Bee Present for Others

This is NOT my story or my experience. I found it online in the vast expanses of the internet where if a tree falls in the forest whether it makes a sound or not, at least half the commenters will argue over what color its leaves were.

The story by an unknown author was offered by Michelle Gaskill, a perfect Internet stranger, from my perspective, and someone I initially encountered on Facebook, a social platform most of us associate more with snarl and snark than with quiet contemplation or incandescent insight. I confess to contributing more than my fair share in the former categories but then again I’ve always been an overachiever. 

It’s only as I’ve aged, or rusted as Neil Young might say, that I’ve become better acquainted with crafting sentences that use personal pronouns other than “I” and have consciously attempted more to listen to understand rather than to wait for my turn and rebut. Not sure my success rate on that is where it should be, but I’m told the goal should be progress and not perfection. 

I love the lesson of this narrative and wanted to share it because it resonates at so many levels. I hope yours is one of them. Don’t get distracted by the brilliance of the detail in this simple story. Savor the larger picture and then look in the mirror.

Here goes: 

“My dad has bees. Today I went to his house, and he showed me all the honey he had gotten from the hives. He took the lid off a 5-gallon bucket full of honey and on top of the honey there were three little bees, struggling. 

They were covered in sticky honey and drowning. I asked him if we could help them, and he said he was sure they wouldn't survive. Casualties of honey collection I suppose.

I asked him again if we could at least get them out and kill them quickly; he was the one who had taught me to put a suffering animal (or bug) out of its misery. He finally conceded and scooped the bees out of the bucket. He put them in an empty yogurt container and put the container outside. Because he had disrupted the hive with the earlier honey collection, bees were flying all around.

We put the three little bees in the container on a bench and left them to their fate. My dad called me out a little while later to show me what was happening. These three little bees were surrounded by all their sisters (all the bees are females) and they were cleaning the sticky nearly dead bees, helping them to get all the honey off their bodies. 

We returned a short time later and there was only one little bee left in the container. She was still being tended to by her sisters.

When it was time for me to leave we checked one last time and all three of the bees had been cleaned off enough to fly away and the container was empty.

Those three little bees lived because they were surrounded by family and friends who would not give up on them, family and friends who refused to let them drown and resolved to help until the last little bee could be set free.

Bee Sisters. Bee Peers. Bee Teammates.

We could all learn a thing or two from these bees.

Bee kind always.” 
-bill kenny