Love to the Bee

This one's serious. Stay with me.

I watched a bee today. Not on purpose. I was sitting outside with my coffee, staring at nothing the way you do when your brain needs five minutes without a screen, and a bee landed on a clover about three feet from my boot.

She didn’t look at me. Didn’t care I was there. She had work to do. Landed, crawled inside the flower like she was punching a clock, rolled around in the pollen like it was payday, and lifted off to the next one. No wasted movement. No committee meeting. No strategic planning session. Just work. Just purpose. Just a creature doing exactly what it was built to do, without asking for credit or a wellness stipend.

We don’t deserve bees.

I mean that. We do not deserve them. And I say that as someone who carries an EpiPen because a bee sting could genuinely rearrange my afternoon in a way that involves paramedics and a very uncomfortable needle in the thigh. The creature that could kill me is also the creature that makes my food grow. That’s not irony. That’s theology.

Let me tell you what a bee does. Not what you think it does. Not the cute version with the cartoon wings and the little bucket of honey. What it actually does.

A single honeybee visits between 50 and 1,000 flowers per trip. She makes about ten trips a day. In her entire lifetime — which is roughly five to six weeks during working season — she produces about one-twelfth of a teaspoon of honey. One-twelfth. That bottle of honey in your cabinet? That took the combined life’s work of hundreds of bees who will never taste it.

She doesn’t make honey for herself. She makes it for the hive. For the ones who come after.

And the honey is just the side hustle.

The real work — the work that keeps you alive, that keeps me alive, that keeps every human on this overscheduled, overstimulated, under-grateful planet alive — is pollination.

One out of every three bites of food you eat exists because a bee touched a flower. Apples. Almonds. Blueberries. Cherries. Avocados. Cucumbers. The coffee I was drinking while I watched her work — pollinated by bees. The clover she was rolling around in feeds the cattle that become the burger you had for lunch. Bees are not part of the food chain. Bees ARE the food chain. Without them, the chain doesn’t link. It just… stops.

And they’re dying.

You’ve heard this. Colony collapse disorder. Pesticides. Habitat loss. Parasites. Climate shifts. The usual list of things we know about and do almost nothing to fix because fixing them would require the kind of sustained, unglamorous, unprofitable effort that doesn’t trend on social media or fit into a news cycle.

A bee doesn’t know about colony collapse disorder. She doesn’t know her species is in trouble. She doesn’t read the articles. She doesn’t watch the documentaries. She just gets up every morning, flies to the flower, does the work, comes home, and does it again. Until she can’t anymore.

That’s not instinct. That’s devotion.

And here’s the part that gets me. The part I can’t shake.

When a bee stings you, she dies. The stinger tears out of her body. It’s not a weapon she can use and holster. It’s a one-time offering. She gives her life to protect the hive. Not herself. The hive. The community. The ones who come after.

She makes honey she’ll never eat. She pollinates food she’ll never taste. She dies defending a home she built for someone else.

Name a politician who’s done that.

Name a CEO. Name an influencer. Name anyone on your timeline today who gave everything — everything — for the thing that comes after them.

You can’t. But the bee can. The bee does. Every day. Without a podcast. Without a merch line. Without a single Instagram story.

So here’s my love letter to the bee.

Thank you for the honey I put in my tea. Thank you for the apple my daughter ate this morning. Thank you for the coffee that makes me functional enough to write this. Thank you for the flowers that make my wife smile. Thank you for the almond milk that… actually, I don’t drink almond milk, but somebody does, and you made that possible too.

Thank you for the EpiPen industry, I guess. You keep the pharmaceutical companies in business and me on my toes. Literally. Every spring is a negotiation between my love for the outdoors and your love for being near my face.

But mostly — thank you for showing up. Every morning. Every flower. Every season. Without being asked. Without being thanked. Without needing to be seen.

If we all worked like bees, the world wouldn’t need saving. It would just hum.

Plant a flower. Skip the pesticide. Let the clover grow. It’s not much. But neither is one-twelfth of a teaspoon. And look what that adds up to.

Anyways.

Let that sit for a moment.

— Gray I. Rony

The Civilized Anarchist

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