Food for All
Give us day by day our daily bread. Luke 11:3
I do not like bees! I never have and probably never will. However, I do enjoy honey. I have been likened to a bee with my busy schedule but I certainly cannot live up to that comparison to the extent that I am going to share from Moving Mountains.
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An Amazing Fact: Bees are very social insects, and mutual feeding seems to be the order of their existence. The workers feed the helpless queen, who cannot feed herself. They feed the drones and, of course, they feed the young. They seem to actually enjoy this social act. One bee always seems ready to feed another bee, even if it is from another colony.
The bee has been aptly described as busy. To produce one tablespoon of honey for our toast, the little bee makes 4,200 trips to flowers. A worker bee will fly as far as eight miles in search of nectar. He makes about 10 trips a day to the fields, each trip lasting 20 minutes and covering 400 flowers. To produce just one pound of clover honey, the bee must visit 56,000 clover heads. Since each head has 60 flower tubes, a total of 3,600,000 visits are necessary. In the end, the worker bee will have flown the equivalent of three times around the world. And they never sleep.
The impact of the honeybee on your food goes beyond honey. This little wonder of God’s creation is responsible for 80 percent of all insect pollination; if it didn’t do its job, it would significantly decrease the yield of fruits and vegetables.
Psalm 145 is a song of praise to the Creator. “Great is the LORD and greatly to be praised; and His greatness in unsearchable (Psalm 145:3). As we look at the amazing honeybee, we can join David in saying, “I will meditate on the glorious splendor of Your majesty, and on Your wondrous works” (vs. 5). When we consider the immense number of flowers it takes to make one pound of honey, it seems an impossibility, yet the Bible says, “The eyes of all look expectantly to You, and You give them their food in season. You open Your hand and satisfy the desire of every living thing” (vs. 15-16).
Thank God for the honeybee!
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Well, I don’t have to like them but I do respect them more…with greater awe! I pray that my business might include serving others.
Heavenly Father, thank You for this bold insect and for all the hard work it does to give us food. You have thought of everything and we praise You. AMEN.
Photograph Michael Johnston