Our family has lived in the same apartment for the last four years (which is longer than we lived in any place in Alabama)…and I use the word “apartment” here very loosely because it’s really just the upstairs half of a 100-year old house. I could write an entire post on why this apartment sucks but I won’t do that because I’ve been told that ingratitude is unbecoming.
The point is, every Spring when we get our tax return my husband and I start dreaming about buying a home and finally getting to do all of things we’ve talked about doing since college like raising chickens and keeping bees. And every Spring, we decide to stay in this apartment for “one more year” (it’s complicated, okay?)
So when we were well into the thick of our last “one more year,” we received a really beautiful gift.
In the fall, new neighbors moved into the house next door—young, cool-looking parents with two kids about the same ages as ours.
I watched with baited breath as my husband went to introduce himself to the husband one Sunday morning. Within that first conversation, Thomas Aquinas had already come up and my theologian/missionary husband was ECSTATIC.
Turns out our neighbors are actually even cooler than we thought they’d be. We share a similar interests, similar faith traditions, and a similar vision for life. Since then we’ve grown in friendship over Sunday dinners, and drinks shared around a bonfire between our two homes (perfectly situated where both baby monitors are still in range).
The wife and I take walks with the strollers, or trade off on watching the older kids outside or in house, each getting some much needed quiet while our kids have time with their favorite playmates.
We’ve helped dig holes for their garden beds, they’ve helped us weed ours having been long neglected by our land-lady.
We’ve introduced them to some local friends, and they are letting us keep bees in our their property.
My husband and I have talked about keeping bees for the past ten years, and this year we were able to order boxes and bees for two hives that would come in May.
But then, this past Sunday, we got an early morning phone call from some friends at our parish. A swarm of honey bees had just arrived in their yard, did we want to come get them?1
Moments later my husband was out the door and I was trying to get our kids ready for mass while also watching videos Ben’s progress being texted in real-time. SUCCESS. He got them.
Until later when they SWARMED AGAIN into another neighbor’s tree.
Now we’ve lived here four years and with the exception of one fella, I really haven’t talked to many of our neighbors. But as Ben and our neighbor stood on ladders to cut down the branch with the bees, more and more folks started to come out to see.
Introductions were made and we chatted as we watched. Everyone delighted, not only by the spectacle of two men in a tree, but by the beauty of the bees.
Honeybees are fascinating creatures, though they often get a bad rap by people who don’t know the difference between the various species.
A hive consists of several thousand bees; there is the queen bee who lays all of the eggs, the drones (males) who mate with the queen, and the worker bees (female) who work together to build the comb, collect food, and rear the brood.
No individual bee can live without the support of the colony. 2
Locality is also important honeybees. Bees create a “mind map” of the three-mile radius surrounding the hive; they stay within this radius to search for food and know how to get home. If you move a hive any further than three feet inside that radius, they’ll have a hard time figuring out where it went (Ask me how I know).
And their presence is an asset to the place in which they live. They build it up and make it better, pollinating the trees and flowers and making them fruitful.
In this, I think we can learn a lot from the bees.
In this modern, and largely digital age, we tend to undervalue our local community. Instead of investing in the community we find ourselves in, we look outside it; we sometimes even move in search of a better one instead of trying to better the one we were given.
We pick our parishes based, not on locality, but on established friendships, politics, or the quality of the homilies.
We talk about “loving our neighbor” but don’t actually look to the people right next door.
Each of us have much to offer others, and we need a love of our place and community to really thrive.
Our bees have settled in nicely after the second rescue; they have gotten familiar with their surroundings and have been busy building up their comb.
And several of our neighbors have already stopped over to check in on them. Hopefully in a few months, we’ll be able to harvest some honey to share.
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BEE FUN FACT #1: So I know that a swarm of bees sounds really aggressive but it’s actually when bees are their most docile. When a hive gets too big, it swarms; a second queen is made and she leaves with half of the hive to go start a new hive somewhere else. During this swarm, the bees don’t yet have a new home and as they have nothing to defend they aren’t looking for a fight. You could literally collect them with your bare hands.
BEE FUN FACT #2: Bees communicate with these little “dances” to help each other find the best sources of food, or in the case of our swarm, the queen. Once the Queen Bee made it into our hive box, the worker bees with her began “fanning” their backsides to share the scent of the Queen’s pheromones to help the others find their way home. If you can get the queen in the box, the other bees will follow.