such a wondorous life that unfolds one chapter at a time, each with its own theme and plot and cast of characters.  I'll try to live out this phase of our life cycle as active caregivers for the young in our hive with as much grace as the 'nurse bees' in the hive.  And one day I'll be deep in my thoughts in the field realizing we have entered the next stage.