If you will agree that man's
nature most closely resembles the bee which cannot live alone, for it dies when
left alone, but bends its energies to the one common task of his fellows and
toils and works together with his neighbors.
If this is so, and in addition
you recognize that for man evil consists in injustice and cruelty and
indifference to a neighbor's trouble, while virtue is brotherly love and goodness
and justice and beneficence and concern for the welfare of one's neighbor—with
such ideas, I say, it would be each man's duty to take thought for his own
city, and to make of his home a rampart for its protection.
Now all analogies are inherently weak, especially
those involving a comparison between men and animals, but the life of the little
bee might be the closest parallel to the calling of being human.
I am honestly quite frightened of bees, but I hope
it is for some of the right reasons. I can swat one away, or even squash him if
he is coming at me, but I stand no chance against the swarm. I have had many
bee stings, and they were annoyances; the one time I had a dozen or so sting me
at once, however, I realized that they could be quite the force to be reckoned with.
I knew a wonderful fellow back in Austria, a beekeeper
out in the country, and he explained to me that you had to work with them and
never against them.
“They will let you take some of their honey, as
long as you let them be what they are. A bee is not to be tamed, like a cow or
a pig or a goat. Do not fight. Show respect. Let them crawl all over you. If
you are no threat to them, they are no threat to you.”
He tried to bring me back out to his hives, to show
me how it was done, but I was too terrified. The buzzing was too much. Long
before I read a single word from the Stoics, this decent man had already tried
to teach me an important lesson.
“It’s fine, because one day you’ll see that bees
are like people at their best, and never at their worst. They always, without exception,
work with the others in the hive. They are all friends to one another, not like
us, with all of our religion and our politics!”
He slapped his thigh and laughed a joyful laugh,
and I lowered my eyes in shame. I now wish I had taken him up on his offer.
And to this day I wonder why a man feels the need
to be more like a wolf instead of more like a bee.
The wolf looks cooler, of course, than the bee. How
many biker gangs do you know that use a happy bumblebee as a symbol, instead of
a growling beast?
I would join a bumblebee gang, if anyone ever made
it. We might actually be friends for the right reasons.
Written in 1/2000
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