“How sweet are your words to my taste, sweeter than honey to my mouth!” Psalm 119:103
Last week, I talked about God’s extraordinary design for the flight of a bumblebee – how it creates tiny hurricanes with its wings! Incredible! This week, I want to focus on honey bees and some other equally incredible facts about them. (Just FYI: All of these spellings – bumble bee and bumblebee and honey bee and honeybee – appear to be acceptable.) It’s difficult to decide which facts about honey bees to mention, because I am fascinated by so many characteristics and habits of these amazing insects. But I’ll try to rein in my enthusiasm, because I don’t have time to write that much anyway (and you don’t have time to read that much).
There are three types of bees in every hive: the queen, worker bees, and drones. The drones are the only males, and their sole responsibility is to mate with the queen. Only about one drone in a thousand gets that opportunity, however (and he dies afterward). Worker bees are infertile females, and they do just what their name implies – work, work, work! Worker bees prepare food, feed the queen, the drones, and the brood, heat and cool the hive, and guard the hive. During the summer, a worker bee may only live about 6-8 weeks, mostly because it wears out its wings flying what would be an equivalent of one and a half times around Earth. And it will only produce about 1/12 of a teaspoon of honey in that life span. An entire hive, however, can produce from 60-100 pounds of honey in a year.
Whenever worker bees travel to flowers, they collect both nectar and pollen, but they will usually focus on one thing at a time. One of the things that I find most interesting is the way in which the worker bees communicate to other workers in the hive about the location of a particularly desirable patch of flowers. They dance! One dance is called the waggle dance, because the dancing bee waggles back and forth as she moves forward in a straight line. The length of that straight line shows the relative distance of the flower patch from the hive. After dancing a certain distance in a straight line, the worker bee will circle back and repeat the dance. How she communicates direction from the hive is even more fascinating. Bees know which way is up and which way is down inside their hives. When a dancing bee waggles, she waggles a certain angle from straight up. Once the bee is outside the hive, she looks for the position of the sun and flies at that same angle away from the sun. A second type of dance is the circle dance. With this dance, the bee is indicating that the tasty patch of flowers is somewhere close to the hive. The dancing bee simply walks in a circle and then turns around to walk the same circle in the opposite direction. She will do this several times, and, if she happens to waggle as she turns around, it is thought that the length of time she waggles indicates the quality of the flower patch she found. Our God is indeed an awesome God!
Last week, I also mentioned that, not only do I believe in God as our Creator, I believe that the Bible is His inspired Word, that He gave his Son, Jesus Christ, to die for our sins, that Christ rose from the dead and ascended back into Heaven, and that He will return and judgment will be pronounced. But I also left you with a question and a verse to consider. “Is believing enough?” James 2:19 says, “You believe that God is one; you do well. Even the demons believe – and shudder!” I think that verse gives us the answer to that question. Our God requires more than belief. Throughout the history of His people, He has expected obedience, as He still does today. God expected Adam and Eve to obey Him when He said in Genesis 2:16-17, “You may surely eat of every tree of the garden, but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it you shall surely die.” God expected the Israelites to keep His commandments. “Now this is the commandment – the statutes and the rules – that the Lord your God commanded me to teach you, that you may do them in the land to which you are going over, to possess it, that you may fear the Lord your God, you and your son and your son’s son, by keeping all his statutes and his commandments, which I command you, all the days of your life, and that your days may be long.” (Deuteronomy 6:1-2)
Christ also speaks of obedience. In Matthew 7:21, He said, “Not everyone who says to me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ will enter the kingdom of heaven, but the one who does the will of my Father who is in heaven.” And again in verses 24 and 26, He says, “Everyone then who hears these words of mine and does them will be like a wise man who built his house on the rock……. And everyone who hears these words of mine and does not do them will be like a foolish man who built his house on the sand.” In John 14:12, Christ says, “Truly, truly, I say to you, whoever believes in me will also do the works that I do; and greater works than these will he do, because I am going to the Father.” He adds in verse 15, “If you love me, you will keep my commandments.”
Our belief, our faith, requires action. Consider Hebrews 11, known as the hall of fame of faith. All of the examples of faith in this chapter acted or obeyed because of their faith. James tells us in chapter 2 of his letter that faith without works is dead (verses 17 and 26). You really should read James 2:14-26 to get the full context of what James is saying. If someone needs clothes and food and you say to them, “Be warm and be full,” you aren’t doing them any good at all. But don’t misunderstand me and think that I am saying that our works can save us. We are told in Paul’s letter to the Ephesians that “For by grace you have been saved through faith. And this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God, not a result of works, so that no one may boast.” (Chapter 2, verses 8-9). Paul and James do not contradict each other. We ARE saved by grace, through faith, as Paul says. You could think of the works of which James speaks as God’s works, not our own. Our faith leads us to obedience of God’s commands, and we cannot boast of ourselves for doing the things God wants us to do. We can never be good enough to deserve God’s gift of His Son, but through our faith and obedience, we can accept His grace.
Obedience involves so many things, and there are so many more verses in both the Old and New Testaments that describe the necessity of obedience and the consequences of disobedience. God’s and Christ’s commandments include love (John 15:12), repentance (Acts 17:30), worship (John 4:23-24), baptism (Acts 2:38), giving (1 Corinthians 16:2), and much, much more! The only way to truly understand obedience is to study God’s word. I urge you to study and read His Word for yourself. As I’ve stated before, don’t believe something just because I wrote it in a blog, and don’t believe something just because a preacher said it from the pulpit. Your eternity depends on it. Your salvation requires more than just belief. Think bee-lief and o-bee-dience!
“That buzzing-noise means something. If there’s a buzzing noise, somebody’s making a buzzing-noise, and the only reason for making a buzzing-noise that I know of is because you’re a bee. ….And the only reason for being a bee that I know of is making honey….. And the only reason for making honey is so as I can eat it.” Winnie the Pooh (A.A. Milne)
