With so many fine beekeepers and scientists, why name the blog after Jan? He was one of the first scientists to study bees under a microscope, and I so love microscopes. My best hours in high school were spent peeking down the lens of a much more advanced model of scope than Swammerdam ever saw.
He was the man who discovered that the king bee had ovaries...and was, indeed, the QUEEN bee. He drew nice pictures of the ovaries.
He was a religious nut. It used to be that all the finest scientists were religious nuts. I look forward to the day when science, religion and art all come back together. We've lost our bearings, with current religious nuts trying to explain away science, and scientists trying to explain away religion, and no one appreciating the role of poetry and awe.
There will one day be a new enlightenment, when people discover that one can find truth in research, in myth, in beauty, without having to distort one truth with another, but holding each value as its own part of the wholeness of humanity.
2 comments:
My third comment today. I'm sure glad you had C send me the link to your blog! What you are saying here is so important. This thing about science and religion and faith and art. On another theological note, I have been thinking since our girls arrived, about the people who went kind of nuts after you left when they began transferring frames from nuc boxes to hives. Bees started to fly around and they were going to be left behind. Bees got squashed. The newbees were freaking out and the pros were saying, "It's not enough to worry about." I began to reflect on the cornerstone of Christian superstition cum American religion: "And what shepherd, if he loses one sheep will not leave the 99 and go and find the one who is lost?" To which all farmers everywhere go, "WHAT?" We are so convinced by our Americanized Christianity that each individual is so precious to Jesus that we have completely lost sight of the fact that it is the community that is precious. Christians no longer know how to live in communities. For the bees, it is the survival of the hive that is critical. The hive is the animal. There are no individual bees. Can we learn to be a hive again? The thought that we are individuals and not dependent on each other is an illusion, but we keep living as if it were true.
Yep, neither Judaism nor Christianity are based on individual relationship with the holy as much as on living in a community. We've really lost that focus in recent years. In the Hebrew Bible/Old Testament the emphasis was on Israel...in the New Testament the focus was on the church. Community comes easier for bees, I think. For us it is all about me me me.
Thanks for sharing about the fun after my bees and I went home. I'm glad I'm not the only worried new parent.
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