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A Community of Love
How beekeeping is a spiritual experience for humans.
As a Christian priest, I have had to negotiate so many relationships — my own, and those of others — but I never imagined I would enter into a relationship with insects. Dogs, cats, furry critters — yes — but insects?
How wrong I was.
It’s now been a few short months since we adopted our first colony of bees and all my presuppositions have gone completely out of the window. Bees, unlike carnivorous wasps, seek their sustenance only from nectar (sugar) and the protein found in pollen. As such, they are both vegetarian and also essential to our ecosystem as pollinators.
But what has surprised me most, is the connection I have found with them.
My initial motivation was about saving the planet’s bees or saving the ecosystem on which we all rely. I asked myself, can you imagine a world without pollination? A world perhaps without apples or fruits and so many other staples we rely on?
I have to confess, I was also really fired up by the thought of making loads of our own honey and couldn’t understand what beekeepers were telling me when they said “the honey is a bonus”.
Once again, how wrong I was!